BOOKS
The Modern Voyeur
By ANTHONY HARTLEY TT is getting on for one hundred years now since the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. The volume appeared in the shops on June 25, 1857, and was confiscated and its author prosecuted for blasphemy and obscenity about a month later. Whatever the imperial authorities may have intended, these proceedings led, as they usually do, to an eventual succes de scandale, and there is no doubt that this false start has made a proper estimate of Baudelaire's poetic achievement more difficult. In England the Nineties found a congenial companion in Baudelaire the eater of babies' brains, the dandy and the black magician. Only Saintsbury pro- vided a sensible essay. Since then things have gone better with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and we should now be able to look at the poet and, for that matter, at the literary journalist without either being shocked or titillated by the curious artificial persona he built up for himself.
That this persona was artificial any reader of his letters—just republished in translation with linking comments*—must admit. More than half of them are about money, and there is little trace of the dandy or the mage. Those to his mother are painful, but in the main prosaic. Nowadays there is no occasion to be terribly interested in a young man's hatred of his stepfather. Since psycho-analysis became popular, the phenomenon is wearisomely familiar. There is more matter in Baudelaire's Journat►x Intimes--the jotted notes in which he displayed all the psychological acumen of a long line of French moralistes- that is, the highest level of moral knowledge of human nature ever reached in any civilisation. The aphorisms are magnificent and frequently brutal: 'La brute seule bande Bien et la fouterie est le lyrisme du peuple.' Moreover, as the above example shows, •they betray a great deal about Baudelaire himself. In these notes and in his criticism of literature and art his system it re- vealed—the series of myths that controlled his poetry.
For there are two possible mistakes, to make about Baudelaire. One is to attach too much im- portance to the occult and obsessive scaffolding of his work; the other is to attach no importance to it. When Sainte-Beuve wrote his famous de- scription of Baudelaire's poetry as being 'tin kiosque . . . a la pointe extreme du Kamschatka rmnantique,' he was unjust, but possibly nearer the truth than attempts to find in it an inverted Christianity or objections, in the manner of Sartre, to its philosophical content. What Sainte- Beuve partially perceived was the literary signifi- cance of the whole • Baudelairian myth. The Satanism, the ,synxsthesia, the theory of corre- spondences, dull mystical view of language, the revival of the microcosm and macrocosm—all these have their importance purely in as much as they assisted the birth of Les Fleurs du Mal, nor would it be true, I think, to say. that Baudelaire believed in them in the ordinary sense of the word.
This question is delicate because largely unex- plored. The modern poet, if without religious belief, as is frequently the case, finds himself in a dilemma. Lacking an assured cosmology, he must either limit his scope to empirical experi- ence or else adopt myths, which play something of the same part in the production of his poetry as do hypotheses in scientific research. In both cases the test is success. Yeats's occult theories were not 'true,' but they were effective. The Second Coming justifies the hotch-potch of `cycles' and 'great years' and 'zodiacs' out of which it was born. Similarly with Baudelaire the idea of a real mystical equivalence existing on all levels of human life can only usefully be con- sidered in relation to the writing of such poems as 'Correspondances.' What these poetical postu- lates have in common is a certain obvious imaginative ordering of the universe. The differ- ence between them and the order introduced by science might be described as that between per- ception and knowledge. Whatever science may say, for the ordinary man the motion of the stars provides the necessary psychological reverbera- tion for Yeats's gyres. A poet's view of the universe is far nearer everyday experience than that of the scientist.
The nature of that view will, however, be de- cided by temperament. In Baudelaire's case the importance of the idea of equivalence or corre- spondence is well illustrated in his attitude to- wards sex. We are, I suppose, all more or less fetichists, but the emphasis in Les Fleurs du Mal on approaching a woman through her clothes, jewellery, perfume or hair fits in so neatly with the poet's myths that it must be assumed that his sexual comportment strongly urged him towards their adoption : 0 toison, moutonnant jusque stir tencolare! 0 boucles! 0 parfam charge de nonchalohl Sexual experience has never been better de- scribed than by Baudelaire, and the intensely sensual nature of this description is due to the inhuman clarity with which he perceived the mechanism of the lover's incarnation of desire * BAUDELAIRE. A SELF-PORTRAIT. SELECTED LETTERS. Translated and edited with a running com- mentary by Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jnr. (O.U.P., 25s.) t SYMROLISME FROM POE TO MALLARMII, By Joseph Chiari. Foreword by T. S. Eliot, (Rockliti, '32s. 6d.) in objects. He had been a lover often enough himself, but it is plain that he was also his own voyeur.
This is Baudelaire's real achievement. Nobody now would take him for a devotee of art for art's sake—an error at least partly due to an over- estimate of the part played by Poe and his theories in the genesis of Les Fleurs du Mal. Joseph Chiari has recently shown in an in- teresting study on Poe and Mallarmdt that the influence of the American poet's esthetics on the Symbolists was less than had been thought, and has traced the origins of their ideas to an earlier Romantic heredity. Dr. Chiari does not specifically deal with Baudelaire, but what is true of Mallarmd is also true of him. Les Fleur•s du Mal were intended to be, as Claudel puts it, `tote grande poesie moderne a la Balzac.' We are in the presence of the first successful attempt by a poet to cope with modern man.
It is in this sense that Baudelaire is the last of the Romantics. Mr. Eliot has justly compared him to Goethe. For him, too, the temptation would be to cry `Verweile dock, du Gist so schon!' He too, like Faust, is saved by experience. The sub- ject-matter of his poetry is the flow of modern life conveyed with unrivalled accuracy and power. The nostalgia of the great towns, the tedium of pleasure, the ecstasies and the ennuis of sex, the strange, haunted feeling that God is dead—all these tones of contemporary psychology were in- troduced into poetry by Baudelaire, and poetry has lived on them ever since. 'C'est tonic noire time avec la violence insoupconnee de ses amours diverses que Baudelaire nous a rendue d nous- mentes sensible,' wrote Jacques Riviere, and this judgement might be made about the whole European Romantic movement which Baudelaire carried to its zenith.
Yet there is more to it than that. Where Baudelaire parts company with the Romantics is in his refusal to idealise the flow of life. There is a width about his picture which resembles the great nineteenth-century novelists rather than the poets who preceded him. His taste for the grotesque, the caricaturist's horror of 'Les A veugles' or 'Les Sept Vieillards,' is more like Dickens or Dostoievsky than anything else. Standing between the novel/epic and the poem /, spell, Baudelaire reintroduced into poetry a uni- versality which it had lost, but was to rediscover. Oscillating between spleen and l'ideal, between la charogne and luxe, entitle et volupte, he wove the total dialectic of human existence. Vette poesie ne rassure pas,' adds Riviere; 'elle ne verse pas d'illusions.' That is its greatness — and Baudelaire's.
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