BAUDELAIRE

Casanova Society. £1 10s.

IT is unfortunate that Baudelaire should start questions that cannot be answered except in a way which must needs con- found him. The charge he inevitably provokes is the charge he is utterly incapable of meeting, for whatever morality men happen to profess—an almost infinitely variable and subtle code—is outraged by this poet who professed none. Even the most desperate sensualist, who may be also the most desperate moralist, cannot admire a sensualism so desperate, so mono- tonous, so blind and so sad. Indeed, it may not be a very for- bidding morality that rebukes Baudelaire's self-conscious disorder, for the simplest of codes will stiffen at the approach of his pathetically odious and dishevelled Muse. A wise reader will step aside hastily and try to avert moral judgments and spare reproaches, but simply because Baudelaire is a poet, and not a contemptible poet, he challenges our judgment and must meet it not at one point but at all points. If poetry itself is not a matter of reason but of something less obvious and more potent, our judgment also is a matter less of reason than of instinctive and unconscious tendencies, and cannot be bound within superficial and merely logical limits.

Too much has been written on the a-morality of art, though little of it by the poets. The question was one that vexed Henry James as stupidly superfluous, when he asked himself what was wrong with Baudelaire. His essay was written when he was young and most susceptible to French influences, but he could not stomach this poet. Baudelaire, he said, offered a rare combination of technical zeal and patience, with vicious sentiment ; to deny the relevancy of subject-matter and the importance of the moral quality seemed childish. " The whole thinking man is one," and to count out the moral element was exactly as sane as to eliminate all three-syllable words. Morality, as James put it, is in truth " simply a part of the essential richness of inspiration—it has nothing to do with the artistic process and it has everything to do with the artistic effect." Audacious enough, to French readers at least, must seem this assault of New England intelligence on French carnality ; yet is it surprising that the most refined, the most delicate and subtle of modern novelists, should have rebuked Baudelaire for a failure in apprehension ? The failure is primary, and leads to another which Henry James scrupled to name but not to hint at—vulgarity. Of Les Fleurs du Mal he cries : " Le Mal ! You do yourself too much honour. This is not Evil ; it is not the wrong ; it is simply the nasty." James's conscience, being puritanic, was a chief part of his serene precocity, but to be precocious is not to be mistaken ; it is to be merely bold and disconcerting. Writing now, I suppose, he would criticize with smiling allusion and ironic prevarication, say, Mr. James Joyce, and remark perhaps that Mr. Joyce is Baudelaire with energy let in and beauty driven out—a good bargain, no doubt, if literature were a matter of bargains of this sort. But whatever Henry James's manner of speech, and whatever his immediate occasion, his attitude would be the same—seemingly indulgent but inwardly exacting --on any question of morality and art.

Why drag in Henry James ? Because he is the sanest of those who have looked candidly at Baudelaire, looking quite simply from his own spiritual hemisphere at one who was so completely a " foreigner." He expresses, more brilliantly and surely than another, the natural resentment of the Englishman when he is as7,_ed to admire an alien wantonness. Many English writers have been fascinated by Baudelaire in youth, but in maturity they have left him unregarded. Swinburne was hardly an exception, for even he forgot the early ardours, expressed plainly enough in the sensational Poems and Ballads, and turned away to sing patriotic choruses and erect enormous rhymed structures for homage to Landor. The conscious and literary element in Baudelaire, the deliberate squeezing of images of lust and Vice, attracted Swinburne who, in youth, found everything unconventional a miracle, and in age found everything conventional natural. It is odd to remember that his most beautiful elegy on Baudelaire, Ave Atque Vale, was prompted by a premature .report of the French writer's death and that, as Sir Edmund Gosse remarks, he wanted to destroy it when he found the news was false :-- "I among these, I also, in such station,

As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods, And' offering to the dead made, and their gods, The old mourners had, standing to make libation, I stand, and to the gods and to the dead, Do reverence without prayer or praise— "

A better poet might be proud if he heard whispers of such verse stealing after him.

But when Swinburne could forget his French god no one else might remember, and it was not until the revivalists of the 'nineties went a-jigging through France that Baudelaire came in again and harlotry was idealized. Mr. Arthur Symons is his prophet, and he is persuaded of his god's greatness as clearly as Henry James was persuaded of his littleness. None of Baal's idolaters could hail him more proudly than Mr. Symons is hailing Baudelaire and miming his luxury and satiety. The introduction to the present volume of translations is full of superlatives—strange in a writer who is usually discreet and communicates himself with difficulty ; he writes of Baudelaire for English readers as a French disciple might write in some fond birthday generosity. Mr. Symons tells us a little too scrupulously how Baudelaire influenced him, and seems to find in his poetry " a sort of religion, in which an Eternal Mass is served before a veiled altar." Mr. Symons says it seriously, but who will not sneeze ? Argument would be wasted. Mr. Symons quotes Blake to heighten Baudelaire's praise. Isn't it strange that one who has written well of Blake, and of other English poets, should lose his head in thinking of Baudelaire ? Strange above all that he should fail to remark that Baudelaire falters where other French writers excel—in intelligence. Proust's subject-matter may be corrupt (and much besides and better)—but the intelligence 1 Baudelaire gives you the sensual and gives it literally and serves it " thick," or Mr. Symons rejoices to render it " thick." If at times Baudelaire becomes metaphysical, this is how he is translated for readers who know Donne :—

"Nothing is worth the horrible projection Of thy saliva, thy breath is About to plunge my soul where Hades' wraith is, And, charioting the creation,

Hurls it hideously where its ultimate Death is."

Another :-

" Songs from mine exasperation Dear girl, lithe-limbed, of my creations In heart's solitude's crispation. This intricately disseminated,

A woman too delicate to be hated, Who saves our souls our God created."•

And once more :— " My spirit, you move with a pure ardency,

And, as one who swoons in the senses of sound, You furrow furiously the immensity profound, With an indicable and male sensuality."

The more frankly " evil " flowers make the translator's style worse ; it possesses a singular power of concentrating mono- tony and making you feel that even that, like the rest, is exaggerated. Maybe this is, but to say that Baudelaire, in style and in subject-matter alike, is untranslatable and that Mr. Symons deserves sympathy, for the English soil will not easily grow these fierce sick flowers but needs a hot manure and a glass-house to force even the poorest exotic blossom. Yet this finely produced volume is offered to English readers, and a translator will not pretend that his author is better in English than in his own tongue. As he appears here Baudelaire is merely artificial. To read these heavy stanzas is to sit in an obscure Soho restaurant, on sticky plush seats, eating from a soiled table something that may be a French dish but is cer- tainly not English, something that provokes an abhorrence of warmed-up meats, and next a foreboding. The remorseful deliquescent waiter stares, you dissemble your distaste,

rise quickly, hasten next door and find, with surprise and delight, that it's a chemist's, and the very smell reviving.

Mr. Symons is a perfectly accomplished writer of verse, but he cannot work miracles and turn stale wine into fresh water.

Others, too, have translated Baudelaire, and I recall Flecker's first little red book, The Bridge of Fire, with its song:— " When I translated Baudelaire, Children were playing out in the air."

Well, you cry sharply,—Why not ? JOHN FREEMA?.7.