Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to English readers: in the columns of the Spectator, it is amusing to remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on his death, Ave atque Vale. There have been occasional outbreaks of irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally misspelled) is the journalist’s handiest brickbat for hurling at random in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up, over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?
It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection, and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life, not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a marvellous original.1 What would French poetry be today if Baudelaire had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his vast materials, his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in contemporary judgements, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record of sensation. This ‘romantic’ had something classic in his moderation, a moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe’s logic. To ‘cultivate one’s hysteria’ so calmly,2 and to affront the reader (Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère)* as a judge rather than as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist, with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered the world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary, secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, le mauvais moine [evil monk] of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.
To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not only the four volumes of his collected works, but every document in Crépet’s Oeuvres Posthumes, and above all, the letters, and these have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crépet.3 Baudelaire put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he showed his business side, or the letters to La Présidente, the touchstone of his spleen et idéal, his chief experiment in the higher sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry, Jeanne Duval, the ‘artificial paradises’) deliberately, is made a little clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains baffling, and will probably never be discovered.
As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see. Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out, through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the Petits Poèmes en Prose:
Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur nécessaire, même pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j’ai voulu faire!†
And, writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet:
Avez-vous observé qu’un morceau de ciel aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux rochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une idée plus profonde de l’infini que le grand panorama vu du haut d’une montagne?‡
It is to another casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion of his writing is some thrill of gratitude towards one who had at last done ‘a little justice,’ not to himself, but to Manet):
Eh bien! on m’accuse, moi, d’imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j’ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu’il me resemblait. La première fois que j’ai ouvert un livre de lui, j’ai vu avec épouvante et ravissement, non seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des phrases, pensées par moi, et écrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant.§
It is in such glimpses as these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.
1906
First published as ‘Baudelaire in His Letters’, 103 Saturday Review (26 January 1907), pp. 107–108, then reprinted in Figures of Several Centuries (1916), before it was added to the 1919 edition of The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Symons reused parts of this essay as the preface to an edition of his translations of Baudelaire’s Prose and Poetry in 1927.
1. Symons alludes respectively to Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Le Spleen de Paris (1869) and Baudelaire’s translations of the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
2. Baudelaire wrote about having ‘cultivated his hysteria with joy and terror’ in his intimate journals, published posthumously as Mon Coeur mis à nu [My Heart Stripped Naked] in 1897. In his review of Symons’ translations from Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot was particularly exercised by the liberties he felt Symons took when quoting this phrase.
3. The French critic Eugène Crépet (1827–92) published a posthumous edition of Baudelaire’s works with some of his letters in 1887. The occasion for Symons’ essay seems to have been the publication of the first full edition of Baudelaire’s correspondence by the Société du Mercure de France in 1906.
* [‘Hypocritical reader, my fellow man, my brother’ – from the address to the reader at the start of Fleurs du Mal.]
† [‘To make a hundred laborious trifling things, which demand constant good humour (good humour [is] necessary, even when dealing with sad subjects), a bizarre state of excitement which needs spectacle, crowds, music, even street lamps – that is what I wanted to make!’]
‡ [‘Have you noticed that a patch of sky glimpsed through a barred window, or between two chimneys, two rocks, or through an arcade, gives a more profound idea of the infinite than a grand panorama from the top of a mountain?’]
§ [‘Well! They accuse me – me! of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I translated Poe so patiently? Because he resembles me. The first time I opened a book by him, I was terrified and ravished to find not only topics I had dreamed of, but phrases, my own thoughts, written by him twenty years before.’]