‘HAPPY, happy they that in Hell feel not the world’s despite.’—The last words written by Dowland for Lachrimae, or Seven Teares, figured in Seven Passionate Pavanes.
‘Could we not believe ourselves in Palmyra unruined…’—THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, Charles Baudelaire (attached as a Preface to Les Fleurs du Mal).
(NOTE.—‘Intact’ was the word in French — it seems unsuitable in English.—E. S.)
‘A profound light that the ear fathoms without fatigue …’ (a work of art) ‘vegetable and architectural as a banana-tree of Rio.’—COCTEAU, writing of a work by Milhaud (‘Carte Blanche’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
This saying of Cocteau’s might equally apply to certain works of Baudelaire’s, although Milhaud’s music would seem to bear no relation to Baudelaire’s strange spirit.—E. S.
‘… I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death … she saw in a moment her whole life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before her … not successively, but simultaneously; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.’—DE QUINCEY, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
It is this simultaneity, a kind of water-clearness (into which he fell as into a river) on the verge of death, to which Baudelaire has attained.—E. S.
‘This poet … loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilisations that aged; a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, using technical vocabularies, taking colour from all the palettes, notes from all the keyboards. … In regard to his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek Art fallen in delinquencies.’—THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, Charles Baudelaire. Quoted and translated by Arthur Symons in Baudelaire, a Study.
‘Polysyllabic and ample-sounding words are pleasing to Baudelaire, and with three or four of these words, he often makes verses which seem immense and in which these vibrating sounds prolong the measure.’—THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, Charles Baudelaire. Trans. E. S.
His ‘great Alexandrines … come, in a time of calm, to die on the shore with the tranquil and profound undulation of the wave arriving from the open sea’.—Ibid.