Charles Baudelaire, His Life

ing in his hand the bouquet of the "Flowers of Evil," a bouquet which in no way resembled the innocent posy of the débutante. Some of the poems were so subtly suggestive, yet so abstruse and envelop

verses; they are born, live, and die in silence; for two

e had given the public, which is a rare occurrence, original work of a peculiar savour. To create in

othing, at first appeared difficult and obscure. This feeling was caused, not through any fault of the author, but from the novelty of the things he expressed-things that had not before been made vocal. It was part of Baudelaire's doctrine that, to attain his end, a poet must invent language and rhythm for himself. But he could not prevent surprise on the part of the reader when confronted with verse so different from any he had read before. In painting the evils which horrified him, Baudelaire knew how to find the morbidly ric

uses him, in spite of all his hypocrisy, of having the vices for which he blames others, and of nourishing in his own heart that great modern mons

e see him pursued by stupidity, envy, and sarcasm, a prey to the perfidious cruelty of some Delilah, happy in delivering him up to the Philistines, naked, disarmed, after having expended on him all the refinements of a ferocio

eets, the by-ways where the closed shutters hide indications of secret luxuries; all the black, damp, dirty labyrinths of old streets to the houses of the blind and leprous, where the light shines here and there on some window, on a pot of fl

e ether breathed by the angels. We must not forget that Baudelaire, although he has often been accused of materialism, and reproached for expending his talent upon doubtful subjects, is, on the contrary, endowed in a large degree with the great gift of spirituality, as Swedenborg said. He also possesses the power of corresp

e to wallow in all the ugliness of its shame; but the poet, with supreme contempt, scornful indignation, and a constant recurrence towards the ideal whi

rmed immoral, as if the flagellation of vice was vice itself, and as if one is a poisoner for having written of the poisonous pharmacy of the Borgia. This method is by no means new, but it t

of Pope Alexander VI. All such foolishness-unfortunately detrimental, for all the fools enthusiastically adopt that attitude-would make any artist worthy of

. If one transposed them into the sphere of colours, they would represent gold and purple. The poet often recurs to this idea of the significance of perfumes. Surrounding a tawny beauty from the Cape, who seemed to have a mission for sleeping off home sickness, he spoke of this mixed odour "of musk and havana" which transported her soul to the well-loved lands of the Sun, where the leaves

ch revive memories of old loves and antiquated elegance; and, if by chance one uncorks a rancid and sticky

oets do we find this care. Generally they are content with putting light, colour, and music in their verses; but it is rare that they

ng, tranquil, mysterious, gentle animals, with their electrical shudders, whose favourite attitude is the recumbent pose of the Sphinx, which seems to have passed on to them its secret. They ramble round the house with their velvet footfalls

t patiently until his task is done, all the time purring gently and rhythmically in a sort of sotto voce accompaniment. Sometimes they gloss over with their tongue some disordered fur; for they are clean, careful, coquettish, and will not allow of any irregularity in their toi

n three-where he celebrates their physical and moral virtues, and often he makes them pass through his compositions as a sort of addit

ctionists, lovers, pickpockets, assassins, grey patrols, and all the obscene spectres of the night. He has the appearance of knowing the latest sabbatical chronicle, and he will willingly rub himself against the lame leg of Mephistopheles. His nocturnal serenades, his loves on the tiles, accompanied by cries like those of a child

mysteries, instinct with power concealed in suppleness, fixing on things and men his penetr

hey are rather types than individuals. They represent l'éternel féminin, and the love that the poet expresses for them is the love and

, almost spectral, that does not animate life, they march to their deaths, pale, insensible, superbly contemptuous, on the hearts they have crushed under their heels. From the departure of these amours, allied to hate, from pleasures more wounding than sorrow, the poet turns to his sad idol of exotic perfume, of savage attire, supple and wheedling as the black panther of Java, which remains always and compensates him for the spiteful Parisian cats with the pointed claws, playing with the heart of the poet as with a mouse. But it is to none of these creatures of plaster, marble, or ebony that he gives his soul.

rs, and a profound contempt for himself. In his hours of loving melancholy it is always with her he wishes to fly away and hide his perfect happiness in some mysterious fairy

oved by the poet during his life-time? It would be romantic to suppose so, but it has not been permitted to

chapter of his loves, he for ever placed a seal upon his fine and disdainful lips. The safest plan would be to see in this ideal lo

hideous and terrible paintings of drunkenness, but without the morality of Hogarth. The picture has no need of a legend and the "Wine of the Workman" makes one shudder. The "Litanies of Satan," god of evil and prince of the world, are one of those cold, familiar ironies of the a

l as a tempter in whom he saw a dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime, and perversity. Fault in Baudelaire was always followed by remorse, conte

ags like Antisthenes, paddles the oars to the domain of Charon. At the stern, a man of stone, a discoloured phantom, with rigid and sculptural gestures, holds the helm. The old Don Luis shows his whitened locks, scorned by his hypocritically impious son. Sganerelle demands the payment of his wages from his henceforth insolvent master. Donna Elvira tries to bring back the old smile of the lover to the disdainful lips of her

nstrous modern Paris, and shows that the artist has, on his palette, side by side with the blacks, bitumens, umbers, and siennas, a whole gamut of fresh tint

e nightmare, worthy of the engravings of Martynn: "Imagine a supernatural landscape, or rather a perspective in metal, marble, and water, from which all vegetation is banished. All is rigid, polished, mirrored under a sky without sun, without moon, without stars. In the midst of the silence of eternity rise up, artificially lit, palaces, colonnades, towers, stair-cases, fountains from which fall heavy cascades like curtains of crystal. The blue w

hile

not a blade of grass, not a leaf, not a flower comes to derange the implacable symmetry of forms invented by Art? Does it

ace, embroider, with old wools faded in colour, designs of bourgeois triviality or of foolish sentimentality: crowns of roses, green leaves of cabbages, and doves pecking one another. Sometimes we do not fear to attain the rare at the expense of the shocking, the fantastic,

mended a hundred times, from the end of lace frayed and yellow, the ring-sorrowful souvenir, disputed by the pawn-broker and ready to leave the slender finger of the pale hand-a past of happier fortune and elegance: a life of love and devotion, perhaps; the remains of beauty under ruin and misery and the devastations of age. He reanimates all these trembling spectre