insight go much deeper than the paraphernalia of Parisian vice — to ‘a sickness unto death’ that is still ours, though its symptoms have changed — will share the impatience of Henry James, an impatience ‘of the same order as that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck the Flowers of Good, should come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plumcake and eau de Cologne.’*
If Baudelaire had been no more than a mid-nineteenth-century Parisian dandy perversely aware of the seamy side of the city which he loved and celebrated, aware of the bad smells, the poverty and the prostitution, he might still be a considerable poet, since no such awareness bothered the purveyors of poetic eau de Cologne to a class that did well out of the bad smells, the poverty and the prostitution; but even Baudelaire’s detractors, such as Sartre, acknowledge that he was a great deal more than that. Baudelaire’s ‘subjectivity’ and apparent egocentricity are misleading. Poets and moralists, unlike biologists, are not provided with guinea pigs and white rats on which they can test their theories; they must content themselves with a limited measure of insight into the minds and motives of others, and the rather more reliable evidence of self-knowledge. Certainly we must allow for a certain amount of inconsistency, if not of self-contradiction, in the moral substance of Baudelaire’s work. Baudelaire was his own guinea pig; and in his experiments he made ample use of masks, of what Yeats called the ‘anti-self’ or ‘antithetical self.’ Whether in the first person singular or not, many of Baudelaire’s statements are experimental in this way, not to say dialectical. Yet it was for the sake of an impersonal truth that he sacrificed his personal vanity and dignity, to the extent of confessing to crimes which he had never committed. His only recompense — and that a small one — for the sacrifice was the pleasure to be derived from shocking a complacent public by an open exhibition of its secret indecencies. This too was his bond — perhaps his only bond — with his brother, the ‘hypocritical reader.’
Baudelaire, of course, could not foresee all the kinds of analysis for which he provided the data, from the Freudian psycho-analysis of René Laforgue to the existential psychoanalysis of Jean-Paul Sartre and the psycho-criticism of Charles Mauron; but his sacrifice had insured him in advance against every kind of judgment, contemporary or posthumous. ‘To be, above all else, a great man and a saint in one’s own eyes,’ he wrote in his journals, omitting to italicize the operative words — ‘in one’s own eyes.’ What is more, Baudelaire did his best not to be a great man or a saint in anybody else’s eyes : ‘When I have inspired universal horror and disgust,’ he also wrote, ‘I shall have conquered solitude.’ Yet even Sartre, who used Baudelaire’s case to demonstrate how men choose their own hell, ended by recognizing ‘Baudelaire’s nobility and greatness as a man,’ because ‘flabbiness, abandonment and slackness seemed to Baudelaire unforgivable sins.’
It was Baudelaire — in the introductory poem to Les Fleurs du mal — who classed boredom among the deadly sins, and this alone assures him a place among the great moralists and psychologists. Here again he profited by laying bare his own heart with a rigour which most of the classical moralists applied only to the conduct of others. Sartre is right when he suggests:
If we could put out of our minds the exaggerated vocabulary which Baudelaire used to describe himself, forget words like ‘frightful,’ ‘nightmare’ and ‘horror,’ which occur on every page of Les Fleurs du mal, and penetrate right into his heart, we should perhaps find beneath the anguish, the remorse and the vibrating nerves something gentler and much more intolerable than the most painful of ills — Indifference.
But Baudelaire himself said more than that in the introductory poem, when he speaks of Boredom ‘that would gladly reduce the earth to rubble and swallow the world in a great yawn.’ It was out of his experience of this Boredom that Baudelaire constructed his dualism of ‘spleen and ‘idéal,’ his knowledge of what he called the ‘abyss’ and our need to escape from it perpetually by creating illusions and ideals of one kind or another.
Baudelaire’s modernity, then, must be looked for not in his ‘exaggerated vocabulary’ but in a capacity for facing the naked truth which he shared with men like Leopardi, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In spite of all that has been written about him — or even because of it — Baudelaire’s theological position remains a conundrum, and it is best to leave it alone here. Catholics have seen him as a Catholic, puritans as a puritan — or ‘puritan inside out,’ as Aldous Huxley called him — atheists as an atheist, existentialists as an existentialist, and so forth. Baudelaire was deeply impressed by the writings of Pascal, but even the Jansenist influence does not account for his peculiar attitude to questions of good and evil — an attitude which at one time earned him the title of ‘Satanist.’ Certain Calvinist doctrines are suggested by Baudelaire’s conviction that ‘wickedness is always inexcusable, but there is some merit in knowing that one is wicked; and the most irreparable of vices is to do evil without knowing it.’ This is how he puts it in the prose poem La Fausse Monnaie. In his poem L’Irrémédiable he speaks of
Soulagement et gloire uniques,
— La Conscience dans le Mal.
John Henry Newman defined the moral doctrine of the Calvinists as follows:
But they go on to say, as I understand them, very differently from Catholicism, that the converted and the unconverted can be discriminated by man, that the justified are conscious of their state of justification, and that the regenerate cannot fall away. Catholics, on the other hand, shade and soften the awful antagonism between good and evil, which is one of their dogmas, by holding that there are different degrees of justification, that there is a great difference in point of gravity between sin and sin, that there is the possibility and danger of falling away, and that there is no certain knowledge given to any one that he is simply in a state of grace, and much less that he is to persevere to the end.
What is certain about Baudelaire is that he did not attempt to ‘shade and soften the awful antagonism between good and evil,’ but sharpened it by relegating good to the realm of the ideal; and his insistence on being ‘a saint in his own eyes’ is difficult to reconcile with any form of Christian orthodoxy, though he did define progress as ‘the diminution of the traces of original sin.’ The same contradictions and complexities attach to Baudelaire’s political opinions. Like other French writers of his time — Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle and the brothers Goncourt, for instance — he detested the ‘progressive’ cant of the newspapers and politicians. On the one hand he was capable of an aphorsim like this one: ‘If a poet demanded from the State the right to keep a bourgeois in his stable, people would be very much astonished, but if a bourgeois asked for some roast poet, people would think it quite natural.’ This, of course, was a squib, from Baudelaire’s notebook called Fusees; and something of the same desire to shock is apparent in his prose poem “Let’s Beat up the Poor,” though it makes a perfectly serious and original point about the inadequacy of mere benevolence and compassion. On the other hand, Baudelaire felt a compassion with the poor, the exploited and the sick that is amply attested in all his works, including many which do not resort to such extreme and revolutionary solutions. His thinking about society and politics, as about everything else, was experimental; like the thinking of most poets, it drew on experience and imagination, rather than on facts and general arguments. That is another reason why the prose poem proved a medium so congenial to Baudelaire.
M.H.
Lerwick, 1944
London, 1967
*Dedicatory Letter to Arsène Houssaye.
*Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (London 1884), p. 62.
I
THE OLD WOMAN’S DESPAIR
