BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER

When a well-known man dies in England they ask: What did he do? In France: How did he do it? In the United States: How much did he leave? But the Socialist in every land says: He didn’t do it! The poetic production of Charles Baudelaire, if put to the same test questions, might easily be conceived as evoking even more variety of responses. Baudelaire has said that nations produce great men against their will. While his position in the poetic firmament of France is that of a star of the first magnitude, there are, nevertheless, dissidents, especially among foreign critics, who either cannot or will not admit what is become a truism in French criticism. And the critical literature concerning the poet grows apace. His letters to his mother, recently published, make a volume admirably calculated to illuminate the character of the man. It contains a preface and notes by Jacques Crépet, who, it may be remembered, assisted his father, Eugène Crépet, in the biographical study of Baudelaire, a definitive study, one is tempted to add, for it dissipated a lot of legends (most of them fabricated by the poet himself) and put his house of life into some sort of order. Above all, it cleared up the rather murky atmosphere of his relations with Jeanne Duval, his Black Venus, who was in reality a young woman with hardly a moiety of African blood in her veins. But she served as a peg for the poet upon which to hang some of his most acrid and lovely verse, therefore she must pass muster in any estimate of his disquieting genius.

Withal, the exegetical literature is not large. George Saintsbury introduced him to English readers, although Algernon Charles Swinburne had in practice, if not by precept, brought his “poisonous honey from France”—Tennyson’s phrase. The Letters (1841-66) were published in 1907 by the Mercure de France, which also fathered a bulky volume devoted to the posthumous works (1908). La Plume had in 1893 republished from the Belgian edition the condemned pieces from Les Fleurs du Mal, with an extraordinary frontispiece by the Belgian etcher, Armand Rassenfosse. There are some poetic numbers in this rare plaque—eagerly sought for by lovers of exotic literature—yet the majority of the pieces must be read book in one hand, the other hand tightly closing the nostrils. These suppressed poems are not the best Baudelairia. Féli Gautier’s illustrated pamphlet (Editions de la Plume) is the most succinct account of the poet. There is also a handy little volume by Alphonse Seché and Jules Bertaut, garnered from various sources, yet of critical merit. And in 1917, during the heat of conflict, Guillaume Apollinaire prefaced the definitive text of the poems and said some pertinent things of Baudelaire. He calls the poet the literary son of Choderlos de Laclos and Edgar Poe—a shuddering combination, indeed.

The previous collection of Letters are of more general interest, for they are addressed to his most distinguished contemporaries—painters, poets, musicians—his friend Richard Wagner among the rest—men of letters and aristocratic ladies. But in the Letters to his mother, Mme. Aupick, the atmosphere is more dramatic, more intense. A duel is fought from his school days to the year previous to his death; the duel of a man, half crazed with alcohol and drugs, and a mother who failed to understand the queer duckling of genius she had hatched out in her first marriage. Demands for money fill the majority of these epistles. Pleas for his poetic work also loom largely, but poverty is the leading motive throughout. We catch more than a profile portrait of the mother; it is not always winning or “motherly.” How could it be with such a son? A half-Hamlet, he was jealous of his mother’s second husband. It was one of the determining causes in his morbid growth. How has his case so long escaped the psychiatrists of the psychoanalytic school? Albert Mordell, in his Erotic Element in Literature, could have found him a better subject than Stendhal for the Œdipus-complex. Notwithstanding his Flowers of Evil, his diabolic and dandical poses, Baudelaire was not a wicked-hearted man. Weak he was rather than depraved. And too curious of certain matters. He did explore the subcellars of the soul, dive into cesspools, and expose putrid sores. A scavenger poet, nevertheless a great poet, the greatest since Hugo. To-day his successor to the purple is Gabriele d’Annunzio.

There was decay in Baudelaire’s bones, a necrosis of the moral nature, yet no more fervent believer among latter-day poets in God and his Mother has penned their praises, except Verlaine. He did lay too much stress on his admiration for Satan, an admiration well-nigh Manichean, but he argued rightly when he said that one can’t believe in the Almighty and not believe in the Adversary. Theologically speaking, this is an inexpugnable position; in reality the world-experiences of the last five years have uprooted a belief that Satan is bound and sealed in some hellish solitude. Roaming about and seeking whom he may devour, would be the consensus of opinion among pious folk. Baudelaire believed in the devil because he had a personal devil. Hence his Litanies to Satan, later imitated by Giosuè Carducci in his Hymn to Satan. “Salute, O Satana, O ribellione, O forza vindice, Della ragione!” But in his Litanies the French poet is more explicit; his refrain is “O Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!” And this from the poet of De profundis clamavi and the hymn, in Latin, to Saint Francis (Francisco meæ Laudes)!

A third person has a share in the new Letters, M. Ancelle, the advocate and guardian of the errant Charles. Alternately cajoling and bullying, the letters addressed him by his charge reveal a curious mentality. The father of Baudelaire bequeathed his son about seventy-five thousand francs, soon dissipated by the incipient dandy on pictures, furniture, jewelry, bibelots, clothes, and light o’ loves; yet he seemed to think that his guardian was robbing him, that his mother hated him. In the mists and ecstasies of his wild life he saw nothing clearly—except his shining visions, and being of an obstinate nature, he pinned these visions to paper. The history of art can show few more laborious workmen than Baudelaire; his was the technical heroism of which Henry James speaks. Despite his drugs and drinks, he never ceased working, the work of an intellectual galley-slave. He filed his poems. He wrote criticism—Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Richard Wagner are specimens of his critical clairvoyancy—read his Salons and his splendid tribute to the genius of Wagner in his Music of the Future. Luck seemed against him. Like Balzac, he was forever in debt. His mother came to the rescue; his friends were worn out helping him across perilous pecuniary quagmires. Then he fled to Belgium, a country he loathed, and celebrated that loathing in distasteful verse, there to be stricken with general paralysis, and later to be brought back to Paris, to die cared for by the mother he believed inimical to him. The mystery is that he didn’t succumb earlier in his life to the perpetual assaults on his health.

When his mother married the father of the poet, Joseph Francis Baudelaire—or Beaudelaire—she was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son, Claude, who, like his half-brother, Charles, died of paralysis. After the death of the father the widow married within a year the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then Chef de Bataillon, Lieutenant-Colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honor, later General and Ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London. Charles was a frail, nervous youth, but, unlike most children of genius, he was an excellent scholar and won brilliant prizes at college. In this d’Annunzio resembled him. His stepfather was proud of him. From the Royal College at Lyons Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839. (He was born in 1821, also the birth year of Flaubert.) Troubles soon began at home. He disdained his mother and quarrelled with General Aupick. She has confessed that she was partially to blame; in the flush of her second love she had forgotten her boy. He could not forget nor forgive what he called her infidelity to the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The worthy Bishop of Montpelier, an old family friend, said that Charles was a little crazy; that second marriages usually bring woe in their train. The young poet contented himself with muttering: “When a mother has such a son she doesn’t remarry.” The reverse was probably the truth. He wrote in his journal: “My ancestors idiots or maniacs ... all victims of terrible passions”; which was another of his exaggerations. His father was a student, a practical man, a steady-going bourgeois. On the paternal side the grandfather of Charles was a Champenois peasant; his mother’s people presumably were of Normandy, though little is known of her forebears. Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken with paralysis, as well he might. Like many others, Baudelaire was a victim to a malady the origins of which were little known in his day. He also believed that his own instability of temperament was the result of the disparity of years in his parents.

In the heyday of his blood he was perverse. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that ennui can be best cured by evil ways; sin, Baudelaire found the saddest of diversions. Despite Théophile Gautier’s stories about the hashish club, Catulle Mendès denies that the poet was addicted to the hemp habit. What the majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary workers is this prime fact: that men who toil writing poetry—and there is no mental toil comparable to it, not even the higher mathematics—cannot indulge in drink or opium without speedy collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of “inspiration,” spontaneity, easy improvisation, of the sudden bolt from heaven, are delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed at his music for years, that in his smithy Beethoven forged his thunderbolts in the sweat of his sooty brows, that Manet slaved like a dock laborer, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to work, may be a disillusion for the sentimental. Yet such is the case. Minerva springing full-fledged from Jupiter’s skull is a pretty fancy, but Balzac and Flaubert did not encourage that fancy. Work literally killed them, as it killed Poe and Jules de Goncourt. Maupassant went insane because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and worried. His debts haunted him. His constitution was undoubtedly flawed, but that his life was one prolonged debauch is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton night-cap country. These letters to his mother are the most human of documents and they prove the contrary. Charles Baudelaire is the saddest and the profoundest poet in modern literature.

Speaking of Nietzsche, I am reminded of the study by William M. Salter, Nietzsche the Thinker, which happened to be published here at an inopportune time (1917). It is the most satisfactory exposition of the ideas of the great poet-philosopher, who, even if he did not create an inclosed system, has given birth to original and suggestive ideas. Mr. Salter has, of course, exploded the erroneous notion that Nietzsche was persona grata with the Prussians. A letter in my possession, though not addressed to me—alas! I have but one written to me—begins thus: “Woe to the victors, for they shall be vanquished!” A veritable prophecy. This was dated 1875, and alluded to the Franco-Prussian War, the consequences of which sorrowed the soul of Nietzsche. The Salter book is testimony to American scholarship; cogent, bold, brilliant, and conclusive.