Part 4

The poem was first printed in _L 'Artiste_, May 10, 1857, together with two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: _Franciscae Meae Laudes,_ and _L'Irrémédiable._ The Latin verses, composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the Dedication: _Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote._ The verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its name, on the comedy of Terence, _The Self-Tormentor,_ where, in fact, the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's _Timon of Athens._ Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal laughter.

The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes with satanical glances and is: _La conscience dans le mal!_

In _Les fleurs du mal_ (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages 123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with _Piscina plena virtutis;_ "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with _Sicat beneficum Lethe;_ "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with _Labris vocem redde mutis!_ "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of _Les paradis,_ "une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution:

_In nocte mea taberna._ _Flambeau des grâces sataniques._

I return to my copy of _Les paradis artificiels_ (1860). The dedication to J. G. F. begins: "_Ma chère amie,_ Common-sense tells us that terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the imaginations that she haunts.

[Illustration: Frontpage Les paradis artificiels]

"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, indispensable that it has been written for _any one?_ I have, for my part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead.

"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality.

"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped his sweating forehead and _refreshed his lips parched by fever;_ and you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you dissipated, with a light and tender hand."

I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who was the woman of the initials?

What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: "I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life."

In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially _haschischin._ I cannot say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of regret, have returned to their former sensibility."

I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by the same woman to whom _Le paradis_ is dedicated. Like Orestes, he might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: "And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, how I keep the watches of the night--how often I bewail my hapless sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. G. F.'s?

In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: _Théophile Gautier, par Charles Baudelaire;_ a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: "Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French language, even l'_Argot._

Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac.

"Not for the first," he says, in his _Study of Shakespeare,_ "and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.

"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in his _Human Comedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest--and that with a sure hand--what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'"

V

"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. It is part of his curiosity in souls--as in the equally sinister curiosity of Baudelaire--to prefer the complex to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth.

[Illustration: manuscript]

Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to _La Révolte_ (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--a writer whose singular personality and work render him perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more especially, of the _bourgeois_ multitude of letters and of life: it is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look for the source of that violent and _voulu_ eccentricity which mars so much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface, _Genus irritabile vatum._

In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions.

Villiers has written much. The volume of _Contes cruels_ (published in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no other collection of tales in any language on which so various and finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The _Tales_ of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the _Twice-Told Tales_ of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the other volumes. _La révolte,_ a drama in one act in prose, represented at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of certain _Contes cruels_; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place near them. _L'Ève future_ (1886), that most immense and ferocious of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the _Contes_ swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale _L'Amour suprême,_ attempts to be a second set of _Contes Cruels;_ it has nothing of their distinction, except in _Akëdysséril. Tribulat Bonhomet,_ which appeared in 1887--"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, couleur du siècle," as the author has called it--is largely made up of an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes, _Histoires insolites_ (1888) and _Nouveaux contes cruels_ (1889), there are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating horror of _La torture par l'espérance,_ and the delicate cynicism of _Les amies de pension._ As for the prose drama in five acts, _Le Nouveau Monde_ (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize--"une médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres seductions encore"--there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du génie"--as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, _La légende du Parnasse contemporaine._ I shall speak chiefly of the _Contes cruels,_ and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided genius.