Charles Baudelaire

“ The insatiable thirst for that which is beyond and which veils life, is the most lively proof of our immortality. It is at once by and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul gets a glimpse of the splendours beyond the tomb. And, when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, these tears are not the proof of an excess of joy, they are [Pg 29] the witness rather of an excited melancholy, an intercession of the nerves, of a nature exiled in imperfection wishing to possess itself, even on this earth, of a revealed paradise. ”

“ But it is to none of these creatures of plaster, marble, or ebony that he gives his soul. Above this black heap of leprous houses, this infectious labyrinth where the spectres of pleasure circle, this impure tingling of misery, of ugliness and perversity, far, far distant in the unalterable azure floats the adorable spirit of Beatrice, the ever-desired ideal, never attained; the supreme and divine beauty incarnated in the form of an ethereal woman, spiritualised, fashioned of light, fire, and perfume ”

“ It is important to be in a tranquil frame of mind and body, to have on this day neither anxiety, duty, nor fixed time, and to find oneself in such an apartment as Baudelaire and Edgar Poe loved, a room furnished with poetical comfort, bizarre luxury, and mysterious elegance; a private and hidden retreat which seems to await the beloved, the ideal feminine face that Chateaubriand, in his noble language, calls the "sylphide." ”

“ You accord too much to the mind, to combination. Let yourself alone, do not be afraid to feel too much like others. Never fear to be common; you will always have enough in your delicacy of expression to make you distinguished.
I do not wish any longer to appear more prudish in your eyes than I am. I like more than one part of your volume—those "Tristesses de la Lune," for example, a delightful sonnet that seems like some English poet contemporary with Shakespeare's youth. It is not up to these stanzas, "A celle qui est trop gaie," which seem to me exquisitely done. ”

“ Who among us, in these days of ambition, has not dreamt of the miracle of poetical, musical prose, without rhythm, without rhyme, supple enough and apt enough to adapt itself to the movements of the soul, to the swaying of a dream, to the sudden throbs of conscience? ”

“ Titania herself appears in the transparent robe of silver gauze.
The reading of the "Poems in Prose" has often produced in us these impressions; a phrase, a word—one only—bizarrely chosen and placed, evoke for us an unknown world of forgotten and yet friendly faces. They revive the memories of early life, and present a mysterious choir of vanished ideas, murmuring in undertones among the phantoms of things apart from the realities of life. Other phrases, of a morbid tenderness, seem like music whispering consolation for unavowed sorrows and irremediable despair. ”

“ They ramble round the house with their velvet footfalls as the genius of the place—genius loci—or come and seat themselves on the table near the writer, keeping company with his thoughts and watching him from the depths of their sanded golden eyes with intelligent tenderness and magical penetration.
It is said that cats divine the thoughts which the brain transmits to the pen, and that, stretching out their paws, they wish to seize the written passage. They are happy in silence, order, and quietude, and no place suits them better than the study of a literary man. ”

“ Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself; let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, and you will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren, moonlit nights and sunless, sterile days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart away. ”

“ Picture to yourself the terrible fate of a man whose paralysed imagination no longer fulfils its functions without the aid of hashish or opium."
And, a little later, he makes his profession of faith in these noble terms: "But man is not so lacking in honest means of inspiration that he is obliged to invite the aid of the pharmacy or of sorcery; he has no need to sell his soul to pay for the intoxicating caresses and friendliness of the houris. What is the paradise that one buys at the price of eternal salvation?" ”

“ Thus, the principle of poetry is, strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration towards Supreme Beauty; and the manifestation of this principle is in the enthusiasm, the awakening of the soul, enthusiasm quite independent of that passion, which is the intoxication of the heart, and of that Truth, which is the Food of Reason. For passion is a natural thing, too natural even not to introduce a wounding note, discordant in the domain of un-sullied Beauty ”

“ CORRESPONDENCE OF BAUDELAIRE Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve 19th March, 1856.
Here, my dear patron, is a kind of literature which will not, perhaps, inspire you with as much enthusiasm as it does me, but which will most surely interest you. It is necessary—that is to say that I desire, that Edgar Poe, who is not very great in America, should become a great man in France. Knowing how brave you are and what a lover of novelty, I have boldly promised your support to Michel Lévy. ”

“ Dissension soon arose in the family à propos of young Baudelaire's desire for a literary career. We think it wrong to reproach parents with the fears they manifest when the gift of poetry develops in their offspring. Alas! They are right. To what sad, precarious, and miserable existence does he vow himself—he who takes up a literary career? From that day he must consider himself cut off from human beings, active life; he no longer lives—he is the spectator of life. All sensation comes to him as motif for analysis. ”

“ But if certain sides of his nature were such as could be satisfied by direct, and not traditional, representation of ugliness, or at least of contemporary triviality, his aspirations for Art, elegance, luxury, and beauty led him towards a superior sphere. And Delacroix, with his febrile passion, his stormy colours, his poetical melancholy, his palette of the setting sun, and his clever expression of the decadence, was, and remained, his master by election. ”

“ She is comparable to a great black Sun, if one could imagine a dark star brimming over with happiness and light. She stirs within one dreams of the moon, Night's Queen who casts spells upon her—not the white moon, that cold bride of summer idylls, but the sinister, intoxicating moon which hangs in the leaden vault of storm, among the driven clouds; not the pale, peaceful moon who visits the sleep of the pure ”

“ An English critic of Baudelaire has said:
"The writing of a great book is the casting of a pebble into the pool of human thought; it gives rise to ever-widening circles that will reach we know not whither, and begins a chain of circumstances that may end in the destruction of kingdoms and religions and the awakening of new gods. The change wrought, directly or indirectly, by 'The Flowers of Evil' alone is almost too great to be properly understood. There is perhaps not a man in Europe to-day whose outlook on life would not have been different had 'The Flowers of Evil' never been written. ”

“ These mournful spectres do not speak the language of mortals; they weep, they sigh, and make terrible gestures in the shadows. Thus they express their unknown sorrows, their nameless anguish, the suggestions of solitary despair, all that there is of suffering, bitterness, and sorrow in the depths of the human soul. ”

“ For the poet, words have in themselves, and apart from the meanings they express, intrinsic beauty and value, like precious stones still uncut and not set in bracelets, in necklaces or in rings. They charm the connoisseur who watches and sorts them in the little chalice where they are put in reserve, as a goldsmith would his jewels. ”

“ Baudelaire, always possessed of great admiration for the old masters, never felt it incumbent upon him to take them for models; they had had the good fortune to arrive in the early days of the world, at the dawn, so to speak, of humanity, when nothing had been expressed yet, and each form, each image, each sentiment, had the charm of virginal novelty. The great commonplaces which form the foundation of human thought were then in all their glory and sufficed for simple geniuses, speaking to simple people. ”

“ Thou shalt love what I love and those that love me: the waters, the clouds, the silence, the night, the great green sea, the shapeless and multiform waters, the place where thou art not, the lover whom thou knowest not, the prodigious flowers, the perfumes that trouble the mind, the cats which swoon and groan like women in hoarse or gentle voices. ”

“ Baudelaire was as sober as all other workers, and, while admitting a taste for the creation of an "artificial paradise," by means of some stimulant, opium, hashish, wine, alcohol, or tobacco, seems to follow the nature of man—since one finds it in all periods, in all conditions, in all countries, barbarous or civilised—he saw in it the proof of original perversity, a means of escaping necessary sorrow, a satanical suggestion for usurping, even in the present, the happiness reserved as a recompense for resignation, virtue, and the persistent effort towards the good and the beautiful. ”

“ This poet, whom people try to describe as of so satanic a nature, smitten with evil and depravity (literary, be it well understood) , knew love and admiration in the highest degree.
But the distinguishing feature of Satan is that he is incapable of admiration or love. The light wounds him, glory is a sight insupportable to him, and makes him want to veil his eyes with his bat-like wings. No one, even at the time of fervour for romanticism, had more respect and adoration for [Pg 12] the great masters than Baudelaire. ”

“ Among these women some symbolise unconscious and almost bestial prostitution, with plastered and painted masks, eyes brightened with kohl, mouths tinted with scarlet, seeming like open wounds, false hair and jewels; others, of a colder corruption, more clever and more perverse, like marchionesses of Marteuil of the nineteenth century, transpose the vice of the body to the soul. They are haughty, icy, bitter, finding pleasure only in wickedness; insatiable as sterility, mournful as ennui, having only hysterical and foolish fancies, and deprived, like the devil, of the power of love. ”

“ Gifted with a dreadful beauty, 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, [Pg 44] 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. ”

“ I scrutinised the formation of the chin —and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fulness and the spirituality of the Greek—the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia. ”

“ He believed only in the Immutable, the Eternal, the self-same, and he was in the possession of—cruel privilege! in a society amorous only of itself—the great good sense of a Machiavelli who marches before the wise as a column of light across the desert of history." Baudelaire had a perfect horror of philanthropists, progressionists, utilitarians, humanitarians, Utopians, and of all those who pretend to reform things, contrary to nature and the universal laws of society. ”

“ To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits; for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. ”

“ You, who love to amuse yourself in all depths, will you not make an excursion into the depths of Edgar Poe? You guess that the request for this service is connected in my mind with the visit I must pay to M. Pelletier. When one has a little money and goes to dine with a former mistress one forgets everything. But there are days when the curses of all the fools mount to one's brain, and then one implores one's old friend, Sainte-Beuve. ”

“ While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. ”