En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève, Sur le fonde de mes nuits, Dieu, de son doigt savant, 'J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou, Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté, Baudelaire describes here accurately enough that obsession of degenerates which is called 'fear of abysses' (cremnophobia).* His second peculiarity is his interest in scents. He is attentive to them, interprets them; they provoke in him all kinds of sensations and associations. He expresses himself thus on this subject in Correspondances : 'Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent. Comme l'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens, Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.' He loves woman through his sense of smell . . . ('Le parfum de tes charmes étranges,' A une Malabaraise), and never fails, in describing a mistress, to mention her exhalations. Parfum exotique: 'Quand les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d'automne, Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux La Chevelure: 'O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure! 'La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique, Naturally, instead of good odours, he prefers the perfumes which affect the healthy man as stinks. position and pestilence charm his nose. Le Flacon: Putrefaction, decom 'Il est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière * Dr. E. Régis, Manuel bratique de Médecine mentale. 2e édition. Paris, 1892, p. 279. 294 Voilà le souvenir enivrant qui voltige Dans l'air troublé ; les yeux se ferment; le vertige Il la terrasse au bord d'un gouffre séculaire, Ainsi, quand je serai perdu dans la memoire We now know all the features which compose Baudelaire's character. He has the cult of self';* he abhors nature, movement and life; he dreams of an ideal of immobility, of eternal silence, of symmetry and artificiality; he loves disease, ugliness and crime; all his inclinations, in profound aberration, are opposed to those of sane beings; what charms his sense of smell is the odour of corruption; his eye, the sight of carrion, suppurating wounds and the pain of others; he feels happy in muddy, cloudy, autumn weather; his senses are excited by unnatural pleasures only. He complains of frightful tedium and of feelings of anguish; his mind is filled with sombre ideas, the association of his ideas works exclusively with sad or loathsome images; the only thing which can distract or interest him is badness-murder, blood, lewdness and falsehood. He addresses his prayers to Satan, and aspires to hell. He has attempted to make his peculiarities pass for a comedy and a studied pose. In a note placed at the head of the first edition (1857) of the Fleurs du Mal, he says: Among the following pieces, the most characteristic... has been considered, at least by men of intellect, only for what it really is: the imitation of the arguments of ignorance and fury. Faithful to his painful programme, the author has had, like a good comedian, to fashion his mind to all sophisms, as to all corruptions. This candid declaration will, doubtless, not prevent honest critics from ranking him among the theologians of the people,' etc. Some of his admirers accept this explanation or appear to accept it. His intense disdain of the vulgar,' murmurs Paul Bourget, 'breaks out in extremes of paradox, in laborious mystification ... Among many readers, even the keenest, the fear of being duped by this grand disdainer hinders full admiration. The * Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 5-'le culte de soi-même.' This is Théophile Gautier's own term. † Paul Bourget, op. cit., p. 31. term has become a commonplace of criticism for Baudelaire; he is a mystificateur'; everything for him is only a deception; he himself neither feels nor believes anything he expresses in his poetry. It is twaddle, and nothing else. A rhetorician of the Paul Bourget sort, threshing straw, and curling scraps of paper, may believe that an inwardly free man is capable of preserving artificially, all his life long, the attitude of a galley-slave or a madman, well knowing he is only acting a comedy. The expert knows that the choice of an attitude, such as Baudelaire's, is a proof in itself of deep-seated cerebral disturbance. Mental therapeutics has declared that persons who simulate insanity with some perseverance, even with a rational object, as, for example, in the case of certain criminals on their trial, in order to escape punishment, are almost without exception really mad,* although not to the degree they try to represent, just as the inclination to accuse one's self, or to boast, of imaginary crimes is a recognised symptom of hysteria. The assertion of Baudelaire himself, that his Satanism is only a studied rôle, has no sort of value whatever. As is so frequently the case among the higher degenerates,' he feels in his heart that his aberrations are morbid, immoral and anti-social, and that all decent persons would despise him or take pity on him, if they were convinced that he was really what he boasts of being in his poems; he has recourse, consequently, to the childish excuse that malefactors also often have on their lips, viz., 'that it was not meant Ch J. J. Sazaret, Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888. This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After having himself asserted (p. 22) that the victims of hysteria are much given to simulate all sorts of maladies,' he says (p. 29): 'Persons mentally affected now and then simulate madness; the case is rare, but it has nevertheless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe, that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and certain actions have not been analyzed.' The case is so far from rare that it is pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Baillarger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum eight years before, as a fully confirmed mad-woman; in the case of Morel (4th observation), the simulator had a nervous attack at the sight of a lancet,' which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration; in the 6th observation Morel admits that 'the extravagance of the subject, his fear of poison' (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), and the fact of picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder'; the case of Foville (10th observation) had a certain number of insane in his family'; the case of Legrand du Saulle (18th observation) was 'the son of a hysterical woman and grandson of a madman'; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (19th observation) numbers some insane among his ancestors'; the case of Billod (22nd observation) 'has often manifested disturbance and delirium,' etc. All these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of their delirium was only a further proof of their alienation. seriously. Perhaps also Baudelaire's consciousness experienced a sincere horror of the perverse instincts of his unconscious life, and he sought to make himself believe that with his Satanism he was laughing at the Philistines. But such a tardy palliation does not deceive the psychologist, and is of no importance for his judgment. CHAPTER III. DECADENTS AND ÆSTHETES. As on the death of Alexander the Great his generals fell on the conqueror's empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his contemporaries and the generation following-many even without waiting for his madness and death-take possession of some one of his peculiarities for literary exploitation. The school of Baudelaire reflects the character of its master, strangely distorted; it has become in some sort like a prism, which diffracts this light into its elementary rays. His delusion of anxiety (anxiomania), and his predilection for disease, death and putrefaction (necrophilia), have fallen, as we have seen in the preceding book, to the lot of M. Maurice Rollinat. M. Catulle Mendès has inherited his sexual aberrations and lasciviousness, and besides all the newer French pornographists rely upon them for proving the 'artistic raison d'être' of their depravity. Jean Richepin, in La Chanson des Gueux, has spied in him, and copied, his glorification of crime, and, further, in Les Blasphèmes, has swelled Baudelaire's imprecations and prayers to the devil to the size of a fat volume, in a most dreary and wearisome manner. His mysticism suckles the Symbolists, who, after his example, pretend to perceive mysterious relations between colours and the sensations of the other senses, with this difference, that they hear colours while he smelt them; or, if you will, they have an eye in their ear, while he saw with the nose. In Paul Verlaine we meet again his mixture of sensuality and pietism. Swinburne has established an English depot for his Sadism, compounded of lewdness and cruelty, for his mysticism and for his pleasure in crime, and I greatly fear that Giosué Carducci himself, otherwise so richly gifted and original, must have turned his eyes towards the Litanies de Satan, when he wrote his celebrated Ode à Satan. The diabolism of Baudelaire has been specially cultivated by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. These two men have, in addition to the general family likeness of the degenerate, a series of special features in common. Villiers and Barbey attributed to themselves, as the deranged frequently do, a fabulous genealogy; the former aspired to be a descendant of Count de l'Isle-Adam, the celebrated Marshal and Grand-Master of Malta (who as such could not be married, be it understood !), and he claimed one day, in a letter addressed to the Queen of England, the surrender of Malta in virtue of his right of heritage. Barbey annexed the aristocratic surname of d'Aurevilly, and - during the whole of his life spoke of his noble race-which had no existence. Both made a theatrical display of fanatical Catholicism, but revelled at the same time in studied blasphemies against God.* Both delighted in eccentricities of costume and modes of life, and Barbey had the habit of graphomaniacs, which we know already, of writing his letters and his literary works with different coloured inks. Villiers de l'IsleAdam, and still more Barbey d'Aurevilly, created a class of poetry to the worship of the devil, which recalls the craziest depositions of witches of the Middle Ages when put to the torture. Barbey especially may be said to have gone, in this respect, to the limits of the imaginable. His book Le Prêtre marié might be written by a contemporary of witch-burners; but it is surpassed in its turn by Les Diaboliques, a collection of crack-brained histories, where men and women wallow in the most hideous license, continually invoking the devil, extolling and serving him. All the invention in these ravings Barbey stole with utter shamelessness from the books of the Marquis de Sade, without a shade of shame; that which belongs properly to him is the colouring of Catholic theology he gives to his profligacies. If I only speak in general terms of the books mentioned here, without entering into details, without summarizing the contents, or quoting characteristic passages, it is because my demonstrations do not require a plunge into this filth, and it is sufficient to point the finger from afar at the sink of vice which testifies to Baudelaire's influence on his contemporaries. Barbey, the imitator of Baudelaire, has himself found an imitator in M. Joséphin Péladan, whose first novel, Vice suprême, occupies an eminent place in the literature of diabolism. M. Péladan, who had not yet promoted himself to the dignity of a first-class Assyrian king, paraphrases in his book what he means by vice suprême': Let us deny Satan! Sorcery has always sorcerers... superior minds which have no need of conjuringbook, their thought being a page written by hell for hell. Instead of the kid they have killed the good soul within them, and * Fr. Paulhan, op. cit., p. 92: 'While affecting the faith of a seminarist, he [Villiers] delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme as his peculiar property.... This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan more than that of God.' |