The BOOKMAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 665, 17 May 1929, Page 14

The BOOKMAN

Reviewsl & Notes

BAUDELAIRE—“FLOWER OF EVIL”

A NEW BIOGRAPHY

HE broken and brainless wreck of humanity who so terribly passed away in the nursing home at Chaillot in 1867 is today recognised by French

critics as the greatest of modern Freach poets. And now comes Francois PorchS with a biography, “Baudelaire: Flower of Evil,” which is so intensified in its emotional appeal, so clarified in its psychological and idiilosophical plumbings into the poet's brain and heart (writes Herbert Gorman), and so vividly conceived as a series of pictures suffused with the colour and spirit of Louis Philippe’s reign and the first years of the Second Empire, that the reader may, for the first time, know the actual Baudelaire in all his abnormal frenzy and hean breaking genius. He is worth knowing, for his life was more than a phenomena scandaleux. In spite of nis drunkenness, his addiction to drugs and

his satyriasis he was, perhaps, the greatest force for discipline, clean clarity and finality of utterance in poetry who had appeared in French letters since Racine. He was a momentous protest against the laxities of Romanticism, a man who could labour for 15 years at a single book (and what a book!), filing, perfecting, achieving the divine exactitude that is the triumph of pure poetry. Like “Madame Bovary,” in fiction, which, curiously enough, appeared within 12 months of Baudelaire's masterpiece, “Les Fleurs du Mai,” marked the end of an era in French letters and the beginning of a new order of things. Order became supreme where before there had been a luxuriant disorder, and, as the French language is peculiar)- adapted to order, the frontiers of Gallic achievement in poetry were forced noticeably further toward perfection. The personality of Baudelaire, as illuminated by M. PorclrS, becomes a tenebrous battlefield above which flies that white standard of order. He was born of parents surprisingly unequal in age, for his father was 60 and his mother was 26 when he came into the world in the now-vanished Rue Hautefeuille in Paris. M. Porche makes much of this disparity in ages, for from it he deduces part of the peculiarity of Baudelaire's temperament in after years. Charles possessed a mother-complex, and, when his old father died and the young mother married again (her second husband was that General Aupick who became French Ambassador to Madrid and a Senator of the Second Empire), the boy knew his first fierce sorrow. What followed were years of continual torture; the long affair with the negress, Jeanne Duval; the descent into the hell of "alcoholism”; the dread disease contracted in youth that was to lay him low eventually; the false relief sought in hashish and laudanum: the sleepless nights when the thought of the dead left him pale and perspiring on his bed; the slowly evolved poems so flawless in their painstaking workmanship; the discovery of Edgar Allan Poe and the exalted passion of finding a spiritual brother as unfortunate as himself; the scandal of “Les Fleurs du Mai” and the trial in the Sixth Criminal Court; the unceasing flight from usurers and rapacious tradesmen; the days of torture in Belgium, and the last terrible scene in the nursing home at Chaillot when a mere rag of humanity became a part of posterity. How could this man have lived as ho did and written so like a god? M. Porch <5 answers that in an analysis that permits the reader to gaze into the strange unholy mind of Baudelaire, that mind that raised sin to a divinity and passed through the tormenting fields of the emotions plucking the pale and perfect flowers of evil. He was the victim of an undying and intolerable spleen, a boredom so perfect that it became a superemotion. “C'est VEnnui. . . ce monstre delicat. He w-as proud, an(J the mischances of life continually thwarted him. “Who can say,” inquires M. Porchd. “which are the real people, which the phantoms in our lives?” Poe. the [ phantom, was the real person in j Baudelaire's life. It seems to have j been a case of real possession. Here was the alter ego. the man who would drink until he fell into the gutter, and yet know that between his drunkenness and ordinary drunkenness there lay worlds of thought, sensitiveness and sadness, like a mountain range with snow-capped peaks and deep ravines. . . . The translations from Poe continued over a period of 17 years | 'from 1848 to 1865), and while, as M. PorchS points out. the period of ilium- ; ination did not last all of that time, the influence never seems to have ; lessened.

Baudelaire was 46 years old when he died (1867), and. though “Les Fleurs du Mai” had been published 10 tears before, his passing caused no ripple in the busy life of the Paris of the Second Empire. The Exposition was going on and people apparently had more important things to think of, the Chinese giant, for instance, or the latest opera bouffe by Offenbach or

; Herve. A few friends—among them Paul Verlaine, Theodore de Banville,

i and Edouard Manet —followed the ; coffin to Montparnasse Cemetery. The j broken body was laid away in that ! populous city of the dead that Baudelaire feared to think about. Les | marts, les pauvres marts, ont de j grande douleurs. He said it himself. | His influence, however, was steadily manifesting itself in the young men who came after, and it was not many j years before that apotheosis took ! place which was to develop season } after season, to bourgeon and flourish, I until, in 1926, M. Paul Valery could write: “Baudelaire is at the height jof his glory now.” “Flower of Evil” ! can do no harm, frank as it is in pori tions. It can but reveal a tortured and unhappy man with abnormal impulses flashing forth at times into the purest poetry that has been written in modern France, a poetry that may be an indictment of life, perhaps, but which is miraculous in its crystal-like lucidity and impressive in its Autumnal revelation.

Have You Read This?

THE CHARM OF OXFORD MATTHEW ARNOLD. —“Essays in Criticism.’* Matthew Arnold (1822-88) left a good deal of poetry of undeniable quality , but is remembered chiefly for his prose. The son of Thomas Arnold, the famous head master of Rugby, he was educated at Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol, won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1843, and became fellow of Oriel in 1815. In 1851 Lord Lansdowne, whose private secretary lie had been for four years, appointed him inspector of schools, and lie held that post for over 30 years. Front 1857 to 1867 he was, in addition, professor of poetry at Oxford. It is in his essays—“ Essays in Criiicism“Culture and Anarchy“ Literature and Dogma” and so on—that he is at his best: vigorous yet urbane, graceful but not too mannered, scholarly without being too pedantic, satirical at times , and in the best sense “ popular .” The following is typical of his style.

NO, we are all seekers still! Seekers often make mistakes, and I wish mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not to touch Oxford. Beautiful City! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! There are young barbarians all at play! And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tubingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend’s highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him: the bondage of “was uns alle bandigt, das gemeine.”

She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?

BANNED BOOKS FORTUNES ON THE CONTINENT i Small fortunes have already been made on the Continent—and chiefly in Paris—by the sale of two novels on which a ban has been placed by the British authorities (reports the Paris correspondent of the London “Daily Chronicle”). They are Miss Radcliffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” and D. H. Laurence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” A Paris bookseller tells me that royalties on the Continental sale of the first-named | book must have exceeded <£lo,ooo.

He himself was aware of sales amounting to £3,600 —that is, of 3,000 copies at 150 francs a copy. And the demand for the book is still great. Original copies have changed hands at as much as seven guineas each.

Of Mr. Lawrence’s book there have already been three editions. The first, printed in Italy, was of 1,000 copies, 150 being in de luxe style. “Of the 150,” the director of the Libraire Castiglione, one of the largest book-shops in Paris, tells me that “most were sold for about £25 a copy. In the case of the last few,

the price was £4O. It is now impossible to obtain one. All the 1,000 copies were signed by the author, and the ordinary copies were priced at 300 and 400 francs, except in the case of the last. On it the author wrote, ‘No. 1,000, and last,’ with his signature. That book went for 7,500 francs (£60).” Royalties on the whole edition amount probably to £BOO.

A second edition of 200 copies, printed in the United States, is a mystery. It is not stated who printed it; the author knows nothing about it. Though the copies are in paper covers, the price was 400 francs (£3 ss). A third edition, of 1,500 copies, was printed in Germany by a French publisher. Its price was 400 francs a copy.