Text: Charles Whibley, “Musings without Method: Baudelaire and Poe,” Blackwood's Magazine (Edinburgh, Scotland), vol. CXCIII, whole no. MCLXIX, March 1913, pp. 417-419

[page 417, column 1, continued:]

There is one writer whose name will always be indissolubly associated with Baudelaire's, and that is Edgar Poe. It is sympathy rather than influence that binds them the one to the other. They both looked with the same artist's eye upon poetry and its aim. Poe's essay on the poetic principle arrives at the same end and by the same path as Baudelaire's analysis cited above. And if Poe merely reinforced the opinions already held by the French poet, Baudelaire did more than any other to establish the American's fame upon the sure basis of immortality. When first he discovered the genius of Poe, his enthusiasm was unbounded. He asked all whom he met at the café or in the street whether they had read the works of the marvellous American poet. “In 1846 or 1847,” thus he tells the story himself, “I became acquainted with a few fragments of Edgar Poe. I experienced a peculiar emotion: as his complete works were not collected till after his death, I had the patience to make friends with some Americans living in Paris, so [column 2:] as to borrow from them collections of journals that had been edited by Edgar Poe. And then I found — believe me or not as you will — poems and tales of which I had already a vague, confused, and ill-ordered idea, and which Poe had known how to arrange and bring to perfection. Here is no question of plagiarism, or even of influence. Two poets, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, dreamed the same dreams and saw the same visions. “You doubt,” said Baudelaire to a friend, “whether such geometric parallels can present themselves in nature. Well, then, I am accused of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I translated Poe with such patience? Because he was like me. The first time I opened a book of his I saw with terror and delight not only subjects I had dreamed of, but sentences that I had thought of, and that he had written twenty years before.” The two men were like one another in feature as in talent, and the sympathy between them being thus complete, it is not strange that Baudelaire should have produced a perfect translation. For seventeen years he devoted himself to the task, and when death overtook him he had left undone only a few stories and a few poems. A stroke of good fortune truly! To be translated by a poet and a master of prose such as Baudelaire has fallen to the lot of no other writer than Poe, Despised in his own country, because the commercial hopes and fears [page 418:] of America were indifferent to him, he received ample reparation at the hands of France. Thus his fame, enjoying two lives, has conquered the whole world. And if we must seek the influenee of Baudelaire, we shall find it in his versions of Edgar Poe's incomparable stories. ‘The Gold Bug,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ have more profoundly affected the course of modern literature than ‘Les Fleurs du Mal,’ to whose height of sinister beauty none has attained, or the ‘ Petits Poémes en Prose,’ whose delicacy still eludes the deftest hand.

“De Maistre and Edgar Poe have taught me to reason,” said Baudelaire. They did not teach him to live, and the life of this strange, mysterious anchorite was one unbroken tragedy. When in his boyhood Baudelaire declared that he could follow no career save the career of literature, his parents did their utmost to dissuade him. They were quite right. They knew something of the misery which dogged the footsteps of a poet in a prosaic world, a misery of which the poet's optimism made light. Baudelaire refused to renounce his ambition, and he too was right. The vocation for him was irresistible, and he did but follow the imperious command of his genius. Yet distress and the suffering came to him, as they were bound to come. An age which worships numbers is eloquent concerning the poverty of the working-classes. It has nothing to say [column 2:] about the poverty of those for whom a certain elegance is the first necessity of life, and who have not always bread to eat. Soscrupulous was Baudelaire of cleanliness and amenity, that he daily dusted his books and his furniture with a camel's hair brush. If the simple dignity of a dandy were taken from him, he was as sharply conscious of tragedy as was Brummel when he was deprived of Maraschino and biscuits de Rheims. Both men went mad under the strain of deprivation, and Baudelaire's unhappiness was the greater because his sensibility was the more acute. He foresaw too soon the unhappiness which would overtake him. In 1862 he noted in his journal a strange warning. “I felt,” said he, “the wing of the wind of imbecility pass over me.” Living in Belgium in a country which he _ loathed, where, said he, “the grass was black and the flowers had no perfume,” he was without the money which should take him back to France. And all the while he was making resolutions of work and thrift. He would carry out all his literary projects, and devote a part of his income to the paying of his debts, another part to making easier the life of his mother. He made rules of health and conduct. “Too late, perhaps,” he wrote. His breviary of wisdom was “toilet, prayer, work.” His prayer was for “charity, wisdom, strength”; and day by day the disease came nearer which was destined to overthrow his reason. He was [page 419:] bidden by his doctor to take drugs, and he had not a halfpenny wherewith to buy them. To the very end he attempted to publish his works, that the mere necessaries of life might not, be lacking to him, and not even the influence of Sainte-Beuve could find him a publisher. For a year he lingered, neither writing nor speaking, and died at last, in 1867, the victim of his genius and his sensibility.

It is commonly said that time readjusts the adverse opinions of contemporaries, — that, when the jealousies and superstitions of the moment are forgotten, men of genius enter into their proper inheritance of fame. That is an opinion of the optimists. Again and again we find that men of mediocre talent are taken by succeeding generations at their hopeful estimate, that advertisement and popularity meet with a vast and posthumous reward. Neither Poe nor Baudelaire has been kindly treated by this later age. The fierce animosities which the author of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ aroused in the breasts of his countrymen are still active. Poe is paying the penalty after a century for the contempt in which he held the cupidity and foolishness of America. He made no concessions to the materialism of his age, and another age, yet more fiercely material, holds him in disdain. If he receives the praise even of the lettered, it is given grudgingly and with a sad contempt. In France and England his fame has [column 2:] grown with his influence. In his own land he remains without honour. And the sympathy which bound Baudelaire and Poe in their work unites them after death. Baudelaire, like Poe, still lies under the ban. The pedants and professors, whom he held ever in scorn, have taken their revenge upon him. They have either excluded him from their herbaria of dead leaves, called histories of literature, or they have dismissed him in three contemptuous lines. It matters not. Even though he be not acclaimed by the multitude, even though he be neglected in a sullen jealousy by the professors of literature, he will still find an audience fit but few. He will still be read by all those who love poetry for its own sake.