Text: Gladys R. Turquet-Milnes, “Edgar Poe,” The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England, London: Constable and Company, 1913, pp. 63-72

[page 63:]

WE have already studied those men who, by reason of the part they play in the circumstances which lead to the development of Baudelairism, may justly be called the predecessors of Baudelaire himself. But there is another class of predecessors (though the two classes are by no means mutually exclusive), those who directly influence the coming writer by their writings. Having endeavoured to present the chief characteristics of Baudelaire's work, we shall now consider to what extent we can trace these characteristics back to his reading.

Of all these predecessors the most original was perhaps Edgar Poe. There is a tendency just now among English and American critics to decry Poe(1); it is the old story of Tennyson's fable: —

But it should be remembered that Poe did really bring a new element into literature — the element of artistic horror. This is something quite apart from the supernatural of Walpole's Castle of Otranto with its sighing portraits and mysterious helmets, or of Mrs. Radcliffe's ghostly machinery, or of ‘Monk’ Lewis's spirits and demons. [page 64:] Before Poe the novelists in this department had produced little of any real artistic or literary value.

Poe, in one side of his work, brought to this crude supernatural a psychological and artistic interest, and thereby showed the way to a new and fertile field of literature into which domain Baudelaire was the first to follow.

There are indeed some striking resemblances between Poe and Baudelaire. In the first place, their life is not without analogy. Both had the misfortune to displease their father by choosing a literary career. Both worked in surroundings that were uncongenial to them : Poe in that America which Baudelaire characterised as a ‘great gas-lit barbarism’; Baudelaire in Belgium, of which his mildest criticism is that it is a country of fools. Finally, both sought by means of artificial sensation to find relief from oppressive reality. The end of both is tragically sombre: Baudelaire dragging out the two last years of his existence with brain paralysis; Poe falling into the hands of political blackmailers, plied with drink, and carried round from polling-booth to polling-booth, then abandoned in the street. He was discovered next morning, recognised and taken to the hospital, where he died soon after.

The resemblances in the work of the two poets are even stronger. M. Crepet has told us how Baudelaire's enthusiasm grew when once he had begun reading Poe: ‘I have rarely seen an enthusiasm so complete, so rapid, so absolute. He would go about asking every new-comer, wherever he were, in the street or a cafe, or a printing establishment, morning or evening, “Do you know Edgar Poe?” and according to the reply he would either pour out his enthusiasm or shower questions on his hearer.’ The reason for this enthusiasm was that in Poe, Baudelaire had discovered a mind very like his own. In a letter to Armand Fraisse of 1858 he says: — [page 65:]

And six years later, in a letter he wrote to M. Thore to defend Manet against the charge of having copied Goya, he says: —

Let us then now consider the work of these two poets. First, we find in both the same theory of art: that beauty must be considered as an end and not as a means to an end, and with this the hatred of the didactic. This last Poe calls ‘ a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corruption of our poetic literature than all its other enemies combined. . . . It has been assumed tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all poetry is truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. . . . We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force; but the simple fact is, that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own [page 66:] souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.’

And here is Baudelaire's view: —

Speaking of drames et romans honnêtes Baudelaire returns again to his subject : —

Like Gautier in this theory, Poe and Baudelaire are like him again in their profession that l’inexprimable riexiste pas — Poe speaking of himself as one who

Both Poe and Baudelaire have a decided taste for the horrible. Only here there is a difference; it were better perhaps to say that Poe has a predilection for horror, and Baudelaire for the horrible. Poe in his taste is much more ‘popular’ than Baudelaire; Poe loved a good thoroughgoing crime, is led sometimes to descend to the level of the shilling shocker. Many of his tales are written to [page 67:] merely present a hair-raising situation, a terrifying state of mind — such as the Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, or The Black Cat, with its wealth of nauseous detail.

On this subject much has been said of Baudelaire's ‘ La Charogne,’ which critics compare with Poe's ‘ Conqueror Worm,’ insisting, and rightly, that Baudelaire has here out-Poe’d Poe in horror. But from the fact that a poem of Poe's suggests a poem of the same kind to his successor, it cannot be rigidly deduced that the latter's ideas on the general subject are identical with those of his predecessor. Baudelaire's poem is rather the outcome of his habit of looking at things from Flaubert's point of view, who said : ‘ I have never looked at a child without thinking that it will grow old, nor can I look on a cradle without thinking of a tomb. To contemplate a woman makes me think of her skeleton.’ In this province Baudelaire is the artist, Poe the novelist.

Further. For Baudelaire there is no beauty without some mystery: —

It is the poetic mystery that attracts Baudelaire. He said in his Mademoiselle Bistouri: ‘I am passionately fond of a mystery, because I am always in hopes of unravelling it.’ Poe, too, hopes to unravel his mystery, but in a different sense from Baudelaire. For Poe ‘ mystery ‘ means a crime of which the perpetrator is unknown, and whom the novelist has to discover. The offspring of Poe in this region is Sherlock Holmes. In the same way the abstract mystery — the mystery of the universe — has no [page 68:] hold on Poe. Spiritual philosophy is as absent from his work as the didactic aim. Yet the works of his two greatest disciples, Baudelaire and Villiers de 1’Isle Adam, are full of searchings into these very problems.

Baudelaire is urged by his curiosity to go into the public gardens in order to watch les petites meilles, and pursue the reveries they suggest. Poe watches a crowd. A man in it attracts his attention; so active is his curiosity that he follows this man all night, and it is not till morning that he has time to ponder and to see in this man ‘the type of genius and deep crime,’ and to give up hope of reading in his heart. ‘The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animæ; and perhaps it is one of the great mercies of God that this book ‘lässt sich nicht lesen!’

This curiosity leading on to dreamy humour is a sign of the ardour with which these two men sought to forget their unhappy surroundings — a dream is for them one of the principal means of forgetfulness.

‘Dreams, always dreams!’ cries Baudelaire in his Invitation au Voyage, ‘and the more delicate and ambitious the soul, the more dreams carry it far from the possible. Every man carries within him his dose of natural opium, endlessly secreted and renewed; from birth to death how many hours can we count filled by positive delight, or by an accomplished, decided action.’

And at the end of his Projets de Voyages he exults in the power of dream : —

Poe said of himself that all his life he had been but a dreamer, that in dreaming lay ever his greatest pleasure. ‘To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin or in the typography of a book; to be absorbed for the better part [page 69:] of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry on the floor; to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp on the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously some common word until the sound of it, by frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in : such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not indeed altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.’ He liked to think of the universe as one great dream.

and his Eureka was offered ‘to the dreamers, and those who put faith in dreams as the only realities.’

M. Lauvriere in his detailed book on Poe has pointed out the dangers to which such a temperament lays itself open ‘when all the fantasies and curiosities of the interior life triumph over the demands and laws of the external world,’ — hysteria is according to him the commonest of them. The saddest result of this temper comes, I think, when the dreams turn to nightmares.

The dreamy humour appears also in those fables ‘Silence,’ ‘Shadow,’ of which we are reminded by such prose poems of Baudelaire as ‘L’Etranger,’ ‘Les Bienfaits de la Lune.’ When Poe and Baudelaire paint Nature (in the landscape sense of the word), they always call forth a dream-landscape, a landscape which is imaginary, fairylike, or as M. Lemaitre would say lunaire. As a matter of fact, we know that Poe had intended to describe in great detail a moon-landscape, as he tells us: —

This is a perfect example of dream-landscape.

And from this same dreamy temper springs the habit of assigning a kind of life to inanimate objects. With Poe this idea turns rather to the terrible side. Perhaps the best example comes in the tale Berenice. At the sight of Berenice's smile he becomes obsessed with the idea of her teeth: —

‘I surveyed their characteristics, I dwelt upon their peculiarities, I pondered upon their conformation, I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said, Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments, and of Berenice I more seriously believed, que toutes ses dents etaient des idles.’

With Baudelaire the development of this idea is rather purely contemplative. Take, for example, the opening of the Chambre Double: —

‘There the soul takes a bath of idleness perfumed with regret and desire. It is something like the twilight, blueish with a tint of rose; a voluptuous dream during an eclipse.

This is the trait of Baudelairism which — as we shall see — was so enthusiastically taken up, carried to excess even, by Rodenbach.

In their love of the mysterious Poe and Baudelaire had shown themselves members of the romantic movement; the same is true of their theory of contrast, of joy born of misery, and of vice producing virtue. As Poe says at the beginning of Berenice: —

The idea of these two alternatives is found throughout Baudelaire's ‘Spleen et Idéal,’ but true Baudelairism goes even further than this Byronism — putting the contrast into one and the same person: —

As for the verbal imitations of Poe in Baudelaire, M. Lauvrière in his book on Poe has sought them out with such indefatigable energy that it is impossible not to quote him on this subject. As he well remarks, it is impossible [page 72:] to read ‘Réversibilité,’ ‘L’Irréparable,’ ‘L’Harmonie du Soir,’ without noticing how Baudelaire employs the Poesque device of line — repetition. ‘ Le Flambeau Vivant’ was directly inspired by Poe's sonnet to Helen. The idea les marts, les pauvres morts ont de grandes douleurs’ is another reminiscence of Poe; and again when Baudelaire describes himself as one of those

he must have had in mind Poe's lines in the ‘ Haunted Palace’: —

In the same way in the Poèmes en Prose, Baudelaire's analysis of the motives of wrongdoing in the ‘ Mauvais Vitrier’ is certainly suggested by Poe's ‘Imp of the Perverse,’ just as ‘Laquelle est la Vraie ‘ is obviously copied from ‘Morella.’

Poe's range was far more limited than that of Baudelaire; the Frenchman offers us a far more complex character to study. One of the reasons for this lies doubtless in the fact that Poe never really spoke out about himself — he never even mentions his surroundings — Baudelaire records all the problems of the various moods of his troubled brain. Poe offers us no criticism of life, he accepts it; therein he is far more resigned than Baudelaire. There is no counterpart of Baudelaire's Révolte in Poe's work.

It is by this aloofness that Poe merits Mr Andrew Lang's reproach that he ‘lacked humanity.’ He limited himself entirely to the unreal world, and therefore he can only appeal to us in a certain mood — and he gives us nothing to carry away.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 63:]

1 The latest study of Poe by Mr. Arthur Ransome (1910) is an exception to this.