BOOK: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

INTRODUCTION By ADAM FEINSTEIN

In 2016, an exhibition in Paris set out to recreate the visual culture in which the great French poet, Charles Baudelaire, immersed himself. Baudelaire believed that painting and poetry were ‘sister’ arts: not only did they share the same emotional nature, treat the same subjects and create the same effects but they shared a common nature and function – to express the thoughts and feelings of the artist-poet.

Baudelaire, whose own father was a painter of questionable talent, spent much of his childhood visiting artists’ studios. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, he became close friends with Édouard Manet. Each day, the two men would stroll together through the new boulevards and parks of Paris, discussing the emerging industrial age, the thrills (and failures) of modern city life and the responsibility of the artist to depict these developments. Baudelaire was also friends, for a time at least, with Gustave Courbet. However, Baudelaire did not share Courbet’s penchant for realism. Baudelaire, the father of symbolism, associated realism with Positivism, which he defined as the complete negation of the imagination (the ‘queen of faculties’).

The revolution of 1848 had destroyed faith in the bourgeois-middle class as progressive, along with the illusion of language as a realist reflection of the world. Baudelaire ridiculed Victor Hugo’s ‘belief in progress, the salvation of mankind by the use of balloons, etc.’ He rebelled against any omniscient frame of vision – what he called ‘the modern lantern which throws its gloom against all objects of knowledge’. Instead of light, Baudelaire’s poems open with shadow and a narrowing line of sight. What light that does emerge in Baudelaire’s poems often turns out to be a rêverie or a mirage.

That 2016 exhibition, entitled ‘The Eye of Baudelaire’ and mounted on the 150th anniversary of his death, illustrated, above all, the poet’s admiration for the work of Eugène Delacroix, the ‘volcan’ (volcano) whose furious brushstrokes escaped what the poet called ‘the tyranny of straight lines.’ Baudelaire recognised the genius which lay behind Delacroix’s use of colour in his paintings: the aim was not to evoke the natural world, but to trigger far stranger, more inward associations, and to suggest bodies, emotions and relationships, without ever attaining precise definition. The poet believed that the ‘dark and cryptic beauty’ concealed in a work of art was as important as what was self- evident. Instead of omniscience, he sought ‘a forest of symbols’ which gazed back at the reader (or the viewer) ‘with familiar eyes.’ He valued the intensity of the creative process above all else. But this burst of intense creativity did not mean disorder. He emphasised the harmonic arrangements and melodic variations of colour in visible beauty.

Hervé Constant is the perfect choice for this beautiful new collaboration between painter and poet across the centuries. It is a memorable encounter between two flâneurs. (In his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ Baudelaire wrote: ‘For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite ... The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.’) Constant’s work not only shimmers with harmony but pulsates with the energy and movement that typifies Baudelaire’s work.

The French writer and literary critic, Nicole Ward Jouve, indulging in delicious understatement, once declared: ‘Nobody but a lunatic would recommend Baudelaire’s life as a pattern to be imitated.’ This short life was – by the poet’s own admission – ‘damned from the beginning’. One of his biographers, F. J. Hemmings, recalled that Baudelaire was persecuted by his parent and his teachers, betrayed by his mistress, racked by disease and made miserable by his neuroticism. His works were misunderstood, condemned as pornographic.

By 19th-century standards, Baudelaire was a radical, embracing the beauty of the strange, the vulgar, the common and the transient. And yet the 21st-century reader may envy Baudelaire his certainties, as well as his paradoxical insistence on his right to contradict himself. The contradictions also relate to Baudelaire’s parentage: his father belonged to the eighteenth century, while his much younger mother, with whom he was far closer, was a woman of the nineteenth century.

The poems in this book all come from Baudelaire’s celebrated collection, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), initially published in 1861. (Most of the English translations are by William Aggeler.) The first section of Les Fleurs du Mal, as Ward Jouve has pointed out, is overshadowed by fragmentation and isolation. In the very first poem, ‘Au lecteur’ (‘To the Reader’), Baudelaire is already addressing us as ‘hypocrites’. But in truth, he is calling our attention to what he sees as the many failings of humanity, as a whole. And he includes himself: if we are hypocrites, we are also his ‘alias,’ his ‘twin’. He acknowledges that our vices and excesses are fed by need. Of course, he views his poetry as a saving grace: it can transform daily horrors into beauties, evils into flowers.

Constant’s stunning, almost Klimt-like accompaniment to the extraordinary poem ‘L’albatros’ reminds us that the outsider poet, though compared to a crippled bird, may also once have been ‘a prince of cloud and sky’ before his alienating wounds made him the target of merciless mockery.

I have always felt the dream-like transcendence of ‘Élévation’ (‘Elevation’) resembles a Marc Chagall painting in verse. Constant’s depiction of this quest for spiritual freedom on the facing page is non-representational, or at most semi-abstract, but no less powerful, for that. Indeed, it is a wonderful exploration of the yearning for escape from all that is Earthbound.

The force of ambivalent abstraction is even more pronounced in Constant’s ‘Sick Muse’, his masterly response to Baudelaire’s astonishing ‘La muse malade’ – a poem that, like most of the section of Les Fleurs du Mal entitled ‘Spleen et idéal,’ oscillates, as the section’s title suggests, between despair and aspiration towards an unattainable ideal. The poet’s muse is a physical and moral ruin, a living ‘nightmare’ – or the victim of a nightmare. Constant’s oil painting of what could be a rock, a human head, a hellishly clenched fist or the dark desperation afflicting the poet, is supremely haunting.

Baudelaire’s rejection of Romanticism led him to exalt artifice at the expense of what he called the ‘insolent’ and constraining laws of nature. He was exasperated by what he saw as the sentimental French cult of pantheism. And yet, some of the palpably ‘modern’ aspects of Les Fleurs du Mal are derived from major Romantic themes. He is indebted to his Romantic predecessors, especially in his drive to integrate contradictions. Ward Jouve goes so far as to claim that Baudelaire was actually salvaging the values of Romanticism by reversing or apparently denying them. ‘Une charogne’ (‘A Carcass’) does appear to be Baudelaire’s utterly compelling reply to the early Romantics, such as John Keats, and particularly their notions of beauty.

It is a poem of revenge, but we readers are also duped until the very last stanza, at which point the poet jolts us by comparing a rotting carcass in the street to the love he once felt for his mistress before she abandoned him. Constant’s accompanying artwork is equally striking. ‘Remords posthume’ (‘Posthumous Remorse’) is another vengeful poem, a macabre sonnet which Baudelaire dedicated to his mistress, Jeanne Duval. In stark contrast to the guilt-fuelled tenderness that Thomas Hardy expressed so movingly (and so tardily) after the death of his wife, Emma, notice the bitter repetition of those harsh French consonants:

Qu’un caveau pluvieux et qu’une fosse creuse

Only a rain-swept vault and a hollow grave

and that unforgettably cruel final line:

Et le ver rongera ta peau comme un remords.

And like remorse the worm will gnaw your skin.

I have always been intrigued by how we would have interpreted this line if Baudelaire had instead written ‘les vers rongeront’ to leave the meaning ambiguous: it could have signified either ‘the worms will gnaw’ or ‘the lines [of poetry] will gnaw’.

This is especially pertinent when you consider two other poems in this book. ‘Je te donne ces vers’ appears to express Baudelaire’s outwardly unshakeable faith in the immortality of his poetry. I love the rhythmic pulse of ‘I Give You These Verses’ – Constant’s visual ‘answer’ to this poem. Even more apposite is the first ‘Spleen.’ In another paradox, having yearned for his poetry to be remembered by distant generations, here Baudelaire is critiquing the cult of memory. His recollections pile up like corpses. If the poet is a cemetery, then his poems are like worms gnawing away at the bodies – an echo of that harrowing notion from ‘Posthumous Remorse’ (and this time incorporating both senses of the devouring agent). These thoughts may trouble the reader as vehemently as they torment Baudelaire himself.

But in the end, the excess baggage of memories causes him an overwhelming sense of ennui, like snowfall on ‘boiteuses journées’ (‘limping days’) – an idea magnificently captured in Constant’s ‘Snowy Years’). Memories have congealed into inanimate stone objects, like an ‘old sphinx’ singing in the setting sun. This is a glorious image and Constant’s exquisitely impressionistic ‘Rays of a Setting Sun’ could almost have been painted by Baudelaire’s friend, Manet.

Constant’s dark palette in ‘My Heart is a Palace’ is a totally appropriate representation of the spirit of ‘Causerie’ (‘Conversation’) which, like ‘Une charogne,’ stands in stark contrast to the optimism and emotional effusiveness of the Romantics. Baudelaire’s unflinching portrayal of human suffering and the darker aspects of love once again reflects the disillusionment and cynicism which characterised the mid-19th century.

‘L’horloge’ (The Clock’) is remarkable, not for its theme (the fugitive nature of time) but for the poet’s startling treatment. Far from God being a clockmaker, Baudelaire reverses the roles: the creature takes the place of the creator and the world is prey to an absurd, sinister, menacing mechanism. Time is ‘un joueur avide / qui gagne sans tricher’ (‘a greedy player / who wins without cheating’). It is a tangible reality. As Ward Jouve astutely notes, it even leaps over a line to grab the reader in the next one, like a dog yapping at our heels:

Trois mille six cent fois par heure la Seconde Chuchote: ‘Souviens-toi!’

Three thousand six hundred times an hour, The Second Whispers: Remember!

The threat from this ‘greedy player’ is potently captured in Constant’s accompanying painting, as is the beauty that the poet is aware he is leaving behind at his own death. ‘Le crépuscule du soir (‘Twilight’) depicts the evening as both grim and joyous. Constant’s ‘Meditate, o My Soul’ (the title is taken from the poem’s penultimate stanza) subtly reflects this dual potentiality: the serene and the sordid. In another remarkable poem about the night – or rather cold, winter nights – ‘Brumes et pluies’ (‘Mist and Rain’), Baudelaire this time feels an untainted love for the ‘pâles ténèbres’ (pale shadows), an oxymoron which Constant encapsulates in his very fine ‘A Moonless Night’.

ELEVATION Oil on card 20x20cm Herve Constant

In a lovely third poem about nightfall, the sonnet ‘La fin de la journée’ (The End of the Day), Baudelaire is even more effusive: night voluptuously silences the ‘impudent, shrill life’ of daytime. Constant traces the dying of the day in ‘Under a Pallid Light.’ Here is yet another artwork with the seductive rhythm that characterises this entire, profoundly captivating book.