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OR the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden times when they gossiped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption, of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways, Byron's escapades and Shelley's atheism Alas! into what faded limbo have they vanished. Poe, too; Poe whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, to New York! These familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerry-built spooks. We know Poe to have been a man suf

fering at the time of his death from a cerebral lesion, a man who drank at intervals and but little. Dr. Guerrier of Paris exploded a darling superstition about De Quincey's enormous opium eating. He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so long-De Quincey was nearly seventy-five at his death-could have worked so hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore, the English essayist's description of the drug's effects is nounced inexact. He was seldom sleepy-a sure sign, asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was not a confirmed victim to the drug habit. In old age he was sprightly, and his powers of labor were prolonged until past threescore and ten. His imagination needed no opium to produce the famous Confessions.

Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the première of Ernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And Rousseau has been whitewashed! So they are disappearing, those literary legends, until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old-fashioned, disreputable men of genius! But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This French poet-whose name should be unforgotten by Poe's American admirers-himself has suffered more from the friendly malignant biographer and Parisian chroniclers of the small beer of literature than did Poe. Who shall keep the curs out of the cemetery, asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold on Poe. In a few years his own cemetery was invaded and the world was put in possession of the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies: that grim, despairing image of a Diabolic, libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime Du Camp was much to blame for the promulgation of these tales-witness his "Souvenirs Littéraires." But it may be confessed that some of the Baudelaire legend was created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of literature it is difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of selfstultification. Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine who imitated him, drew for the astonishment or disedification of the world like unflattering portraits. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times from acute cortical irritation. Notwithstanding his desperate effort to realize Poe's idea of "Mon cœur mis à nu," he only proved Poe correct who had said that no man can bare his heart quite naked; there will be always something held back, something false too ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul of man and the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was no more exception to this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, or Huysmans; though he was franker than any of them, as we may see in the recently printed diary, "Mon cœur mis à nu" (Posthumous Works, Societé Mercure de France); and in the Journal, Fusées, Letters, and other fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians.

To smash many legends Eugene Cré-
VOL. XLV.-27

pet's biographical study, first printed in 1887, has been republished with new notes by his son, Jacques Crépet. This is an exceedingly valuable contribution to Baudelaire lore; a dispassionate life, however, has yet to be written, a noble task for some young poet who will disentangle the conflicting lies originated by Baudelaire-that tragic comedian-from the truth and thus save him from himself. The new Crépet volume is really but a series of notes; there are some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished men of his day, supplementing the rather disappointing volume of "Lettres, 1841-1866," published in 1908. There are also documents in the legal prosecution of Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau, Léon Cladel, Camille Lemonnier, and others.

In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves at the French Ambassador's, Constantinople. The two friends had taken that trip in the Orient which later bore fruit in "Salammbô." General Aupick, representative of the French Government, received the young men cordially; they were presented to his wife, Madame Aupick. She was the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired of Du Camp, rather anxiously: "My son has talent, has he not?" Unhappy because her second marriage, a brilliant one, had set her son against her, the poor woman welcomed from such a source as Du Camp confirmation of her eccentric boy's gifts. Du Camp tells the much-discussed story of a quarrel between the youthful Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table. There were guests present. After some words Charles bounded at the general's throat and sought to strangle him. He was promptly boxed on the ears and succumbed to a nervous spasm. A delightful anecdote, one that fills with joy psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius and its degeneration. Charles was given some money and put on board of a ship sailing to the East Indies. He became a cattle dealer in the British army, and returned to France years afterward with a Venus noire, to whom he addressed extravagant poems! All this according to Du Camp. Here is another tale, a comical one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris, and his hair was violently green. Du Camp said nothing. Angered-by this indifference,

Baudelaire asked: "You find nothing abnormal about me?" "No," was the answer. "But my hair—it is green!" "That is nothing singular, mon cher Baudelaire; every one has more or less green hair in Paris." Disappointed in not creating a sensation, Baudelaire went to a café, gulped down two large bottles of Burgundy, and asked the waiter to remove the water, as water was a disagreeable sight; then he went away in a rage. It is a pity to doubt this green hair legend; presumably a man of genius will not be able to enjoy an epileptic fit in peace-as does a banker or an outcast. We are told that St. Paul, Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostievsky were epileptoids; yet we do not encounter men of this rare kind among the inmates of asylums. Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.

The joke of the green hair has been disposed of by Crépet. Baudelaire's hair thinned after an illness, he had his head shaved and painted with salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape baldness. At the time when he had embarked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not seventeen, but twenty years of age. Du Camp said he was seventeen when he attacked General Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place at Lyons, because the Aupick family had left that city six years before the date given by Du Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand francs for his expenses, instead of twenty-Du Camp's version-and he was not a beefdrover in the British army for a reason-he never reached India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and after a short stay was seized by homesickness and returned to France, being absent about ten months, But, like Flaubert, on his return home Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East; out there he had yearned for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him with a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious." Is it necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious in Paris for his love of cats, and dedicating poems to cats, would never have perpetrated such revolting cruelty?

Another misconception, a critical one, is the case of Poe and Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first became infatuated with Poe's writings in 1846 or 1847-he gives these two dates, though several stories of Poe had been translated into French as early as 1841 or 1842; "L'Orang-Outang” was the first, which we know as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue.' Madame Meunier also translated several of the Poe stories for the reviews. Baudelaire's labors as a translator lasted over ten years. That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace of literary gossip. But that Poe had overwhelming influence in the formation of his poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an acute critic as the late Edmund Clarence Stedman writing, "Poe's chief influence upon Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry." It is precisely the reverse. Poe's influence affected Baudelaire's prose, notably in the disjointed confessions, "Mon cœur mis à nu," which recall the American writer's "Marginalia." The bulk of the poetry in "Les Fleurs du Mal" was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though not published in book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of the poems saw the light in the "Revue des deux Mondes," while many of them had been put forth a decade or fifteen years before as fugitive verse in various magazines. Stedman was not the first to make this mistake. In Bayard Taylor's "The Echo Club" we read on page 24 this criticism: "There was a congenital twist about Poe. . . . Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have been trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but his muse is the natural Pythia, inheriting her convulsions, while they eat all sorts of insane roots to produce theirs." This must have been written about 1872, and after reading it one would fancy Poe and Baudelaire were rhapsodic wrigglers on the poetic tripod; whereas their poetry is too often reserved and glacial. Baudelaire, like Poe, sometimes "Built his nests with the birds of night," and that was enough to condemn the work of both men by critics of the didactic school.

Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American man-of-letters (?) was in Paris, he secured an introduction and called. Eagerly inquiring after Poe he learned that he was not considered a genteel person in

anecdote; many such were foisted upon him. For example, his exclamations at cafés or in public places, such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing to the palate!" or, "The night I killed my father!" Naturally people stared and Baudelaire was happy-he had startled the bourgeois. The cannibalistic idea he must have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet, for this French poet knew English literature.

Gautier, in the masterly preface to the definitive edition of "Les Fleurs du Mal" compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne's in which there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, "A divine poet." How childish, yet how touching is his resolution-he wrote in his diary of prayer's dynamic force-when he was penniless, in debt, threatened with imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: "To make every morning my prayer to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe as interces(Evidently, Maurice Barrès encountered here his idea of "Intercessors.") Baudelaire loved his father as much as Stendhal hated his. To his mother he became reconciled after the death of General Aupick in 1857. He felt, in 1862, that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for he wrote: "I have culti vated my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day imbecility's wing fanned me as it passed." The sense of the vertiginous gulf was abiding with him; read his poem entitled "Pascal avait son gouffre."

sors."

corroding dreams, a spray of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam of blue sky, despairing hearts, and music and the abomination of desolation for ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery of the seven sorrows. He loved the clouds. . . . les nuages . . lá bas. . . . It was lá bas with him even in the tortures of his wretched love-life. Corruption and death were ever floating in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the skeleton concealed in us. Félicien Rops has best interpreted Baudelaire: The etcher and poet were closely-knit spirits. Rodin, too, is a Baudelarian. If there could be such an anomaly as a native wood-note evil, it would be the lyric voice of this poet. His sensibility was morbid, though he could be frigid in the face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man for whom the visible word existed; Gautier was pagan, Baudelaire a strayed spirit from mediæval days. The spirit ruled, and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw God." A Manichean in his worship of evil, he nevertheless abased his soul. "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force and courage to contemplate my heart and my body without disgust," he prays. But as some one said to Rochefoucauld: "Where you end, Christianity begins."

Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma, which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh light and glowworm inhabited. Like Wagner, he painted in his sultry music the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted, too, the great nocturnal silences of the soul.