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ten?" she asked, with a little laugh. She was ashamed at feeling so happy with that letter in her hand.

"I've every reason to think so." He pulled some letters from his pocket and showed her the directions-George Courtfield, Esqre. "I've some reason to believe that that's my name," he said. "And look-it's rather rough to have to prove one's identity, isn't it?" He opened a pocketbook and showed her a card. "It's a much nicer name than Wootten," she said.

"I wish you'd make it yours."

She was quite startled. "What do you mean?" she asked. The train was plodding on toward Visp; the empty carriage with the mountains on either side looking in on them made the situation a romance.

"What I mean is this," he said looking down at her. "That I think you're the sweetest thing in womankind I ever came across. I don't know anything about you except what you've told me; but yet I know everything, and above all I know this-that I love you. You caught me in the moment you looked back at Glion. Do you remember?"

"Oh-"

"You don't know anything about me, you evidently didn't even know my name, and I don't know yours yet. I may be a ruffian or a scoundrel

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"I'm certain you're not." "Or a loafer-or a cheesemonger"You said you were in a Government office and wrote philosophy-" She was making time.

"And I haven't many of this world's goods-"

"I don't care a bit about money." "-But if you could care about me, I should be the happiest man alive, for I love you-if we have only met two or three times I have thought of you ever since that first day-and of nothing else." "Oh, but

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I

By James Huneker

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 pronounced 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 CréVOL. 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

America. Baudelaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet. Charming literary person. But the American, whoever he was, represented public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated by the desire to make him an angel. It is to be doubted whether without his barren environment and hard fortunes we should have had Poe at all. He had to dig down deeper into the pit of his personality to reach the central core of his music. But every ardent young soul entering "literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe was a man, and he is now a classic. He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire. In both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair loved to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were implacable pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, and had to face unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of an exotic beauty. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all he was obsessed by sex. Woman, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems. Poe was almost sexless. His aerial creatures do not foot the dusty highways of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me," could never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes Damnées":

"Descendez, decendez, lamentables victimes."

Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast sinister mezzotints:

"J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal

Un être, qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,
Terrasser l'énorme Satan;

Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l'extase,

"Est un théâtre où l'on attend

ficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and affection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror." Poe is without passion, except the passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls "The October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire which shakes your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. That Baudelaire said, "Evil be thou my good," is doubtless true. He proved all things and found them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childishly to us-in his heart he was a believer. His was "an infinite reverse aspiration," and mixed up with his Byronic pose was a disgust for vice, for life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; SainteBeuve called him the Kamchatka of Romanticism; its remotest hypoborean peak. Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is alive, and is read. His glistening phosphorescent trail is over French poetry and he is the begetter of a school. Verlaine, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Verhaeren, and many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be the reverse of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong with the world."

When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they all came from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of Rousseau-"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But there is more of Byron and Petrus Borela forgotten mad poet-in Baudelaire, though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau reactionary, sported the workingman's blouse, shaved his head, shouldered a musket, went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling the proletarian "Brother!" (Oh, Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts recorded in their diary, looked like a maniacal Saint

Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de Just. How seriously we may take this gaze."

Professor Saintsbury thus sums up the matter of Poe and Baudelaire: "Both authors-Poe and De Quincey-fell short of Baudelaire himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have a super

swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet's at the time of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go shoot General Aupick!" It was his step-father that he thought of, not the eternal principles of Liberty. This may be a false

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