Roger Pearson - The Beauty of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver

Lhomme y passe travers des forts de symboles

Qui lobservent avec des regards familiers.

(Correspondances, ll. 34)

pour tre juste, cest--dire pour avoir sa raison dtre, la critique doit tre partiale, passionne, politique, cest--dire faite un point de vue exclusif, mais au point de vue qui ouvre le plus dhorizons.

(Salon de 1846, ii. 418)

Puissent les vrais chercheurs nous donner [] cette joie singulire de clbrer lavnement du neuf! (ii. 407). As we mark the bicentenary of Baudelaires birth in 1821, the urgent plea of this final sentence from the Salon de 1845 assumes fresh resonance. Is there really anything more, anything new, to be said about the lifes work of perhaps Frances greatest lyric poet? I believe so.

This account of Baudelaires writings started out as a chapter in my still-envisaged volume on Alternative Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Nineteenth-Century France but soon outgrew its intended context. I now present it as a comprehensive stand-alone study: of Baudelaires critical writings, of his verse poetry in Les Fleurs du Mal, and of his prose poetry in Le Spleen de Paris. As the subtitle indicates, my principal emphasis derives from an ambition to situate Baudelaires work within an ongoing tradition of poetic lawgiving in France that did not end with those Romantic magi, Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny, but continues, in my view, to this day. I trust nevertheless that this emphasis has not led to a tendentious or narrowly focused study but rather to a new and potentially reinvigorating perspective on a body of writing that is itself familiar, perhaps only too familiar, to anyone with an interest in poetry.

In my earlier book, Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France I focused on the work of Chateaubriand, Stal, Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny. Mindful of Paul Bnichous magisterial investigations of French Romanticism and of the ways in which he employs the model of a lay priest to shape his account of various nineteenth-century French poets and prose writers, I emphasized instead the role of the poet as lawgiver. Unlike legislator the term lawgiver contains a fruitful ambiguity that seems to me to shed valuable light on the nature of poetic expression. The word legislator etymologically denotes someone who bears or carries the law, who brings it to others, and so is analogous with lawgiver in implying that the laws already exist and have simply to be conveyed, brought as a gift like Tables or Tablets from the top of a mountain. Yet perhaps the more common understanding is of a lawgiver who gives, i.e. makes or promulgates, a law or code of laws; a legislator (Oxford English Dictionary). In the present book, as previously in Unacknowledged Legislators, I see the term lawgiver as highlighting a fundamental tension in poetic writing between passive transmission and active creation. Does the poet resemble Moses, receiving the Laws from God and handing them down to humankind? Or does the poet more closely resemble Orpheus, actively employing the power of poetryof harmonyto bring order where there was originally chaos? Or perhaps both at once? As Wordsworth writes in Book Second of The Prelude, the first Poetic spirit of our human life [c]reates, creator and receiver both, | Working but in alliance with the works | Which it beholds (ll. 2735). For Baudelaire this coexistence of passivity and creativity is absolutely central and informs his recurrent theoretical statements about poets and artists as what I shall call double agents: on the one hand, human beings who are necessarily subject to the laws of human nature, and, on the other, human beings who observe and analyse this state of subjection and, through willed effort, create imagined and alternative legislations.

While French poets and prose writers of the Romantic period have more usually been associated with the Mosaic model, and are indeed so associated by Bnichou, I tried to show how they themselves were conscious of this tension between receipt and invention and how they were each in their own various ways no less Orphic than Mosaic in their understanding of the nature of poetic creation. I presented my five chosen authors as unacknowledged legislators of the World, as Shelley puts it at the end of his Defence of Poetry (1821), because each of them did indeed write and live their lives as poets and prose writers who expected to be able to influence the course of public life through their writing and instead found themselves variously outlawed, exiled, self-exiled, and/or increasingly sidelined by the official legislators of their time, from the earliest days of the Revolution and then under the many and various political regimes that came and went in France throughout the nineteenth century. Long before Verlaine wrote his celebrated articles on les potes mauditsbut also very long after such other famous exiles as Ovid, Dante, Tasso, and Camonsthese five authors knew the cost of resistance.