BAUDELAIRE AND THE ABYSS
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sophy which demands that "our wretched ego" be driven out of
art? The wretched ego had indeed been ignominiously dis–
missed: "I am impersonal now, no longer the Stephane you have
known, but an aptitude of the spiritual universe to see and de–
velop itself through what was once myself."
It would be impossible to do better in this genre! Mal–
larme is no longer a man like others, "hom marked for sin",
he no longer runs the risk of being damned, he has erased in
himself the very possibility of the original sin which Baudelaire
dragged like a millstone around his neck-then why do we
speak of his case as tragic? What more does a man need than
to move in the Eternal? But cast a glance at Mallarme's spirit–
ual universe: it is not strong passions that dwell there, not even
the absence of passions; boredoil?- in this world is not long,
intense and violent, as in Baudelaire's; the boredom here is
gloomy and worn-out, that of a house not even haunted, without
a ghost, without midnight, where emptiness sighs for a breeze, a
log on the fire, a rustle of the curtains. There is never a throw
of the dice in this world, not a cry, a surprise, a stress; never
an Event. The lord of this manor has become a shadow; a
happy one? that is what people say; but it is not what the poems
say; an unhappy one? that neither. Nothing human can enter
here, the Srephane we :nave known has beGome tenuous, he has
become eternal-like the dust on his books and the cobwebs in
the comers. Nothing human-that was just what had been
sought; but what ray of the "spiritual universe", which was
supposed to replace what had been his "self", can be found here?
Yes, to be sure
Tel qu'en lui-meme enfin l'eternite le change'
tells us again, in a magnificent line, that Mallarme is moving
within 'the Eternal. One might say-if lines of poetry could
bring back life, that we have here, returned from among the
dead, the great line in which Parmenides defined the One:
Meme, dans le meme demeurant, en soi-meme il repose!
•
This is /the land of Identity, the great kingdom of Defini–
tion; no spring in this land dares hurst forth lest it disturb the
•
Such as into himself at last eternity has changed him
•
Same, in the same abiding,
it
rests in itself.
