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PARRTISAN REVIEW
dragged after him, within him? What dike could he oppose to
solid reality, which would be as solid as reality yet not of it?
Art is likelier than anything, he wrote, to veil the terrors of
the Abyss. From this it is clear that Baudelaire had greater
need
for art
than
Mallarme. For this reason he tried to raise
barriers less noble, less subtle than Mallarme's, but firmer and
more efficacious; and to contain the furious surges of the world
outside, he drew them even inside his walls and lodged them
there, tricking the pressures by actually borrowing their uneven–
ness and instability and living in a perpetual see-saw-like a
light-house keeper.
This explains T. S. Eliot's idea that Baudelaire's poetry
contains much more
perishable
matter than that of great poets
like Shakespeare and Dante; but there
~s
no need to address
oneself to the greatest: the fact is there is less perishable matter
in Mallarme's poetry than in Dante's. Yet it is by comparison
with Dante that Eliot judges Baudelaire a
bungler.u
To be sure
he thereby intends to point to what can be called Baudelaire·s
eccentricity;
but shall I dwell on this? The biographers have
stressed it sufficiently! his dandyism, Byronism, satanism have
for a long time been flaunted for public curiosity; it would
appear that he painted not only his hair but even his poems
green; and his angers, his personal spites reached metaphysical
proportions. And yet how difficult it is to reduce these aspects
of him to an
attitude,
a
fashion,
borrowed and submitted to!
Everything that touches Baudelaire, even what is least his own,
is transformed by the contact and acquires the thickness of a
profound personal event; he is the seat of a poetic and human
experience so singular that everything combines to isolate him
spiritually and morally, and to isolate him in such a way that
it is impossible to distinguish that which is perishable among
"The reference is to T. S. Eliot's essay on Baudelaire (Collected Essays,
p, 335). I am quoting the passages from which M. Fondane selects the words
"perishable" and "bungler."
"...
compare him with Dante and Shakespeare, for what such a comparison
is worth, and he
is
found not only a much smaller poet, but one
in
whose work
much more that is verishable has entered."
"But in the adjustment of the nafltral to the spiritual, of the bestial to the
human and the human to the supernatural, Baudelaire
is
a bungler compared to
Dante; the best that can be said, and that
is
a very great deal, is that what
he
knew
he
found out for hirnself."-Tr.
