BAUDELAIRE AND THE ABYSS
415
the elements composing
h~s
internal unity.
It
is at this point
that Eliot goes astray: nothing contingent has entered Baude–
laire's poetry; it is in his very deepest being, precisely insofar
as changed by eternity, that Baudelaire is truly
ex-centric;
it is
as essence that he is a
bungler;
he is never at his center, or at
least his center is not in the middle, at an equal distance from
any point on the circle. Thus to estimate the distance separat–
ing him from Dante one must resort to another criterion than
the amount of perishable matter in their respective works; if
only the center is real (and this is what Eliot thinks), then
the
very criterion
of the poetry of Baudelaire is perishable, the
very idea of a poetry without a center. But Eliot does not dare
go that far; even when it is a question of Shakespeare.he dodges
the issue and ascribes the poet's "anarchy" to the philosophy of
his time, to Montaigne, Seneca-in short to perishable elements
which escaped control; Eliot is afraid to admit that there can be
a great poetry which does not move within the Eternal, which is
not centered on the Same; he is afraid to recognize that the
Eternal can also be found in the
Other,
and that a Shakespeare
or a Baudelaire, can, without being a bungler, be something
besides "an aptitude of the spiritual universe to see and develop
itself through what had once been himself", that such poets can
be purely and simply the Shakespeare and Baudelaire we know,
with their "wretched selves" intact.
It is true that at first sight Baudelaire's continual running
after his center and constant complaint that he has lost it ("how,
with so clear and distinct an
ide~
of duty, does it come that I
always do the opposite?"; his remarks about his "hateful rever·
ie2", etc., the assertions of his scorn for the motion which dis–
places lines), would seem to justify Eliot's idea that
this
is his
aesthetic. The criminal is rarely on a level with his crime, says
Nietzsche, and Baudelaire's aesthetic is seldom on a level with
his poetry; he arrived at his real aesthetic only at the end of his
life when he dismissed Joy from poetry and brought in Wretch–
edness, disproportion, deformity. But until to-day no one has
wanted to take this aesthetic into account, people have always
clung to the first, which, it is true, Baudelaire professed with
