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much artful glibness, but which he betrayed at every step
in his poetry. And it must be admitted that in forbidding him·
self to stand level with his crime Baudelaire is quasi-heroic; no
one professed remorse, no one opposed
artifice
to reality, to the
self, better than he, and since inspiration seemed to act only
on his head, and since it
had
to come when he
desired,
he stimu–
lated it by means of drugs; he whipped his
natural
laziness
into work with stimulants; to chaos, to nightmare, he opposed
order, peace, will; against monotony he employed surprise; to
maintain the universe at its center he appealed to the Flogger,
the Hangman. And when unable to formulate a reasonable
profession of faith by his own efforts, he was ready to plagiar·
ize, if necessary, the credo of the Poet's Poetic Principle. Never
before have such audacity, such aggressiveness been used to
assert-what? the most banal notion of the most banal aesthetic:
exactly what art has always taught us, what philosophy has
always taught. To life, to the wretched self, the poet and the
philosopher have always opposed a universe of ideas, essences
and forms-which they ended up, very simply, by taking for
real life, and indeed for Eternity, while all the Mallarmes,
Baudelaires and Shakespeares did their utmost to thin them–
selves out into vaporous webs, into matterless ghosts. But while
Mallarme succeeded, neither Shakespeare nor Baudelaire did: is
this really a misfortune? and must we conceal their adventure,
call them "bunglers" in order not to offend that Eternal in
which Mallarame moved? We have always believed that the
poet had only to beat his wings to leave the earth and attain the
·reality
of the Ideas-that his was his
mission.
Is it so catas–
trophic to learn that this is not the case at all, that we know
nothing about the poet's "mission", that it may very well be
there are several missions, indeed, one for each, and that to
have or not to have a "center", to move or not to move within
the Eternal, are only "external" criteria, which have nothing to
do with poetry, seeing that poetry is free to take the direction
it pleases without ceasing to be poetry, and great poetry at
that? We like the poets who escape from reality-and why
shouldn't we? But this does not entitle us to claim that those
