BAUDELAIRE AND THE ABYSS
417
who do not escape, and precisely to the extent to which they do
not escape, are "bunglers" who have consented to the perishable,
as
if
we knew what poetry does or does not need, what it is and
what it is not.
It so happens that Baudelaire's great novelty-the novelty
of his poetry-lies in his very awareness that
escape
is
unreal;
and in his understanding of the artificial in all its
artiftciality.
Unlike his critics he is not fooled by his most subtle stratagems;
he knows that the
ways
he
proposes to
us-and imposes on us–
lead him, at least,
nowhere.
And is not this the legacy he
bequeathed Rimbaud, the Rimbaud whose leit-motif after each
attempt at escape is the dejected awakening to failure:
Ce n'est rien;
j'
y suit, j'y suis toujours!
u
On ne part pas!
,.
Or again: "I will get used to it. It will be the French life, the
path of honor!"
Art, Baudelaire knew, he was the first to know it, is only
faking,
the best means we have, the instrument best suited for
casting a veil over the terrors of the abyss. Neither Kant,
Hegel nor Schopenhauer told us that. Very likely all three of
them would have refused to accept a proposition which, without
beating about the bush, proclaimed the
reality of the abyss.
But
had they been forced to admit this {and no one has ever coerced
philosophers into such an admission), they would at least have
held that the veil, once cast over the abyss, was really efficacious,
that the terrors were really dispelled, that the abyss no longer
had anything to say. It would never have occurred to them that
one should perhaps listen to the
objections
of the abyss, if in–
deed it had any, they could never have conceived that the abyss
might be offended by a definition forever excluding it from the
workings of art. What if the abyss did have something to say,
something important, what if art were precisely its chosen lan–
guage? But if this idea had occurred to them, all of them in
complete agreement (and Baudelaire would doubtless have been
of their opinion), would have decided that when the abyss and
12
It
is
nothin8; I am here, I am still hue!
'"
One never le.ves!
