418
PARTISAN RE'JIIEW
its terrors talk, there cannot be,
and
ought not to be,
art. Even
if life exists (and the wretched self),
it must remain powerless
to
attain the concept,
it must not be able to bite at the Idea, not
even at the "sensuous reflection of the. Idea", as Hegel defined
art. "This is in agreement with my principles", says Leibniz,
"for
naturally
nothing enters our minds from the outside and
we have ·a bad habit of thinking that our soul admits certain
messengers as though it had doors and windows." So long
as the "wretched self" moves within the Eternal, so long as it is
a sensuous reflection of the Idea, it has neither doors nor win·
dows; the abyss does not exist; nothing can enter from the
outside. But the moment it
does
indeed enter with its train of
perishable elements, we are in a mess: art must submit or resign.
I
hop~
that after this brief analysis the reader will under–
stand without difficulty why in Baudelaire the cult of art as
Idea takes on
unique
proportions and density, why this cult so
little resembles what has been called art for art's sake, and
tiDally, why there is in this poet such a deep human resonance,
such a bitter metaphysical savor. For Baudelaire, the cult of
art for art's sake is not an escape, a facile flight, a completed
purification of his wretched self (this is the meaning of cathar–
sis), it is a terrible struggle undertaken without hope, without
illusions, hence a desperate struggle, against the one thing he
loathes and holds as
real-the
abyss! Upon the success or fail–
ure of this struggle depends not only Baudelaire's idea of art
but also his idea of life and God. The triumph of the abyss,
he thinks, would ruin not only his art, but also his life, exposed
· eternally as it would be to terrors which no veil could conceal
any longer. But these things cannot be easily said: one is
reluctant to tell them; they do not sound as well as "I am now
impersonal ... an aptitude of the spiritual universe ... I am
moving in the Eternal"; it is easier to be on a level with one's
virtue than on a level with one's crime; and one would never
confess this were it not that there is a law-an enigmatic law,
to be sure-which does not permit any secret to remain buried.
And Baudelaire reveals his own secret, without even being
aware of the fact, in a sort of apology in code, in a code which
he himself must have found rather hard to decipher.
