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that cursory gesture we have all come to expect in recent criticism–
proves self-defeating. The critic, instead of undoing the knot or being
undone by it, simply abjures his function and steps into the next room
where things are easier, the walls bright with anecdote. One wave of
the hand and the Idol disappears: "And we begin to suspect that the
Idol is a defence-mechanism against the Bitch." Another, and the Abso–
lute thins out into mist: "In his poetry he is constantly in search of
something that he describes as the 'Ideal' or the 'Absolute,' but it is
evident that he does not believe in its existence." One turns away and
thinks of Charles Du Bos' theological-not religious-analysis where
tenns had sharp edges; where true connections were made among the
"extreme" terms of Baudelaire's discourse; where tenns were seen as
truly
designating,
standing for fixed properties of the mind and reaching
outward, beyond themselves, not ruinously, suicidally downward. Mr.
Turnell has been the victim of specious concreteness, unaware it seems
of the fact that psychological explanation must exercise great care in
choosing its objects; that there are objects which resist being "fixed"
in this fashion-having a nature that is general but not at all vaporous,
vague-and so must be condensed, if we wish to condense them, in
tenns germane to their proper existence. "Reduction" destroys them
utterly; and one hopes that it was not
this
the critic intended, that he
lacked full cognizance of the damage his method entailed.
Mr. Turnell's studies of Laforgue and Corbiere-preparatory, in a
sense, to this one-were incisive; but those were writers who, while they
pose problems, are easy to deal with. They give themselves as they are,
that is to say, as the figures into whom they have stylized themselves,
without serious equivocation. The psychologist may find some difficulty
in equating the man with the
persona;
for the literary critic there is no
embarrassment here. Baudelaire's case is different. The critic, no less
than the analyst, finds cause for disturbance. These poems mask as much
as they reveal and precisely where they seem to reveal most. Baudelaire
has pushed non-conformism to its logical extreme: he even refuses to
conform to the image he himself has set up, with consummate plaus–
ibility, in the mind of his reader. Peter Quennell writes on the first page
of his study: "How such a poet spent his days, what kind of a man he
was, what measure of personal success crowned his life, are questions
seldom asked more fruitlessly than when we apply them to the remains
of Charles Baudelaire. The records he left behind him are voluminous,
detailed, communicative, and yet an air of singular reticence guards his
name." A good remark, this,
if
not especially startling. But once we make
