ISO
STEPHEN .
SPENDER
icanized us to such a degree, Progress will have so atrophied the
spiritual side of our natures, that nothing among
all
the sanguinary
dreams, anti-natural and sacrilegious, of the Utopians,
will
compare
with the result. I appeal to every thinking man to show me what
remains of life.... The time will come when humanity, like an
avenging ogre, will snatch the last morsel from those. who believe
themselves to be the legitimate heirs of revolution.
Baudelaire goes on to predict that the republics
will
fall because they
are not directed by "holy men," or by "certain aristocrats." How–
ever, the real ruin will result from "the degradation of the human
heart." There
will
be a "pitiless wisdom which condemns everything
except money," including even the most criminal pleasures of the
flesh.
Here Baudelaire is mainly concerned of course with attacking
his old enemy the bourgeois. Nevertheless "Americanization" . epi–
tomizes for him the idea of a world from which aristocratic and
sacramental ideals have been subtracted.
One can agree that a bourgeois, or, for that matter, a socialist
future, with no
aims
or ideals except those of technological advance–
ment, would
be
a vicious circle of suppliers and consumers, centralized
government and people looked on as "social units." The symbol for
such a world would be a glittering serpent with its tail trapped in
its Midas mouth which changed even sinful
flesh
to gold.
In Baudelaire's view the things with which the nineteenth-cen–
tury bourgeois surrounded himself superseded religious and (to use a
Forsterian phrase) "invisible" values. The only experience left was
of boredom - "ennui."
Baudelaire's view of the Americanized future was, of course,
melodramatic. He anticipated a world so far fallen from grace that
it was below dis-grace also: dis-grace implying a spiritual awareness
of the loss of grace. In such a world it would be as nearly impossible
to
be
damned as to
be
saved. For to attain damnation would show
a certain degree of moral consciousness. This reified, thingified, world
would die of spiritual inanition. Or, rather, the remnants of human–
ity
(poetes maudits,
students, etc.) would
rise
up and tear it to pieces.
The best testimonies that this feeling of aggression against the
community often changed to aggression against themselves, are the
suicides of several American poets.
