1869.2查尔斯-波德莱尔，恶毒的诗人

shiyi18

Charles Baudelaire, Poet of the Malign
By Eugene Benson
FEBRUARY 1869 ISSUE
SHARE
DURING the summer of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, while no mean part of the world was looking and wondering amid the noise of crowds at the remarkable works of invention and art, or thinking of the greatness of our industrial age, a few Frenchmen and strangers were for the moment saddened by the death of a French poet, — a poet whose first book had been suppressed, whose very name was an offence to a great many men, but whose writings were uncared for by the general public of Paris. That poet was Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du Mal, Critique sur Théophile Gautier, Les Paradis Artificiels, and translations of the works of Edgar A. Poe.

Perhaps only to certain English and American admirers of Swinburne is his name known outside of France. They may recollect reading of him in connection with ideas that belong to the very revolt and pride of human nature.


Baudelaire is the living spring, bitter and beautiful, of which Swinburne is the foaming and impetuous English issue. To that strong and acrid source we must go to discover what flaunting and poisonous flowers, what purple and bloody blossoms, grow under the broad heaven of literature : they have their hour for blossoming.

Magazine Cover image
View This Story as a PDF
See this story as it appeared in the pages of The Atlantic magazine.

Open
Charles Baudelaire’s genius, however, does not breathe contagion to infect our literature. It cannot do that, because sanity and health are the general law of life.

Baudelaire is as unique and interesting as Hamlet. He is that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet,—a poet in the midst of things that have disordered his spirit, — a poet excessively developed in his taste by art and beauty, having a remarkable penchant for certain strange ideas, very responsive to the ideal, very greedy of sensation. Most people will say that he prostituted himself to fatal impressions and was intoxicated with pride.

A poet, a genuine poet, is always a strange, a fascinating being ; often he is frail and delicate, agitated by the spectacle of nature and the tragedy of life, before which, without him, men are mute and patient like oxen. Only the prophets are strong, loud, and majestic. The poets are like lost or fallen angels in mortal bodies, seeking in sensation to find God, roaming in vast and vague spaces to lose the consciousness of their bondage. Such a poet was Shelley, such a poet was Poe, such a poet was Charles Baudelaire. His was a sad, a terrible, and accusing spirit, expressing the disorder of his soul, laughing his ironical laugh in the midst of his pleasures, seeing awful visions between the changes of the moon.


The English and American public thinking of Wordsworth, and the pure and lofty expression of his thoughtful joy in nature, later falling down to the jingle of Jean Ingelow, in whose verses pleasant things are pleasantly said, or better, thinking of Bryant and his impersonal love of nature, and of Whittier with his home sentiment, seem to have lost the sense that poetry may be the expression of the terrors and disorders of the soul; they have no intimation of the less self-possessed spirit which broods over the ruins of life, and dreams of the abyss that lies beyond the visible. The abyss in which formless and colossal things scream and float was revealed by Victor Hugo ; the despair of hopeless loss was uttered by Poe: the laugh, the homelessness, the evil that may be found in common and beautiful things, remained for Baudelaire.

RECOMMENDED READING
Holly Becker today (left) and in her 20s (right), when she had cancer
A Woman’s AncestryDNA Test Revealed a Medical Secret
SARAH ZHANG
illustration
A New Theory of Western Civilization
JUDITH SHULEVITZ

The Tax Experiment That Failed
EMILY BUDER
His was a new voice, a new and arresting word, thrown into the polite Parisian world. He was familiar with all the seductions of life ; he knew the changes that have come upon the world ; but he felt and looked upon all experience with the old spirit of the strong, unregenerated man who seeks to grasp the fleeting good of sensation, and blasphemes in the midst of pleasures. He expresses the barrenness of sensation, without having liberated himself from its seductions.

Charles Baudelaire was born in India. It may be supposed that he learned the English language during his childhood ; to his long familiarity with it France is indebted for his translations of the works of Edgar A. Poe, whose genius inspired him with a sustained and profound admiration. Théophile Gautier says that “he naturalized in France the mind and imagination of Poe, so learnedly strange that, beside him. Hoffman is not more than the Paul de Kock of the fantastic...... Thanks to Baudelaire,” he continues, “we have a literary savor totally unknown, and the name of Baudelaire must in some sort be inseparable from that of the American author.”

The reader of Baudelaire’s poems is first struck with the force of the sentiment, the vigor of the thought, the strength of the feeling, that animates them. They are the poems of a virile being. They have not one effeminate note. In this particular they have the same masculine and refreshingly frank character that we find in the less musical utterances of Walt Whitman. The resemblance is entirely due to the uniformity of the genuine, virile, poetic mind. Whenever he speaks, you hear the voice of a man in his agony, in his gladness, in his transports. The character of largeness, which is opposed to perfumed drawing-room daintiness, is likewise found in Baudelaire as it is lound in Walt Whitman. What he writes is wholly free from triviality.

What should arrest your attention is Baudelaire’s courage. He will not tolerate cant, which in his judgment robs us of the true and beautiful. He will not consent to deceptions. He tears the decent drapery from men’s vices, and has the uncommon taste to call things by their names. His verses are loaded with indignation, and through them breaks terrible irony and despair.

Magazine Cover image
Explore the February 1869 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More
I know no stronger or more intense expression than the poem to his reader, — to his “hypocrite reader,” his “fellow-man,” as he calls him, — which is placed at the beginning of Les Fleurs du Mal, which was written to make us know how he despises our cowardice, cant, and self-deception, our habitual vices, and, when we talk, naïve exclusion of ourselves from the universality of evil!

Our mulish sins, our cowardly repentance, and “ the good pay we demand for our confessions, the gayety with which we re-enter the slimy path, thinking we wash all our spots with vile weeping,” inspire his soul with disgust and contempt of us. He tells us, with a kind of infernal glee, that Satan rocks our spell-bound minds ; that “he holds the threads that make us find attractions to repugnant objects ” ; and that “every day we descend one step towards hell without horror,” while we "steal on the wing a clandestine pleasure.”

With such startling and biting phrases headdresses his reader, and hurls upon us his horrible images of the evil that is in man. O sage advocates of the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature, rejoice and clap your hands, for here is a modern poet from the heart of Paris giving metrical and convincing expression to your belief!

Charles Baudelaire gives us the catalogue of our vices, and declares that if poison, the sword, and fire have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs the canvas of our pious destinies, it is because our souls are not strong enough. Such is the prelude to his own bold and inexorable poems called Spleen et Idéal, Les Fleurs du Mal, and Révolte.

I discover in Charles Baudelaire a mind almost malignant to men, because they have not the courage of their actions. In this I recognize a remarkable fact in his poetry, — it is the malign influence. He is the poet of the malign, as Shelley was the poet of love, as Byron was the poet of passion and adventure.

Poor Baudelaire, poet of the evil in good things, of the demoniacal element in familiar things ! Some persons have thought he was made insane by his preoccupation with the idea of beauty and his excesses of pleasure. I think he was made insane by an absorbing contemplation of the evil principle, the fatal principle incarnated in all things, and which stared at him.

Baudelaire worshipped the beautiful, but he seems always to have been in bondage to the mysterious and destructive fatality that makes a man the victim of his very qualities. He profoundly felt the tragic truth that man can only be tempted by what corresponds with his nature ; and that that very correspondence is a natural revelation of his wants and pleasure in life. But for his masculine force, his positive mental vigor, he would have been found in the madhouse when he died, long before his genius had grown beautiful and bitter fruit. Probably you have a patronizing pity for him, and think he was weak ! No man would have more quickly resented your pity, for his pride was colossal; and as for his weakness, I cannot recall a writer whose thought, whose feeling, has seemed to me so strong.

But to go back to the sense of Baudelaire’s poetry, although you shall discover in it a malignant spirit, although it expresses the morbid and caustic thought of a soul far from gladness and peace, do not suppose that it is without the beautiful. The beautiful very often exists side by side with the terrible.

Unhappy Baudelaire, so angry with us, with an indignation so deep that it even drowns the objects of it, and inspires a feeling of horror, is a warning, and begets a sentiment of awe. The strength of his thought is more than the loaded weight of his expression, in which particular he has the advantage of Swinburne, whose expression is greater than his thought, stronger than the feeling that urged it forth.

It is a poor protection from the force of Baudelaire’s mind to say that his poetry is the utterance of an insane man. It does not make it any the less true, for emotion and thought are true independently of their origin or issue. Read his Critique sur Théophile Gautier, or his preface to the translated works of Edgar A. Poe, and ask yourself if you could express so high and fine a literary sense, or speak with more authority ?

Baudelaire was a poet and a mind full of force and originality. He belonged to the literary family of Poe and Hawthorne. Like them, he was preoccupied with the subtilty of things and the awful inevitableness of human suffering ; like them, he was burdened with the weight and mystery of the world ; unlike them, he boldly trod the burning marl of his passions, and withered his heart in the furnace-heat of his unslaked desire, now cooled and voiceless in its dark trench of earth.

Charles Baudelaire is the type of the poetic mind unredeemed by love. To me he has a forlorn and fatal grandeur of aspect, like Milton’s Satan ; but he was a modern man in our contemporary world. Consider his situation. He had fed himself at the great springs of English literature, which made him a realist, and authorized his tenacious grasp upon things; he was familiar with antiquity, which gave him a far-off ideal in the past, and discouraged him because he had to look back whither he could not go ; he was in the midst of a luxurious, corrupted phase of modern civilization in France. His poems represent, not merely the local facts of society in France, but typical conditions of man during his age. They are contemporary, like Gavarni’s sketches, and appeal to exalted minds, by certain sides, like Michael Angelo’s figures, which embody a universal idea of human grandeur. I cannot hear his utterances without mingled feelings of admiration, shrinking, and pity. Alfred de Musset, the unhappiest of French poets, seems delicate and weak like a woman beside Baudelaire. Baudelaire alone represents the strong, masculine, unregeuerate man. He seems to have been even untouched by love. Had love been revealed to his heart, the flowers of evil would have wilted, never again to bloom in his life. What a man may become who goes through life without it, — a complete being, I mean, — you may know by reading Baudelaire’s unique poems.

Among Baudelaire’s poems called Spleen et Idéal is one entitled Les Phares, The Light-houses. Its several stanzas depict the great painters of the world, and are splendidly expressive in diction. They interpret the meaning of the great masters. The last stanza is sad and impressive in thought. Its meaning is that the suffering of man, in a passionate sob, rolls from age to age, and dies only on the brink of God’s eternity.

The little poem La Vic Antérieure is beautiful. The dreaming eye of the poet has a vision of Greek life. His spirit recognizes the place as familiar, and he says : —

“ I have a long time lived under vast porticos, which the marine sun tinted with a thousand fires, and whose grand pillars, straight and majestic, at eve were like basaltic grottos.

“The waves, in rolling the image of the sky, mingled, in a mystical and solemn fashion, the all-powerful chords of their rich music with the colors of sunset reflected in my eye.

“ ’T is there that I have lived, in calm voluptuousness, in the midst of the azure of the waves, of splendors, and of nude slaves, all impregnated with odors, who freshened my brow with palms, and whose unique care was to seek the painful secret which made me languish.”

I give you these unmetrical renderings to let you take the bare thought of Baudelaire, which is always poetical. For example, among several poems about the sea, the ancient and prolific source of poetry to the mind of man, he says that the bitter laugh of man, conquered, full of sobs and insults, he hears repeated in the enormous laugh of the sea.

In his poem of the Ideal the thought is likewise uncommon and large and poetical. He says he does not love the beauty of vignettes,— that he leaves to Gavarni, the poet of white and feeble things, his beauties of the hospital,— that he cannot find among those pale roses one flowers that represents his “red ideal.” “What my heart, profound like an abyss, needs, — it is thee, Lady Macbeth, soul strong for crime, dream of Æschylus ; or it is thee, grand Night, daughter of Michael Angelo, twisting peacefully, in a strange pose, charms fashioned to the mouth of Titans !”

His poem of Le Voyage, in which irony, contempt, and audacity give the tone to his voice, expresses the sum and substance of life to a man who is entirely outside of Christian sentiment, and yet far from antique cheerfulness. The only peace and sweetness you can discover in his poems is in the verses with which he celebrates the glory and beauty of the Pagan life. His souvenirs of that ancient and admirable time have the vividness and intensity of a personal experience. Baudelaire’s very being expands and feels anew the strength and ardor of existence at the memory of days when civilization and the natural life of man were not opposed to each other.

When he looks at the present life he becomes cruel, morbid. Too serious to let his mind be amused with the trivial aspects of the time, too penetrating to let his thought rest upon frivolities, he regards his fellow-beings as the sketches and illustrations of a hideous story, of whose meaning they are mere suggestions. He torments himself with the typical and dual life of things. A beautiful woman at the ball is to him a serpent that dances, and he taxes his mind for correspondences and resemblances ; as you read his poem, you are gradually subject to the same fancy: the cadence of the step, the beautiful abandon of the body, — it is the serpent in the woman !

One of his little poems is called Correspondences. The sense of it is unique and fine. He says the perfumes, the color, and the sounds answer each other; that there are perfumes fresh like the flesh of children, soft like a flute, green like the meadows, and others corrupted, rich, and triumphing, having the expansion of infinite things, like amber, musk, benzoin, and incense, which chant the transports of the spirit and the senses.

But what shall we say of his Litanies de Satan, of Abel et Cain, of Une Mar-

tyre? The feeling of horror which they inspire would make you forget the outrage done to your taste. They are poems whose meaning I have not the wish to express. No, I cannot deny it, this poet of evil has a terrible voice,— his is a dreadful cry rising from the heart of our age. Baudelaire walked amongst us despising us, and he was more sincere in his life than we are. He despised us, because with mutual consent we ignore the painful facts that fester in the very centres of our civilization. He curses us in our pleasures, in our vices, in our tardy and feeble repentance. He walked among us like an accusing spirit, who, sharing our unhappiness, contemplated our miseries, and never felt the saving and transfiguring power of a pure human love. As for the love of God, Baudelaire would have laughed a terrible laugh, had you spoken of it.

Byron’s cry is the cry of an audacious, discontented boy compared with Baudelaire’s cry of despair and pride. He did not go with Dante beyond this world to enter the Inferno ; he discovered it in our civilization, and he abandoned all hope the moment he discovered it.

But Baudelaire is dead. His cry is yet with us, and we must heed that cry. The cry of the poet expresses the suffering of the age ; it expresses the moral malady of a civilization. He came among us to make us know how far a man may go from the serene and beautiful world of our dreams. But Les Fleurs du Mal grew not out of the poet’s mind alone. They were fed and nourished by the moral soil of French life. Reproach him, at rest in his grave, for the pictures he made with words, the desires he so passionately expressed, the abnormal and shocking situations which he revealed? You dare not. You must reproach and correct the civilization which made his experience and emotions possible. Call him insane if you choose ; but first ask what made him insane, and you will not contemplate so tranquilly the aspects of human life. Read him, and you will enlarge your experience; read him, and you will broaden and deepen your sympathies. He will sadden you ; but what saddens spiritualizes and lifts out of brute life. Read him, and he will startle you ; but what startles gives a mental movement and takes out of inertia.

Baudelaire’s poetry is intensely personal,— it is even local. But all fine poetry not descriptive of external things is personal, and often it is local, inasmuch as it belongs not to a common experience. To take Baudelaire at his true value, we must understand him as the outcome of Parisian life in which the worship of beauty and the thirst for pleasure is supreme. The title of Several of his poems will do much to suggest to you their peculiar character, — such as Le Serpent qui Danse; Parfum Exotique; Horreur Sympathetique; Les Métamorphoses du Vampire; Les Promesses du Visage; Femmes Damnées; Les Bijoux; La Fontaine de Sang; L' Ame du Vin; La Mort; L' Homme et La Mer.

Charles Baudelaire was also a critical mind. He thought with force, and spoke with authority. His critique upon Gautier is a witness to the independence and incisiveness of his mind and of his high literary sense. Les Paradis Artificiels, which is composed of two parts, — one a translation of De Quincey’s “Confession of an OpiumEater,” the other, his own Confessions of an Hashish-Eater, — is remarkable for its terse and splendid diction, and thorough analysis of the ideas and sensations of a fine mind forced into activity by artificial means.

Victor Hugo paid him the tribute of a letter of thanks for his critique upon Théophile Gautier, in which he said: “Your article is one of those pages which strongly provoke the mind. Rare merit to make think.....You write of things profound and often serene. You love beauty. Give me your hand.”

The thinker in Charles Baudelaire is most interesting to me. It is the thought embodied in his verses that arrests my mind and separates the poet from the versifier, and gives him his place outside of their smooth insipidities. How far he is above or below, or how well he rivals his illustrious contemporaries in metrical art, is a question which belongs exclusively to his French critics ; but his thought, his emotion, his artistic sentiment, his moral idea, his poetry, — that is, the expressed relation of his mind to life and nature,— may appear in any language that corresponds with the mind of a civilized man, and bear witness to his being.


I have no pleasure in thinking of Charles Baudelaire. He has revealed himself as the most forlorn and energetic figure of the world’s poets. He has incarnated in his poems a covetous and haughty spirit; and he went through the golgotha of his passions unsatiated and unhumbled. De Musset, the melancholy poet of the disenchantments of life, and Heine, the sad mocker of the changefulness of life, are very light offenders against the serene or stagnant world of well-regulated people, compared with the positive, the unmitigated, the caustic poet Baudelaire. If you confront him, you will never forget him ; he will not let you forget him. He plants his thought in your mind, and it rankles there, the painful proof of a real and contemporary experience, that never has had so intense and bold a representative as the wretched author of Les Fleurs du Mal.

Naturally such a poet puts in play the whole of your moral and æsthetic faculties. If you make your reflections according to tradition, it is very easy to classify Baudelaire ; you rank him among the evilly possessed spirits ; you say he had several devils in him. The old symbols furnish good material for your rhetoric. No doubt his soul was in very bad company, and, to use the expressive language of Henry James, “resorted to eccentric and explosive methods by way of compelling society” to mark its work. Yet it is a serious question, and does not come within the range of my faculties, to say how far he was responsible for his extraordinary mental and moral life. He had mysterious and irresistible attractions to beautiful and fatal things, and they made the sadness of his soul, the fascination of his musical and sonorous verses, and the dark destiny of his life. He is one more type in the Pantheon of the poets ; as defined, as striking as Dante ; like him, intense, terse, vivid, in his use of words; like him, tenacious in his hold upon real things, while he expressed the dual life, the mysterious and ideal ; but he created no figure, and he made no story; he was impelled to express his personal experience, stripped bare of the usual poetic fictions and common inventions of timid and conventional, or modest and reserved writers. “ He loved the rare, the difficult, the strange,” wrote one of his friends; “and when he painted the deformities of humanity and civilization, it was only with a secret horror. He had for them no complaisance, and he looked upon them as infractions of the universal harmony.” As a writer he was remarkable for his pitiless logic and lyric fury of expression.



查尔斯-波德莱尔，恶毒的诗人
作者：Eugene Benson
1869年2月号
分享
在1867年巴黎博览会的夏天，当世界上任何地方的人都在嘈杂的人群中观看和惊叹于非凡的发明和艺术作品，或思考我们工业时代的伟大时，一些法国人和陌生人却因一位法国诗人的去世而感到悲伤，这位诗人的第一本书被压制，他的名字让很多人感到不快，但他的作品却不被巴黎的公众所关注。这位诗人就是查尔斯-波德莱尔（Charles Baudelaire），他著有《恶之花》（Les Fleurs du Mal）、《泰奥菲尔-戈蒂埃评论》（Critique sur Théophile Gautier）、《人工天堂》（Les Paradis Artificiels）以及埃德加-A-坡的作品译本。

也许只有某些英国和美国的斯温伯恩崇拜者才知道他在法国之外的名字。他们可能记得在阅读他的作品时，看到过一些属于人性的反叛和骄傲的思想。


波德莱尔是活生生的泉水，苦涩而美丽，而斯温伯恩则是英国的泡沫和躁动。我们必须到那个强烈而尖锐的源头去发现，在文学的广阔天空下，生长着什么样的炫耀性和有毒的花朵，什么样的紫色和血腥的花朵：它们有自己的开花时间。

杂志封面图片
以PDF格式查看本故事
请看这个故事出现在《大西洋》杂志的页面上。

打开
然而，查尔斯-波德莱尔的天才并没有通过呼吸传染给我们的文学。它不能这样做，因为理智和健康是生命的一般规律。

波德莱尔就像哈姆雷特一样独特而有趣。他是那种罕见的、不为人知的存在，一个真正的诗人，--一个处于精神紊乱的事物中的诗人，--一个被艺术和美感过度开发的诗人，对某些奇怪的想法有着非凡的嗜好，对理想非常敏感，对感觉非常贪婪。大多数人都会说，他为致命的印象而卖淫，并为骄傲而陶醉。

一个诗人，一个真正的诗人，总是一个奇怪的、迷人的存在；他常常是脆弱的、细腻的，被自然界的景象和生活的悲剧所激动，在这些景象和悲剧面前，没有他，人们就像牛一样哑巴和耐心。只有先知们是强壮的、响亮的、威严的。诗人就像迷失或堕落的天使在凡人的身体里，在感觉中寻找上帝，在广阔而模糊的空间里漫游，以失去对他们的束缚的意识。这样的诗人是雪莱，这样的诗人是坡，这样的诗人是查尔斯-波德莱尔。他的精神是悲伤的，可怕的，指责的，表达了他灵魂的混乱，在他的快乐中发出他讽刺的笑声，在月亮的变化之间看到可怕的幻象。


英美公众想到华兹华斯，想到他在自然界的思想快乐的纯洁和崇高的表达，后来倒在让-英格罗的叮当声中，在他的诗句中愉快的事情被说出来，或者更好，想到布莱恩特和他对自然的非个人的爱，想到惠蒂尔与他的家庭情感，似乎已经失去了诗歌可能是表达灵魂的恐惧和混乱的感觉。他们没有意识到不那么自在的精神，这种精神在生活的废墟上徘徊，并梦想着可见之外的深渊。维克多-雨果揭示了无形和巨大的事物在其中尖叫和漂浮的深渊；坡说出了无望的损失的绝望：笑，无家可归，可能在普通和美丽的事物中发现的邪恶，仍然是波德莱尔的。

推荐阅读
今天的霍利-贝克尔（左）和她20多岁时（右），当时她患有癌症
一个女人的AncestryDNA测试揭示了一个医学秘密
SARAH ZHANG
插图
西方文明的新理论
judith shulevitz

失败的税收实验
埃米莉-布德
他是一个新的声音，一个新的、引人注目的词，被扔进了礼貌的巴黎世界。他熟悉生活中所有的诱惑；他知道世界上发生的变化；但他以强壮的、未重生的人的古老精神来感受和看待所有的经验，他试图抓住感觉中短暂的美好，并在快乐中亵渎。他表达了感觉的贫瘠，却没有把自己从感觉的诱惑中解放出来。

夏尔-波德莱尔出生在印度。可以推测，他在童年时期就学会了英语；由于他长期熟悉英语，法国对埃德加-A-坡作品的翻译功不可没，埃德加-A-坡的天才给他带来了持续而深刻的钦佩之情。泰奥菲勒-戈蒂埃说，"他在法国归化了坡的思想和想象力，如此博学而奇特，以至于在他身边。霍夫曼不过是梦幻般的保罗-德科克，......。感谢波德莱尔，"他继续说，"我们有一种完全未知的文学味道，波德莱尔的名字在某种程度上必须与美国作家的名字密不可分"。

读波德莱尔的诗，首先会被其情感的力量、思想的活力、感情的强度所震撼。它们是一个阳刚的人的诗。它们没有一个妩媚的音符。在这一点上，它们具有与我们在沃尔特-惠特曼不那么有音乐感的讲话中所发现的相同的阳刚和令人耳目一新的坦率特征。这种相似性完全是由于真正的、阳刚的、诗意的头脑的统一性。每当他说话时，你会听到一个人在痛苦中、在高兴中、在感动中的声音。波德莱尔身上也有一种大度的特点，它与香艳的客厅里的娇媚相对立，它在沃尔特-惠特曼身上也有。他所写的东西完全没有琐碎的东西。

应该引起你注意的是波德莱尔的勇气。他不会容忍陈词滥调，因为在他看来，陈词滥调剥夺了我们的真实和美好。他不同意欺骗行为。他撕掉了人的恶习的体面外衣，并有一种不寻常的品味，直呼事物的名字。他的诗句充满了愤慨，并通过它们打破了可怕的讽刺和绝望。

杂志封面图片
探索1869年2月号
查看本期的更多内容，并找到你要阅读的下一个故事。

查看更多
我不知道有什么比这首写给他的读者--写给他的 "虚伪的读者"、他的 "同胞"--的诗更强烈或更强烈的表达方式，这首诗被放在《恶之花》的开头，写这首诗是为了让我们知道他是如何鄙视我们的懦弱、谎言和自欺欺人，我们的习惯性恶习，以及当我们谈论时，天真地把自己排除在罪恶的普遍性之外

我们狡猾的罪孽，我们懦弱的忏悔，以及 "我们为我们的忏悔要求的丰厚报酬，我们重新进入粘稠的道路的快乐，认为我们用卑鄙的哭泣洗净我们所有的斑点"，激发了他对我们的厌恶和蔑视。他带着一种地狱般的喜悦告诉我们，撒旦摇动着我们被咒语束缚的心灵；"他掌握着使我们对令人厌恶的事物产生吸引力的线索"；"每天我们都在向地狱一步步下降，而不感到恐惧"，同时我们 "在翅膀上偷着乐。"

用这些令人震惊和尖锐的短语给他的读者戴上帽子，把他关于人的邪恶的可怕形象投向我们。倡导人性完全堕落学说的圣人啊，请高兴地拍拍手吧，因为这里有一位来自巴黎市中心的现代诗人，为你的信仰提供了格律化的、令人信服的表达!

夏尔-波德莱尔给我们列出了我们的恶习目录，并宣称，如果毒药、刀剑和火焰还没有在我们虔诚的命运的画布上绣上它们悦目的图案，那是因为我们的灵魂还不够强大。这就是他自己大胆而无情的诗歌的序幕，这些诗歌被称为《脾脏与偶像》（Spleen et Idéal）、《恶之花》（Les Fleurs du Mal）、《愤怒》（Révolte）。

我在夏尔-波德莱尔身上发现了一种对人几乎是恶毒的思想，因为他们没有行动的勇气。在这一点上，我认识到他诗歌中的一个显著事实，--这就是恶性影响。他是恶毒的诗人，正如雪莱是爱情的诗人，拜伦是激情和冒险的诗人一样。

可怜的波德莱尔，美好事物中的邪恶，熟悉事物中的恶魔因素的诗人！有些人认为他是被逼疯的。有些人认为他是由于对美感的专注和对快乐的过度追求而变得疯狂的。我认为他是由于对邪恶原则的吸收性思考而精神失常的，这个致命的原则体现在所有的事物中，它盯着他。

波德莱尔崇拜美丽的事物，但他似乎总是受制于神秘的、毁灭性的宿命，这种宿命使一个人成为他自身品质的受害者。他深刻地感受到一个悲剧性的事实，即人只能被符合其本性的东西所诱惑；而这种对应关系正是他在生活中的愿望和乐趣的自然揭示。如果不是因为他的阳刚之气，他的积极的精神活力，当他死的时候，在他的天才还没有长出美丽而苦涩的果实之前，他就会被发现在疯人院。也许你对他有一种怜悯之情，认为他很软弱! 没有人会更快地反感你的怜悯，因为他的骄傲是巨大的；至于他的软弱，我想不起有哪位作家的思想和感情在我看来是如此强烈。

但是，回到波德莱尔诗歌的意义上，尽管你会在其中发现一种恶毒的精神，尽管它表达了一个远离快乐和和平的灵魂的病态和苛责的思想，但不要认为它没有美。美丽的东西往往与可怕的东西并存。

不幸的波德莱尔，对我们如此愤怒，其愤慨之深，甚至淹没了它的对象，并激发了一种恐怖的感觉，是一种警告，并引起一种敬畏的情绪。他思想的力量超过了他表达的重量，在这一点上他比斯温伯恩更有优势，他的表达比他的思想更强大，比催促它的感觉更强大。

说波德莱尔的诗歌是一个疯子的言论，这对他的思想力量来说是一种可怜的保护。但这并不意味着它就不真实了，因为情感和思想是真实的，与它们的起源或问题无关。读读他的《泰奥菲勒-戈蒂埃评论》，或他为埃德加-A-坡的译作所写的序言，问问自己，你能不能表达出如此高超的文学感，或说得更权威？

波德莱尔是一位诗人，一个充满力量和独创性的头脑。他属于波尔和霍桑的文学家族。像他们一样，他专注于事物的微妙性和人类痛苦的可怕的必然性；像他们一样，他背负着世界的重量和神秘；与他们不同的是，他大胆地踩着他的激情的燃烧的泥土，并在他未冷却的欲望的炉火中枯萎他的心，现在在它黑暗的土沟里冷却和无声。

查尔斯-波德莱尔是未被爱情救赎的诗意的典型。对我来说，他有一种绝望和致命的宏伟气势，就像弥尔顿的撒旦；但他是我们当代世界的一个现代人。考虑一下他的处境。他曾在英国文学的伟大泉源中汲取营养，这使他成为一个现实主义者，并授权他顽强地把握事物；他熟悉古代，这使他在过去有一个遥远的理想，并使他感到沮丧，因为他不得不回头看他不能去的地方；他正处于法国现代文明的一个奢华、堕落阶段。他的诗不仅代表了法国当地的社会事实，而且代表了他那个时代的典型人的状况。它们是当代的，就像加瓦尔尼的素描一样，通过某些方面吸引着高尚的心灵，就像迈克尔-安吉洛的人物一样，体现了人类宏伟的普遍理念。我听到他的讲话时，不由自主地产生了钦佩、畏缩和怜悯的混合情感。法国最不快乐的诗人阿尔弗雷德-德-穆塞（Alfred de Musset）在波德莱尔身边就像一个女人，显得娇弱无力。波德莱尔一个人代表了强壮的、阳刚的、没有气质的男人。他似乎甚至没有被爱所触动。如果爱被揭示在他的心中，邪恶的花朵就会枯萎，再也不会在他的生命中绽放。一个人在没有爱的情况下度过一生，--我是说一个完整的人，--你可以通过阅读波德莱尔的独特诗作来了解。

在波德莱尔名为 "脾性与理想 "的诗中，有一首名为 "Les Phares "的诗。它的几节诗描绘了世界上伟大的画家，在修辞上有精彩的表现力。它们诠释了伟大大师们的含义。最后一节在思想上是悲伤和令人印象深刻的。它的意思是，人的痛苦在激情的抽泣中，从一个时代滚到另一个时代，只有在上帝的永恒的边缘才会死去。

小诗La Vic Antérieure很美。诗人梦幻般的眼睛看到了希腊的生活。他的精神认识到这个地方是熟悉的，他说： --

" 我曾长期生活在巨大的门廊下，海洋的阳光为其染上了无数的火焰，其宏伟的柱子，笔直而雄伟，到了晚上就像玄武岩的洞穴。

"海浪翻滚着天空的形象，以一种神秘而庄严的方式，将它们丰富的音乐中的所有和弦与映入我眼帘的夕阳的颜色混合在一起。

"'就是在那里，我在平静的妖娆中生活，在海浪的蔚蓝中，在辉煌中，在裸体的奴隶中，都被气味所浸染，他们用手掌梳理我的眉毛，他们独特的关怀是寻找使我痛苦的秘密。"

我给你这些不加修饰的渲染，是为了让你接受波德莱尔的赤裸裸的思想，它总是充满诗意。例如，在几首关于大海的诗中，他说，大海是人类心灵的古老而多产的诗源，他说，人类被征服的苦笑，充满了呜咽和侮辱，他听到了大海巨大的笑声中的重复。

在他的《理想》一诗中，思想同样是不平凡的，大有诗意。他说他不喜欢小品之美，--他把他的医院之美留给了加瓦尔尼，这位白色和软弱事物的诗人，--他在那些苍白的玫瑰中找不到代表他 "红色理想 "的花朵。"我的心，像深渊一样深邃，需要的是--是你，麦克白夫人，犯罪的灵魂，埃斯库罗斯的梦想；还是你，伟大的夜，迈克尔-安吉洛的女儿，以奇怪的姿势安详地扭动着，泰坦之口的魅力！"

他的《旅行》一诗中，讽刺、轻蔑和大胆赋予了他的声音以音调，表达了一个完全在基督教情感之外的人的生活的总和和实质，但却远离了古老的欢快。在他的诗中，你能发现的唯一平静和甜蜜是在他歌颂异教徒生活的光荣和美丽的诗句中。他对那个古老而令人钦佩的时代的纪念品具有个人经历的生动性和强度。波德莱尔在回忆文明和人的自然生活并不对立的日子时，他的生命力得到了拓展，重新感受到了生存的力量和热情。

当他审视现在的生活时，他变得残酷、病态。他太严肃了，不能让他的思想被这个时代的琐事所吸引，太深刻了，不能让他的思想停留在轻浮的事情上，他把他的同胞看作是一个可怕的故事的草图和插图，他们的意义仅仅是建议。他用事物的典型和双重生活来折磨自己。舞会上的美女对他来说是一条跳舞的大蛇，他在脑海中寻找对应和相似之处；当你读他的诗时，你会逐渐受到同样的幻想：步伐的节奏，身体的美丽放弃，--这就是女人中的大蛇！他的一首小诗叫做《大蛇》。

他的一首小诗叫做《对应》。它的感觉是独特而精细的。他说，香水、颜色和声音是相互呼应的；有的香水像孩子的肉一样新鲜，像笛子一样柔软，像草地一样绿色，还有的香水是腐败的、丰富的、胜利的，具有无限的扩张性，像琥珀、麝香、安息香和沉香，它们吟唱着精神和感官上的感动。

但我们该如何评价他的《撒旦之歌》、《亚伯与该隐》、《新马》？

tyre？它们所激发的恐怖感会让你忘记对你的品味所做的冒犯。这些诗的意义我不想表达。不，我不能否认，这位邪恶的诗人有一个可怕的声音，--他是从我们这个时代的心脏里发出的可怕的呼声。波德莱尔走在我们中间，蔑视我们，他在生活中比我们更真诚。他鄙视我们，因为在双方同意的情况下，我们忽视了在我们文明的中心地带发酵的痛苦事实。他诅咒我们的快乐，诅咒我们的恶习，诅咒我们迟钝无力的忏悔。他在我们中间行走，就像一个指责的灵魂，他分享我们的不快，思考我们的苦难，却从未感受到纯洁的人类之爱的拯救和改变的力量。至于上帝之爱，如果你说到它，波德莱尔会笑得很可怕。

与波德莱尔绝望和骄傲的哭声相比，拜伦的哭声只是一个大胆的、不满的男孩的哭声。他没有和但丁一起走出这个世界，进入《地狱》；他在我们的文明中发现了它，而且在发现它的那一刻，他就放弃了所有希望。

但波德莱尔已经死了。他的呼喊还在我们身边，我们必须听从这呼喊。诗人的呐喊表达了这个时代的痛苦；表达了一个文明的道德弊病。他来到我们中间，让我们知道一个人可以离我们梦想中的宁静而美丽的世界有多远。但是，《恶之花》并非仅从诗人的头脑中生长出来。它们被法国生活的道德土壤所哺育和滋养。在他的坟墓里休息的时候，责备他用文字描绘的画面，他如此热情地表达的欲望，他所揭示的不正常和令人震惊的情况？你不敢。你必须指责和纠正使他的经验和情感成为可能的文明。如果你选择说他疯了；但首先要问是什么使他疯了，你就不会如此平静地考虑人类生活的各个方面。读他，你会扩大你的经验；读他，你会扩大和加深你的同情心。他将使你感到悲哀；但悲哀的东西会使人精神振奋，并使人摆脱粗野的生活。读他，他将使你惊愕；但惊愕的东西会给人以精神上的感动，使人从惰性中摆脱出来。

波德莱尔的诗歌是强烈的个人化的，甚至是地方性的。但所有不描述外部事物的优秀诗歌都是个人的，而且往往是局部的，因为它不属于一个共同的经验。要了解波德莱尔的真正价值，我们必须把他理解为巴黎生活的结果，在这种生活中，对美的崇拜和对快乐的渴求是最高的。他的几首诗的标题就能向你暗示它们的特殊性质，如《跳舞的蛇》、《异国情调》、《同情的恐怖》、《吸血鬼的变形》、《视觉的承诺》、《受诅咒的女人》、《珠宝》、《桑的方丹》、《酒的味道》、《死亡》、《男人与海》。

夏尔-波德莱尔也是一个批评家。他的思考很有力度，发言也很有权威。他对戈蒂埃的评论见证了他思想的独立性和敏锐性以及他的高度文学感。Les Paradis Artificiels》由两部分组成--一部分是对德-昆西的《一个吃鸦片的人的自白》的翻译，另一部分是他自己的《一个吃大麻的人的自白》--因其简洁而华丽的辞藻和对一个被人为手段强迫活动的美好心灵的思想和感觉的彻底分析而引人注目。

维克多-雨果为他对泰奥菲勒-戈蒂埃的评论写了一封感谢信，向他表示敬意，他在信中说 他在信中说："你的文章是那些能强烈刺激人的思想的页面之一。罕见的优点，让人觉得.....，你写的东西很深刻，而且往往很宁静。你爱美。把你的手给我"。

查尔斯-波德莱尔身上的思想家对我来说是最有趣的。正是他的诗句中所体现的思想吸引了我的注意力，将诗人与诗人们分开，并在他们的平淡无奇中给予他自己的位置。他在多大程度上高于或低于他的同时代杰出人物，或者他在格律艺术方面能与之匹敌，这是一个完全属于他的法国评论家的问题；但他的思想、他的情感、他的艺术情感、他的道德观念、他的诗歌，也就是他的思想与生活和自然的表达关系，可以出现在任何与文明人的思想相一致的语言中，并为他的存在作证。


想到查尔斯-波德莱尔，我没有任何快感。他已经显示出自己是世界上最孤独和最有活力的诗人。他在他的诗中体现了一种贪婪和傲慢的精神；他经历了他的激情的戈壁，没有得到满足，也没有被打倒。德-穆塞，这位忧郁的诗人对生活的失落感，以及海涅，这位悲哀的嘲笑者对生活的多变性，与积极的、不遗余力的、苛责的诗人波德莱尔相比，对宁静或停滞的世界的冒犯非常轻。如果你面对他，你将永远不会忘记他；他不会让你忘记他。他把他的思想植入你的脑海中，它在你的脑海中徘徊，这是一种真实的、当代的经验的痛苦证明，这种经验从来没有像《恶之花》的可悲的作者那样有如此强烈和大胆的代表。

很自然地，这样一位诗人会让你的道德和审美能力全部发挥出来。如果你根据传统进行思考，就很容易对波德莱尔进行分类；你把他列为被邪恶附身的精神；你说他身上有几个魔鬼。古老的符号为你的修辞提供了良好的材料。毫无疑问，他的灵魂处于非常糟糕的境地，用亨利-詹姆斯的表达方式，"用古怪和爆炸性的方法迫使社会 "来标记其工作。然而，要说他在多大程度上对自己非凡的精神和道德生活负有责任，这是一个严肃的问题，而且不在我的能力范围之内。他对美丽而致命的事物有着神秘而不可抗拒的吸引力，它们造就了他灵魂的悲伤，造就了他音乐和铿锵的诗句的魅力，也造就了他人生的黑暗命运。他是万神殿诗人中的另一个类型；像但丁一样明确、醒目；像他一样，在用词上激烈、简练、生动；像他一样，在表达双重生活、神秘和理想时，顽强地抓住现实事物；但他没有创造人物，也没有制造故事；他被迫表达他的个人经验，剥去胆小和传统的、或谦虚和保留的作家的通常诗歌虚构和普通发明。"他喜欢罕见的、困难的、奇怪的东西，"他的一位朋友写道；"当他描绘人类和文明的畸形时，只是带着一种秘密的恐惧。他对他们没有任何怨言，他把他们看成是对普遍和谐的破坏。作为一名作家，他因其无情的逻辑和抒情的愤怒表达而引人注目。