Baudelaire and the English Tradition by Patricia Clements

Abstract

Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1985). x, 442. $33.50 (u.s.) Patricia Clements’s book is primarily an influence study in the old style, though it contains an implicit critique of Harold Bloom’s ideas. Her study analyzes the influence of Baudelaire on a number of English poets and critics from Swinburne to Eliot, and shows how Baudelaire’s ideas were used, often without acknowledgement, to attack English conventionality and philistinism in the arts. Swinburne was the first English critic — the first critic anywhere, in fact — to pay serious attention to Baudelaire as a poet rather than a cause célèbre. In his poems, criticism, fiction, and satires, Swinburne carried on an extended dialogue with the French poet, and in doing so argued, says Clements, “that the ‘brotherhood’ of poets is inter­ national; that poetry and imaginative prose have the right to deal with unorthodox or unusual psychological and sexual subject matter; that the language of criticism stands in need of revision” (25). He also argued courageously against l’hérésie de l’enseignement and maintained, with Baudelaire, that a work is justified only by its formal qualities. Clements often suggests through her diction that Swinburne was alone in his opinions : he “heralds” or “predicts” later developments, including much of Modern­ ism. In fact, he was the first to derive these ideas from his reading of Baudelaire, but Arnold, for example, had already argued for international standards of poetry and for the revival of criticism. Swinburne’s real origi­ nality lay in his appreciation of Baudelaire’s craftsmanship and his ability to understand Baudelaire’s hatred of nineteenth-century positivism and optimism. Noting Baudelaire’s “contempt of such facile free-thinking.” Swinburne suggested that the poet had sought “ a fiery refuge in the good old hell of the faithful from the watery new paradise of liberal theosophy and ultimate amiabiilty of all things” (70). This perceptive criticism is all the more remarkable in that it influenced Swinburne’s own poetry so little: his own sense of evil remains largely small-boy naughtiness or pathological masochism. By the time of Walter Pater’s major works, both Swinburne and Baude­ laire had been damned by Buchanan in his pamphlet on the “Fleshly School” of poetry, and Jowett had threatened to expose Pater’s homo­ sexuality if he did not restrain his aesthetic enthusiasms. The result was what Clements calls “ the reign of cunning in Pater’s work” (104) — a net­ work of allusion and allegory in Pater’s writing, the purpose of which was to conceal his debt to Baudelaire. This chapter, the most interesting in the book, is intriguing simply as detective work; the subterranean connections between Baudelaire and Pater are scrupulously and ingeniously traced, and we learn much about the sources of Pater’s ideas about modernity, abstrac225 tion. correspondances, and personality in art. Clements occasionally makes extravagant claims, as when she argues that the “mythic method” of Joyce and Eliot is anticipated by Pater’s far more general interest in memory and intellectual context. But on the whole her method serves her well here. The suppression of his sources saved Pater from the fate of Oscar Wilde, who courted publicity as assiduously as Pater shunned it. By this third chapter, Clements is in difficult territory, for English culture had become far more cosmopolitan by the 1880s, and it is not always easy to say whether a Baudelairean idea comes directly from Baudelaire, or through Swinburne and Pater, or more vaguely from the Zeitgeist. Baudelaire was now asso­ ciated with “decadence,” a notoriously difficult term to define, but one which often implies cultivation of the artificial. Baudelaire had damned nature as immoral and cruel, and maintained that everything good in man was artificial: “Tout ce qui est beau et noble est le résultat de la raison et du calcul.. . . Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d’un art” (154). This is another aspect of Baude­ laire’s rejection of meliorism, in this case the eighteenth-century worship of nature as an ethical norm; as such it was sane and necessary...