Baudelaire, Verlaine and Verhaeren

Abstract

TOWARDS the end of his life, Charles Baudelaire spent several years in Belgium, where he left a progeny of more or less servile imitators. The verse they produced abounds in the more specious characteristics of Decadent poetry. A cult of perversity and recherche sins, a weakness for luxuriating in real or imaginary woes, a glut of ecstasies, depressions and disillusions, became the stock in trade of fashionable versifiers, who exploited ad nauseam the fluctuations of their morbid moods. Baudelaire cannot be held responsible for the defects of his disciples, but most of their excesses had degenerated from seed sown in the Fleurs du Mal. Their greatest crime was, as Laforgue said, the woeful attempt to imitate a certain feverish intensity, which Gautier had seen to be the essential and most original characteristic of Baudelaire's genius, and which he defined in the course of a comparison with Delacroix. The painter, he thought, must have attracted the poet by the very malady of his talent, ' si trouble, si inquiet, si nerveux, si chercheur, si exaspere, si paroxyste, qu'on nous passe ce mot qui seul rend bien notre pens6e, et si tourmente des malaises, des melancolies, des ardeurs f6briles, des efforts convulsifs et des r6ves de l'epoque.' (Fleurs du Mal: Notice, ed. def.) Of the literary descendants of Baudelaire in Belgium, Emile Verhaeren alone seems to rival the master as a poet of paroxysm. For all the morbidity of its early phases, his work has escaped the shallow indulgence in vice, the factitious reactions of spleen and ideal, cultivated by his immediate predecessors. The sombre desperation of a book like Les Dgbdcles leaves no place for doubt as to the reality of the anguish there depicted. Its contents are so many images of torment, outbursts of rage, protests against destiny, set down directly in rugged, onomatopoetic rhythms, the creation of which was both an extreme exasperation and a supreme triumph. The poems are marred in places by the wilful extravagances of the author's manner at the time; but it would be impossible for an intelligent reader to confuse their excesses with the artificial excitations of a fin de siQcle aesthete. To a poet of Verhaeren's passionate sincerity and positive realism such a 'model' would have been intolerable; but he would not be likely to ignore the one volume that could direct him in the task of 'exteriorising' the dibdcle of his