ページの画像
PDF
ePub

L'étranger. Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur, ou ton frère ?

Je n'ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.

Tes amis ?

Vous vous servez là d'une parole dont le sens m'est resté jusqu'à ce jour in

connu.

Ta patrie ?

Did

with pleasure from his work! For instance, this one in his review of "Les Misérables:" "Un sourire et une larme dans le visage d'un colosse, c'est une originalité presque divine." Victor Hugo ever before or since receive so much praise in so few words? Of Wagner, whom he dared to praise when it was the fashion to abuse him, he writes: "En effet, sans poésie, la

J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est musique de Wagner serait encore une

située.

La beauté ?

œuvre poétique, étant, douée de toutes les qualités qui constituent une poésie

Je l'aimerais volontiers, déesse et im- bien faite." Time has proved the

mortelle. L'or?

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

These marvellous clouds could not bear up the earthly clay, but to men of like aspirations these words will express their visionary longings; whilst those who cannot take in his mystic meaning can still turn to his art criticism, or to his life sketches, even to his advice to young authors, with pleasure and profit. We are, indeed, sometimes inclined to smile when we see modern English authors thrust their hands into the Baudelaire mine and dig out his thoughts, presenting them to us unacknowledged and clothed in English garb. But it needs care to steal from Baudelaire. At one time he will tell you he worships art for art's sake and beauty for itself; at another, he will flatly contradict himself, and praise a didactic purpose. His friends are not taken in by his apparent contradictions they know his mind too well for that; they are inclined to say with Emerson, "With consistency a great soul has nothing to do," and further to describe him in his own words spoken in praise of Théophile Gautier.

L'égal des plus grands dans le passé, un modèle pour ceux qui viendront, un diamant de plus en plus rare dans une époque ivre d'ignorance et de matière, c'est-à-dire un parfait homme de lettres.

prophet true; but when he wrote he was without honor in France, and his words without weight among the multitude.

In his "Fusées," or "Mon Cœur mis à nu," we find more private opinion."It is not specially through polit ical institutions that universal ruin or universal progress will manifest itself -the name matters little rather it will be through l'avilissement des cœurs

Il y a dans la prière une opération magique. La prière est une des grandes forces de la dynamique intellectuelle. Il y à la comme une récurrence électrique. Il n'y a d'intéressant idée est par elle-même, douée d'une vie sur la terre que les religions. - Toute immortelle, comme une personne. Sois toujours poète même en prose.'

[ocr errors]

"Mes humilia

Later on in his diary we come upon pathetic sentences, showing the depths of the man's feeling and the higher aspirations which he had no strength to tions ont été des grâces de Dieu. — Ma bring to perfection. phase d'égoïsme est-elle finie ?—Tout est réparable, il est encore temps. -Je n'ai pas encore connu le plaisir d'un plan réalisé."

Then comes the last utterance of his poor heart laid bare :

I swear to myself henceforth to adopt the following rules as the everlasting rules of my life... To pray every morning to God, the Fountain of all strength and of all justice; to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe. [These titular saints of Baudelaire make us inclined to smile, as well as to weep, for one was the father he had lost at six years

How many quotations we might make old, and the other his affinity, the poor

American outcast!] To pray to them to | Voici mon cœur qui n'a battu qu en vain, give me necessary strength to accomplish Pour palpiter aux ronces du Calvaire, all my tasks, and to grant my mother a life | Voici mon cœur qui n'a battu qu'en vain. long enough to enjoy my reformation. To work all day, or at least as long as my strength lasts. To trust to God—that is to say, to Justice itself for the success of my projects. To pray again every evening to God to ask him for life and strength, for my mother and myself. To divide all my earnings into four parts-one for my daily

expenses, one for my creditors, one for my friends, and one for my mother. To keep

to principles of strict sobriety, and to ban

ish all and every stimulant.

Here these acts of faith and good resolutions break off, with what result we already know. Not many of his countrymen took the trouble to come to Baudelaire's funeral; a few poets carried him to his grave. The indignant poet Banville read the funeral oration to a sprinkling of people, and only the thunder applauded; but among the witnesses another great outcast poet, still amongst us, watched the last scene, already, perhaps, fashioning in his dreamy style the beautiful lines of his own confession :

The waters of the river have a saffron and a sickly hue; and they flow not onward to the sea but palpitate forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them, like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh one unto the other.

Vous Dieu de paix, de joie et de bonheur,
Toutes mes peurs, toutes mes ignorances,
Vous Dieu de paix, de joie et de bonheur.

[ocr errors]

Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne.

It needs a poet to understand such poetry, a merciful judge to answer such aspirations as are found in Baudelaire's

resolution and Verlaine's confession.

It may not be without interest to the reader to place side by side a sentence from one of Edgar Poe's pages and its translation by Baudelaire. Only those who have attempted such work know its difficulties; but it is certainly wonderful that the translator was able to grasp the full meaning of the English and to turn it into a French classic accepted as such by his country men. We shall note that the disciple has not altered the master's words; they were a sacred trust and must not be tampered with. The passage selected is from "Silence."

De

Les eaux de la rivière sont d'une couleur safranée et malsaine; et elles ne coulent pas vers la mer, mais palpitent éternellement, sous l'œil rouge du soleil, avec un mouvement tumultueux et convulsif. chaque côté de cette rivière un lit vaseux s'étend, à une distance de plusieurs milles, un pâle désert de gigantesques nénuphars. Ils soupirent l'un vers l'autre dans cette solitude, et tendent vers le ciel leurs longs cous de spectres, et hochent de côté et d'autre leurs têtes sempiternelles. Et il sort d'eux un murmure confus qui ressemble à celui d'un torrent souterrain. Et ils soupirent l'un vers l'autre.

Setting aside translations, we shall often singled out by modern Frenchnotice many passages in Baudelaire's men. Turning to Poe, we find," Man writings which seem to be the echo of being what he is, the time could never some of Edgar Poe's own thoughts; have been in which poesy was not. Its indeed, he himself has said so. Fur- first element is the thirst for supernal ther, we are inclined to attribute the beauty, . . . the second element is the appreciation of Shelley by modern attempt to satisfy this thirst by novel Frenchmen to this same source, for combinations among those forms of Poe was a great admirer of Shelley, beauty which already exist." selecting his lines on the "Sensitive Baudelaire will tell us: "Le but de Plant" as a poem of supreme beauty; la poésie est de répandre la lumière and we shall see that the same poem is parmi les hommes ;" and "Gautier,

c'est l'amour exclusif du beau avec les nuages toutes ses subdivisions exprimé dans le│. . . là-bas,

les nuages qui passent les merveilleux nu

langage le mieux approprié. . . . Le ages." That was the answer of both principe de la poésie est strictement of them to a generation of materialet simplement, l'aspiration humaine ists. vers une Beauté supérieure, et la manifestation de ce principe est dans un enthousiasme, un enlèvement de l'âme; enthousiasme tout-à-fait indépendant de la passion, qui est l'ivresse du cœur, et la vérité, qui est la pâture de la raison."

We might go on choosing passages on this favorite theme from both poets, but there is no need; extracts are only useful as patterns of the whole material, and cutting off short lengths should be avoided.

To make Baudelaire better understood is also to raise Edgar Poe on a higher pedestal. If we doubt where to place this latter, we know his translator had no difficulty on the subject. The glory of both has increased with years; and if they failed on earth and among their fellow men, they must at last have joined hands in the spirit-world, and claimed from thence their rightful meed of praise.

They were potters who fashioned their clay into exquisite moulds, and artists who cared not at all for uselessness or utility. They understood that the beauty of a Grecian urn is not impaired by its being put to vile use, and that the maker of it will not incur the blame, for, the result being achieved, his hours of toil have not been wasted, and the beauty he created must last as long as his creation exists. As Baudelaire wrote: “La beauté est une qualité si forte qu'elle ne peut qu'ennoblir les âmes." ESME STUART..

From Bailey's Journal. NEW ORLEANS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

THEIR houses are generally built of wood, and boarded very plain on the inside, and made very open, that there may be a free circulation of air; consequently they avoid all the inconvenThose who ranked Baudelaire very ience and expense of paper, carpets, high (even before reading Mr. Swin- fires, curtains, and hangings of different burne's famous poem or Mr. Saints-kinds. The bedrooms are fitted up in bury's article) had no need of any the same plain style, and are furnished incentive to place him anywhere but with nothing but a hard-stuffed bed, amongst a small but very choice circle raised very much in the middle, and of truly original immortals, even if the covered with a clean, white sheet; and selection is made from some of those over the whole there is a large gauze whom the world knoweth not. Baude-net (called a bar), which is intended as laire chose his mental affinity from the a defence against the mosquitoes, and same class of genius-déclassé-and serves tolerably well to keep off those determined to place him higher. tormenting creatures. On this sheet Though he could not gain honor for (spread upon the bed and under the himself, though he could not keep his net) you lie down without any other pathetic vows or make publishers pay covering, and (if it be summer time) him highly, he could bestow fame on with the doors and windows open, so another poor mortal, a poet of the nine-intolerable is the heat of the climate. teenth century that age extolled not | During several days when I was here, for dreams, but for its common sense the thermometer was at 117° in the and its material progress.

shade. The dress of the inhabitants is There was but one form of progress also correspondent to the furniture of these two cared about, not the progress the houses; being clothed in the lightof science or of electric light, but the est manner possible, and every one in increased power of seeing visions and the manner which pleases him best, dreaming dreams. "Et qu'aimes-tu there is not (in these new countries) donc, extraordinaire étranger? J'aime that strange propensity to ridicule every

one who deviates from the forms which a more established society may have prescribed to itself; but every one, in this respect, "doeth that which is right in his own eyes." Some will wear the short linen jacket of the Americans; others the long flowing gown, or the cloak of the Spaniards; some the open trousers and naked collar; others the modern dress of tight pantaloons and large cravats; some, with the white or black chip hat; others, with the beaver and feathers, after the manner of the Spaniards; and so in respect to all the other minutiæ of dress.

practice, I presume, they have adopted from the Americans, who (in the southern part of that continent) follow this amusement very much. They have a playhouse, which is rather small. It consists of one row of boxes only, with an amphitheatre in the middle, which is raised above the pit, and over the whole there is a gallery. The plays are performed in French, and they have a tolerable set of actors. The inhabitants are also musical, but this lies chiefly among the French. The gentlemen of the place often perform in the orchestra There at the theatre; in fact, there is no is but one printing-press in this place, other music there but such as they oband that is made use of by the govern- tain in this voluntary way. . . . New ment only. The Spanish government Orleans may contain about a thousand is too jealous to suffer the inhabitants houses. It is one hundred miles from to have the free exercise of it; for, the sea, down the Mississippi; but however strange it may appear, yet it is across the country by land it is not absolutely true that you cannot even more than seven leagues. Owing to stick a paper against the wall (either to the rapidity of the current, vessels are recover anything lost, or to advertise a long while in coming up here. There anything for sale) without its first having the signature of the governor or of his secretary attached to it; and on all those little bills which are stuck up at the corners of the streets you see the word "Permitted, written by the governor or his agent. . . . As to the diversions of the place, they consist principally in billiards, of which there are several tables in the town. This

is a port, called Balize, at the mouth of the river; but I am informed that it furnishes no defence to it. The tide ascends but very little way up the channel of the Mississippi, owing to the rapidity of its current. The banks of this river are well settled for a few miles below the city; but after that there are no plantations of any conse quence.

port, which is illuminated from a lamp, while a screen is introduced to give a shadow (the order being, observer, lamp, screen, vertical support, pendulum, dark wall). The white thread in its swing passes into the shadow of the rod and screen, and each time it enters or reappears its velocity seems increased considerably. It seems as if attracted into the shadow, and as if it entered into the light with a sudden shock. It is necessary that the thread should cease to be visible when it enters the shadow. With a red thread the illusion also occurs, perhaps somewhat less

A CURIOUS OPTICAL ILLUSION is described by M. Bourdon in the Revue Philosophique. If an object moves before our eye, kept fixed, it undergoes, in passing from direct to indirect vision, an obscuration, a change of coloration; and the opposite effect occurs when the object comes into the field of direct vision. It is natural to suppose that this plays a part in the perception of motion, and one fact proving that it does so is, that if we render a slowmoving object suddenly invisible- - e.g., by means of a shadow - its velocity of displacement seems much increased. M. Bourdon describes an arrangement in vividly. A simpler plan than the above is which a long pendulum with white thread to hang a pendulum from the ceiling, shadis swung from a cross bar on a vertical sup-ing with a screen.

Nature.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO.

Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

« 前へ次へ »