BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES ( 1821-67 ). A French poet, born in Paris, April 9, 1821. He was the forerunner of the decadent school in modern French poetry, and in his kind great er than any of his successors. Ilis parents sought to turn him from literature by travel in the Orient, and, as might have been foreseen, confirmed him in his perversity. The imagery, the colors, the odors of those, scenes, that splendid nature, new and strange, fired his eccentric imagination and seemed to command a poetic expression. Yet at first this morbid hyperresthesia, which was to rise at times to emotional hysteria, was controlled by a strong critical bent. P.audelaire's early essays show remarkable keenness and prescienee of the trend of lyric poetry, and his translations of Poe's Talcs (1856) made that. author almost as much a classic of French as of American romantic fiction. But Ila udela ire*s card inal work in French literature is the Firers du Mal (Flowers of Evil), 1857, in which the restless reaction from the confident outlook of scientific deter minism duds its first, its most morbidly pes. simistic, and possibly its strongest expression. Bandelaire lived for ten years longer. "culti vating hysteria with delight and terror." as he tells us. and died in a hospital at last after a year of semi-lunacy induced by the excessive use of nervous stimulants. Baudela ire's topsy turvy ethics regard nature as evil, the natural as ugly, decay as a release, and death as a blessing. Possibly he was insincere: certainly he was in tentionally brutal, and strained after effects in "the last convulsions of expiring individual ism," as though drunk with the lees of romantic wine. There are 151 of these rank night-shade
Flowers, all short poems, compactly built. with a mastery of technique unsurpassed in France, carefully polished and elaborated moral para doxes, in which a shuddering at the vileness of life alternates with futile aspirations for an emancipation from it. For even while Brunie laire worshiped Satan. he clung to the Cross, and became toward the close of his life as morosely ascetic in resolution as he was extravagantly hedonistic in action. In his prose, as in his verse, the philosophy of science and the ethics of materialism coexist with the my8ticism of media•al demonology. His ethics are pessimism reduced to the absurd, his testheties are a reduc tion to the absurd of art; yet his poetry, in spite of all its artistic theory and ethical teach ing, has a perverse poisonous originality that like arsenic preserves his memory green. The F/cu•s dit Mal have scattered their seeds wide, and Baudelaire is justly called the father of the decadent Symbolists. See Baudelaire's with a preface by Gautier (7 rids., 1868). Consult: James, French Poets cud Novelists (London, : .Asselineau, Chu ries Bet ude /aire, sa rie et son wurre (Park, 1889) ; Briuton. "A Poet of the Decadence," in New Century Review (London, 1897).