Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello
Nietzsche · en
Professor Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and
Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire
himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have
a superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and
affection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror."
Poe is without passion, except a passion for the _macabre_; for what
Huysmans calls "The October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a
gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire which shakes
your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a
poet, he was no match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual
prestidigitation. The mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious
detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights
into the cosmical blue, the Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the
American was more versatile than his French translator. That Baudelaire
said, "Evil, be thou my good," is doubtless true. He proved all things
and found them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a worshipper
of Satan for the sake of paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish
to us--in his heart he was a believer. His was "an infinite reverse
aspiration," and mixed up with his pose was a disgust for vice, for
life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called
him the Kamtschatka of Romanticism; its remotest hyperborean peak.
Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is
alive, and is read. His glistening phosphorescent trail is over French
poetry and he is the begetter of a school:--Verlaine, Villiers de
l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Verhaeren, and
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who
was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be
the opposite of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong
with the world."