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I
PREFACE
France is passing through a period of vulgarity. Paris, a center radiating
universal stupidity. Despite Molière and Béranger, no one would ever have
believed that France would take to the road of progress at such a rate. matters
of art, terrae incognitae.
Great Men are stupid.
My book may have done some good; I do not regret that. It may have
done harm; I do not rejoice at that.
The aim of poetry. This book is not made for my wives, my daughters,
or my sisters.
Every sin, every crime I have related has been imputed to me.
Hatred and contempt as forms of amusement. Elegists are vulgar
scum. Et verbum caro factum est. The poet is of no party. Otherwise, he
would be a mere mortal.
The Devil. Original sin. Man as good. If you would, you could be
the Tyrant's favorite; it is more difficult to love God than to believe in Him.
On the other hand, it is more difficult for people nowadays to believe in the
Devil than to love him. Everyone smells him and no one believes in him. Sublime
sublety of the Devil.
A soul to my liking. The scene. --Thus, novelty. --The Epigraph.
--D'Aurevilly. --The Renaissance. --Gérard de Nerval. --We are all hanged or
hangable.
I have included a certain amount of filth to please the gentleman of the press.
They have proved ungrateful.
II
PREFACE TO THE FLOWERS
It is not for my wives, my daughters, or my sisters that this book has been
written; nor for the wives, daughters, or sisters of my neighbors. I leave that
to those who have some reason to confuse good deeds with fine language.
I know the passionate lover of fine style exposes himself to the
hatred of the masses; but no respect for humanity, no false modesty, no
conspiracy, no universal suffrage will ever force me to speak the unspeakable
jargon of this age, or to confuse ink with virtue.
Certain illustrious poets have long since divided among themselves
the more flowery provinces of the realm of poetry. I have found it amusing, and
the more pleasant because the task was more difficult, to extract beauty
from Evil. This book, which is quintessentially useless and absolutely
innocent, was written with no other aim than to divert myself and to practice
my passionate taste for the difficult.
Some have told me that these poems might do harm; I have not
rejoiced at that. Others, good souls, that they might do good; and that has
given me no regret. I was equally surprised at the former's fear and the
latter's hope, which only served to prove once again that this age has
unlearned all the classical notions of literature.
Despite the encouragement a few celebrated pedants have given to
man's natural stupidity, I should never have believed our country could move
with such speed along the road of progress. The world has taken on a
thickness of vulgarity that raises a spiritual man's contempt to the violence
of a passion. But there are those happy hides so thick that poison itself could
not penetrate them.
I had intended, at first, to answer numerous criticisms and at the
same time to explain a few quite simple questions that have been totally
obscured by modern enlightenment: What is poetry? What is its aim? On the
distinction between the Good and the Beautiful; on the Beauty of Evil; that
rhythm and rhyme answer the immortal need in man for monotony, symmetry, and
surprise; on adapting style to subject; on the vanity and danger of
inspiration, etc., etc.; but this morning I was so rash as to read some of the
public newspapers; suddenly an indolence of the weight of twenty atmospheres
fell upon me, and I was stopped, faced by the appalling uselessness of
explaining anything whatever to anyone whatever. Those who know can divine me,
and for those who can not or will not understand, it would be fruitless to pile
up explanations.
C.B.
How the artist, by a prescribed series of exercises, can
proportionately increase his originality;
How poetry is related to music through prosody, whose roots go
deeper into the human soul than any classical theory indicates;
That French poetry possesses a mysterious and unrecognized prosody,
like the Latin and English languages;
Why any poet who does not know exactly how many rhymes each word
has is incapable of expressing any idea whatever;
That the poetic phrase can imitate (and in this, it is like the art
of music and the science of mathematics) a horizontal line, an ascending or
descending vertical line; that it can rise straight up to heaven without losing
its breath, or go perpendicularly to hell with the velocity of any weight; that
it can follow a spiral, describe a parabola, or zigzag, making a series of
superimposed angles;
That poetry is like the arts of painting, cooking, and cosmetics in
its ability to express every sensation of sweetness or bitterness, beatitude or
horror, by coupling a certain noun with a certain adjective, in analogy or
contrast;
How, by relying on my principle and using the knowledge which I
guarantee to teach him in twenty lessons, any man can learn to compose a
tragedy that will be no more hooted at than another, or line up a poem long
enough to be as dull as any epic known.
A difficult matter, to rise to that divine callousness! For,
despite my most commendable efforts, even I have not been able to resist the
desire to please my contemporaries, as witness in several places, laid on like
make-up, certain patches of base flattery aimed at democracy, and even a
certain amount of filth meant to excuse the dreariness of my subject. But the
gentlemen of the press have proved ungrateful for tender attentions of this
kind, I have eliminated every trace of both, so far as possible, from this new
edition.
I propose, in order to prove again the excellence of my method, to
apply it in the near future to celebrating the pleasures of devotion and the
raptures of military glory, though I have never known either.
Notes on plagiarisms. --Thomas Gray. Edgar Poe (2 passages).
Longfellow (2 passages). Statius. Virgil (the whole of Andromache). Aeschylus.
Victor Hugo.
III
DRAFT OF A PREFACE FOR THE Flowers of Evil
(To be combined perhaps with earlier notes)
If there is any glory in not being understood, or in being
only very slightly so, I may without boasting say that with this little book I
have at a single stroke both won and deserved that glory. Submitted several
times over to various publishers who rejected it with disgust, put on trial and
mutilated in 1857 as a result of a quite bizarre misapprehension, then
gradually revived, augmented, and fortified during several years' silence, only
to disappear agin thanks to my losing interest, this discordant product of the Muse
of modern times, again enlivened with a few violent new touches, dares
today for the third time to face the sun of stupidity.
This is not my fault, but that of an insistent publisher who thinks
he is strong enough to brave the public distaste. "This book will remain a
stain on your whole life," one of my friends, a great poet, predicted from
the beginning. And indeed all my misadventures have so far justified him. But I
have one of those unhappy characters that enjoy hatred and feel glorified by
contempt. My diabolically passionate taste for stupidity makes me take peculiar
pleasure in the falsifications of calumny. Being as chaste as paper, as sober
as water, as devout as a woman at communion, as harmless as a sacrificial lamb,
it would not displease me to be taken for a debauchee, a drunkard, and infidel,
a murderer. My publisher insists that it might be of some use, to me and to
him, to explain why and how I have written this book, what were my means and
aims, my plan and method. Such a critical task might well have the luck to
interest those minds that love profound rhetoric. For those I shall perhaps
write it later on and have it printed in ten copies. But, on second though,
doesn't it seem more obvious that this would be a quite superfluous undertaking
for everyone concerned since those are the minds that already know or guess and
the rest will never understand? I have too much fear of being ridiculous to
wish to breath into the mass of humanity the understanding of my art object; in
doing so, I should fear to resemble those Utopians who by decree wish to make
all Frenchment rich and virtuous at a single stroke. And morover, my best, my
supreme reason is that is annoys and bores me. Do we invite the crowd, the
audience, behind the scenes, into the workshops of the costume and scene
designers; into the actress's dressingroom?Do we show the public (enthusiastic
today, tomorrow indifferent) the mechanism behind our effects? Do we explain to
them the revisions, the improvisations adopted in rehearsal, and even to what
extent instinct and sincerity are mixed with artifice and charlatanry, all
indespensable to the amalgam that is the work itself? Do we display all the
rags, the rouge, the pulleys, the chains, the alterations, the scribbled-over
proof sheets, in short all the horrors that make up the sanctuary of art?
In any case, such is not my mood today. I have no desire either to
demonstrate, to astonish, to amuse, or to persuade. I have my nerves and my
vertigo. I aspire to absolute rest and continuous night. Though I have sung the
mad pleasures of wine and opium, I thirst only for a liquour unknown on earth,
which the pharmoceutics of heaven itself cannot afford me; a liquor that
contains neither vitality nor death, neither excitation or extinction. To know
nothing, to teach nothing, to will nothing, to feel nothing, to sleep and still
to sleep, this today is my only wish. A base and loathsome wish, but sincere.
Nevertheless, since the best of taste teaches us not to fear
contradicting ourselves a bit, I have collected at the end of this abominable
book certain testimonials of sympathy from a few of the men I prize most, so
that an impartial reader may infer from them that I am not absolutely deserving
of excommunication, and that since I have managed to make myself loved of some,
my heart, whatever printed rag may have said of it, is perhaps not "as
frightfully hideous as my face."
Finally, the uncommon generousity which those gentlemen, the
critics...
Since ignorance is increasing...
I take it on myself to denounce imitations...
(Translated by J.M.)
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