Born in Paris in 1821, debaucher, wastrel, drug user, Charles Baudelaire died in 1867 of syphilis and failed in almost everything he tried to do. Except to shock people. He was good at that. When Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) was first published, in 1857, it was not met with the universal praise that Baudelaire had hoped for and may even have expected; instead, Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy and were convicted of a public offense and fined. Six of the poems were banned until 1949, and Baudelaire’s name, for nearly a century after his death, was synonymous with depravity and vice in the mind of a French public that has always been more conservative in its moral judgments than the image of “Gay Paree” would suggest.
Baudelaire suffered terribly. He planned many works but never wrote them; he started others but never finished them; he declared bankruptcy but still could not escape his creditors; when he died, in the arms of his mother, who had always told him sternly that he ought to live another way, only a few of the many invited to his funeral came. Yet his achievement was enormous. This strange, tortured soul was a hard worker and a producer.
If he possessed any fame during his lifetime it was as the translator of the American author, until then unknown in Europe, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe appealed to Baudelaire; they shared a dark view of mankind and the world and a concept of the poet as one who was able to lift the mask from evil and show it in all its putrescent appeal and beauty. Baudelaire wrote the first critical article to appear on Poe in any language other than English and translated many of Poe’s stories into classical French—these translations are still the preferred ones. But Poe was hardly a subject to remake Baudelaire’s reputation.
He was also a fine, although almost completely unappreciated, art critic. He knew Delacroix and Courbet, and what is more understood them and what they were trying to do, which most Frenchmen of his time did not. His review of the Salon of 1846 is said to be a landmark in aesthetic criticism. He continued to write such reviews for twenty years until, paralyzed and oppressed by poverty, he was unable to visit the places where new paintings were being shown.
The most important events of Baudelaire’s life were private ones. When he was twenty he took his only sea voyage, a trip to India, which was aborted when he suddenly declared his intention to return home. But for the rest of his life Baudelaire remembered images of that voyage, and they fill his poems with a strange, beautiful light. All of his voyages were, thenceforth, in his imagination only, but he soared nonetheless, perhaps because his broken body was so resolutely earthbound.
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exilé sur le sol, au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”
[The poet is like the prince of the clouds,
Who rides the tempest and scorns the hunter. An exile on the ground, amidst boos and insults, His wings of a giant prevent his walking.]
These famous lines, from the poem “The Albatross,” became the marching song of the Symbolist movement, which was already marshaling its forces in France when Baudelaire died. The lines express Baudelaire’s feelings about poetry, and his heartbreak.
Many poems in Flowers of Evil are erotic, shocking, perhaps even depraved, but they are not to be read for that reason. They are also beautiful. And they are symbolic; they have meanings that must be sought out, that are not apparent on the surface. To read Baudelaire, then, is something of an effort—and he is hard to translate. Nevertheless, even a little of the essence of Baudelaire is worth the effort of distilling it.
Why? Because poor Baudelaire, so blind to his own good, saw ours better than we are likely to do ourselves. The world is not just full of fools; everyone knows that (when we do not wish to forget it); it is also full of knaves, and worse than knaves. Theologically speaking, we have to admit that the Devil has never given up and may even be winning. Priests and prophets are not enough to stop him. Poets are needed, too, to point with both astonishment and derision at the cloven foot showing through his shoes and the horns peeking through his hair.
CHARLES DICKENS
1812–1870
A Christmas Carol
Hard Times
The Pickwick Papers
Bleak House
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812. His childhood years were spent in Chatham and he returned to the town in 1860 to live in his famous house, Gad’s Hill, until his death. From 1822 to 1860, Dickens lived in London, where he experienced his most desolate moments and his greatest triumphs.
In 1824, his father, an extravagant ne’er-do-well who was the pattern for Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, went to prison for debt. Charles, the eldest son, was withdrawn from school and sent to work. An improvement in the family fortunes made it possible for him to later go back to school, but he never forgot the depression he felt at that time and he wrote about the experience, or similar ones, in several of his books.
Dickens left school for good when he was fifteen to work in a lawyer’s office. He soon became a court shorthand reporter and, later, a parliamentary reporter. He liked journalism, but he found he had contempt for both the legal profession and for Parliament.
In 1833, when he was twenty-one, he began contributing stories and essays to magazines and published a collection of them in 1836 called Sketches by “Boz.” He was then invited to produce a comic serial narrative; seven weeks later the first installment of The Pickwick Papers appeared. Within a few months Pickwick was the rage and Dickens, not yet twenty-five, was the most popular author in England.
Pickwick was written by a very young man who did not yet fully comprehend his powers, and who, furthermore, while it was still running, started another serial, Oliver Twist (1837–39). Indeed, the fecundity of his imagination and the skill of his pen were in these early years incredible. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) was begun before Oliver Twist was completed, and it was in turn immediately followed by The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), and that by Barnaby Rudge (1841). At this point Dickens, exhausted, rested for five months, but by 1843 he was publishing again; in that year appeared perhaps the most famous of all his works, A Christmas Carol.
The early phase of Dickens’ career is said to have ended in 1850, with the publication of the autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. It was Dickens’s favorite and it is the favorite of many readers as well.
For years Dickens had been editing a monthly magazine; starting in 1850, at the age of thirty-eight, he began to produce the weekly Household Words, which was succeeded in 1860 by the even more popular All the Year Round. He edited all the copy and wrote a great deal of it, including the first serial publication of his later novels. The ventures were enormously lucrative—and time-consuming.