The Dark Eminence of Modernism

BOOK REVIEWS THE DARK EMINENCE OF MODERNISM Patricia Clements. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. $33.50 This dense and elegant volume is a distinct addition to our studies. Its argument is that the major derivation of "modemism" is from Baudelaire. Baudelaire's critical prose in particular is sometimes translated or refracted through the English modernists from Swinburne to Eliot. Such transactions are so numerous that it remains a mystery as to why it has been left to Professor Clements to detect them and place them in an explicable context. When we look at the Clements cast it is amusing to reflect on the distance we have come not only from F. R. Leavis' New Bearings or C. K. Stead's New Poetic—a work still high in critical esteem—but, to descend, from Louise Bogan's coarse version of modemism which simply dismisses the whole of Victorian poetry. Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, Symons, Edith Sitwell, a real rogue's gallery. Matters tend to be more under control when we come to the Imagists, Murry, Huxley and Eliot. The French master's presence can be incidentally detected in the "flower of darkness" or "flowers of mud" of Conrad's Marlowe, Lawrence's Women in Love and Virginia Woolf. From this new canon there are some trenchant omissions: Yeats, Pound more stimulated by Corbière and Laforgue, while Hardy, though he may sense "the ache of modemism," remains presumably more or less innocent of Baudelaire. Baudelaire was naturalised by being made a culture counter. Swinburne begins the process with his Spectator essay of 1862 and his splendid Blake of 1868. What Baudelaire offers is an exemplum of "Art for Art's sake" in the sense that formal qualities in a work of art remain their own justification, anticipating the handling versus subject which was to become a cliché of Parisian ateliers. Swinburne also, according to the French, identified "the profoundly and broadly classical" spirit under the apparent Romantic surface of Les Fleurs du Mal. He also stressed the importance of going beyond national cultures"— internationalism as much as Art for Art is stressed in the Spectator piece—no less than the relationship of literature to the other arts as part of a conscious "modernity." And, in Swinburne's Notes on Poems and Ballads, the importance of dramatic distance, of impersonality, a tenet of a later modemism, is strongly accented. Baudelaire was already a dubious name in the England of the 1860s and 1870s. Swinburne's comments on the master assume a double audience: the one literate but philistine; the other initiated and acute. Swinburne's review of two fictive Baudelarian poets, topped up with suitably lubricious and creepy 81 30:1,/îeviewi extracts in his own French, or the brilliantly funny Fille du Policeman indicate the playful nature of his dealings with the larger audience. With Pater, the subversive quality of Baudelaire becomes the occasion for evasion and with Wilde an opportunity of seeing how far he could go; but Wilde was both more daring and more vulnerable than Swinbume. It is with the Swinbume of literary criticism and the novel that Clements is most engaged and her comments on Lesbia Brandon as an enactment of a destructive sexual sensibility are persuasive. She concurs with Edmund Wilson, both in his high valuation of the novels and his distaste for the "mossy" quality of the poems. Only "Ave Atque Vale" is thought worthy of extended comment: first, for the sense of intense personal loss and secondly because it offers a more than usual preciseness of phrase to suggest a community of poets that transcends national traditions. Of this community of poets, whose principal figures are Sappho and Baudelaire, Swinbume himself through the elegy with its imagery of clasped hands, communion, marriage, comradeship, asserts his membership. However, Clements' statement that the garden of "Ave Atque Vale" is unlike any of those in Swinburne's other elegies requires a faint protest. "The Forsaken Garden" is an elegy on Swinburne's youth and the flowers are rank enough there if not altogether poisonous. A further distinction implicitly drawn between Baudelaire and Swinbume is, that unlike Baudelaire in, say, "Femmes Damnées" the...