The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
coining of the term “ivory tower.”32 Baudelaire’s brief description of Stello might confirm the superficial applicability of the coinage to the novel, but Vigny’s account of the relationship between poetry and politics is complex, and highly significant for Baudelaire’s purpose.
Vigny’s novel is a dialogue in which the fictional Romantic poet Stello, suffering from a deep depression, is “treated” over the course of an evening by the so-called Doctor Noir. Quite unlike Poe, who, Baudelaire argues, labors under the sign of a tormenting ill fortune, Stello was born “under the most auspicious star in heaven.”33 Nevertheless, he suffers spells of melancholy, during which only the “comfort of a human voice” protects him against severe attacks (F 4; E 4). When Doctor Noir finds him, Stello has isolated himself and is contemplating, “out of sheer despair,” writing a treatise “on behalf of a sublime form of government” (F 8; E 7). Doctor Noir is so alarmed that he offers to cure him through the “homeopathic” method (F 9; E 8) of telling him three stories about poets—Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert, Thomas Chatterton, and André Chénier—who die, in Vigny’s telling, as a result of the governmental forms under which they live: absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and republicanism, respectively. He offers the death of the poets as evidence that political ambitions are fundamentally at odds with Stello’s poetic vocation. In the course of the stories, we learn that Doctor Noir has tended to these poets, and intervenes on their behalf with the ruling authorities of each political order. The three rulers all refuse aid, and all speak candidly to Doctor Noir about their disdain for poets and poetry.34
Vigny insists that the hostility of the rulers to poets is not specific to the three forms of government the doctor encounters but is fundamental to the relationship between art and political power. Doctor Noir tells Stello that “the essence of Power is irreconcilable with your poetic essence, and … one cannot expect it to do anything but try to destroy what conflicts with it” (F 197; E 173). The poets are “eternal pariahs” (F 188; E 165), their history “an unbroken chain of glorious exiles” (F 193; E 169). Doctor Noir’s “prescription” follows from this observation: he orders Stello to “separate the poetic life from the political life” (F 205; E 179). Although the doctor’s orders might seem to counsel a stereotypically aestheticist turn from reality to art, the judgment is pragmatic and does not require the poet entirely to sever the tie between art and politics. The crucial emphasis, for Vigny, is on the word “life.” Poets need solitude, while politics demands engagement in the public square. The poet should “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” allow politicians to “play their role,” and shun explicit political activity, as well as the lure of celebrity, literary schools, and academic associations, in favor of a solitary life devoted to the poetic craft (F 205; E 179). Retreat is the poet’s only answer to the depredations of power, regardless of the political theories that power serves.
As Doctor Noir’s allusion to the theatricality of politics suggests, this turn away from active engagement in the public square is more complicated than it initially seems to be. Doctor Noir, much like Baudelaire—who, in symbolic mourning for the Second Republic, took to wearing only black after Louis Napoleon’s coup—defines the poet’s solitude in political terms. The poet, Vigny argues, should stand above the political fray but still intervene when necessary: “The solitary thinker observes an armed neutrality that mobilizes at need. It is he who puts his finger on the scale and decides the balance, now urging on, now restraining, the spirit of nations; he inspires public actions or protests against them, in accordance with what his foresight reveals to him. What matter if his own head be endangered in the sudden advance or retreat?” (F 207; E 180–81). Doctor Noir’s prescription finds its echo in Baudelaire’s account of the relationship between the solitary dandy or the proud anchorite and the nation as a whole. As a practical matter, the poet cannot help but be engaged with politics; the most cunning poets do so only when necessary, and only on their own terms, preserving their hard-won artistic autonomy in all other instances. Recognizing a crucial distinction between genuine politics and the quotidian play of power, poets maintain an internal distance from the clamor of the public square. They speak to the “spirit” of the nation, avoiding direct competition with the status quo. The fact that even the most cautious poet’s head may be endangered by such engagement is a crucial reminder that poetry can never separate itself completely from public affairs.
Vigny’s depiction of political power in Stello is deeply satirical; the rulers Doctor Noir encounters are invariably vain and duplicitous, and much of the novel’s irony comes from the fact that these rulers are unknowingly on the brink of their demise. Like the America that torments Poe, they are real embodiments of political decadence. The only answer to the corruption and falsehood that attends political power, Vigny suggests, is a return to an older ideal of association. “The Republic of letters,” Doctor Noir tells Stello, “is the only one whose citizens are truly free [la seule qui puisse jamais être composée de citoyens vraiment libre], for it is composed of isolated thinkers, often unknown [inconnu] even to each other” (F 206; E 180). Coming on the heels of the story of Chénier’s death under the Terror, Doctor Noir’s reference to the republic of letters is highly charged, suggesting that the political form of the republic can transcend the lure of power that makes poetry a potentially fatal occupation. Vigny’s republic is composed of individuals who never meet, never even know one another, and who share only their devotion to beauty and a desire to ensure its dissemination. It is precisely this kind of republic that Baudelaire seeks to define in his essays on Poe, and evokes in the list of journal titles I discussed in the opening pages of this book, as well as in the recurrent evocations of an elite family of taste that arise elsewhere in his writings. Adding Poe’s legend to the stories of Gilbert, Chatterton, and Chénier, Baudelaire takes on the role of Doctor Noir, updating his prescription for a greatly changed political context. Later decadent writers build upon this lesson, adapting it to their own political contexts and varying relationships to the public. Decadent writers fashion themselves as contributing members of an international republic of letters. Observing the “armed neutrality” Doctor Noir counsels, they continue to speak to and for a body of “unknown sympathizers” who understand reading and writing as deeply political acts—a signal contribution to the public good, however invisible this contribution may remain to a ruling order that lacks ears to hear.
CHAPTER 2
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The Politics of Appreciation
Gautier and Swinburne on Baudelaire
I know of no sentiment more perplexing than admiration.
—Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier”
The Precursor
In the introduction to his section on the decadents and aesthetes in Degeneration, Max Nordau offers a suggestive analogy for Baudelaire’s influence over later writers in the decadent movement. “As on the death of Alexander the Great,” he writes, “his generals fell on the conqueror’s empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his contemporaries and the generation following—many even without waiting for his madness and death—take possession of some one of his peculiarities for literary exploitation.”1 With his typical blend of blindness and surprising insight, Nordau here identifies the remarkable extent to which the decadent movement defined itself through its reception of Baudelaire. For Nordau, Baudelaire’s less talented imitators merely pillage his works for their themes, rather than following their own talents (or lack thereof): Catulle Mendès takes his lasciviousness; the Symbolists develop his mystical theories; Paul Verlaine borrows his mixture of sensuality and pietism; Algernon Charles Swinburne appropriates his Sadism. Denigrating the originality of decadent writers is a veritable cottage industry in critical writings on the period. Decadence, as Arthur Symons—surely no ally of Nordau’s—writes in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), is the work of “lesser men,” whose celebration of vice is a sheer pose.2 But imitation is also the sincerest form of flattery, and even the most servile expressions of admiration for Baudelaire, I argue in this chapter, are really forms of creative reception, the means by which later writers import the French poet’s vision of aesthetic community and the politics