262/1 - "Reader! Bruder!" (German,
brother) An echo of the last line of Au Lecteur .
Appel's translation "Hypocrite reader - my fellow man - my
brother"
I found other translations where "my fellow man" became "my twin":
Roy Campbell (1952) "Hypocritre reader! - You! - My twin! - My
brother!"
Norman R. Shapiro Les Fleurs du mal, Univ. Chicago Press."—You know
him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!"
284/3 "Shorn Baudelaire": A.Appel: "the poet's dramatic baldness" [ "an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn
Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind."]
..................................................................................
* - T.S Eliot's essay: The Lesson of
Baudelaire
With regard to certain intellectual activities across the
Channel, which at the moment appear to take the place of poetry in the life of
Paris, some effort ought to be made to arrive at an intelligent point of view on
this side. It is probable that this French performance is of value almost
exclusively for the local audience; I do not here assert that it has any value
at all, only that its pertinence, if it has any, is to a small public formidably
well instructed in its own literary history, erudite and stuffed with tradition
to the point of bursting. Undoubtedly the French man of letters is much better
read in French literature than the English man of letters is in any literature;
and the educated English poet of our day must be too conscious, by his
singularity in that respect, of what he knows, to form a parallel to the
Frenchman. If French culture is too uniform, monotonous*, English culture, when
it is found, is too freakish and odd. Dadaism is a diagnosis of a disease of the
French mind; whatever lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable
in London.
Whatever value there may be in Dada depends upon the extent to
which it is a moral criticism of French literature and French life. All
first-rate poetry is occupied with morality: this is the lesson of Baudelaire.
More than any poet of his time, Baudelaire was aware of what most mattered: the
problem of good and evil. What gives the French Seventeenth Century literature
its solidity is the fact that it had its Morals, that it had a coherent point of
view. Romanticism endeavoured to form another Morals--Rousseau, Byron, Goethe,
Poe were moralists. But they have not sufficient coherence; not only was the
foundation of Rousseau rotten, his structure was chaotic and inconsistent.
Baudelaire, a deformed Dante (somewhat after the intelligent Barbey
d'Aurevilly's phrase), aimed, with more intellect plus intensity, and without
much help from his predecessors, to arrive at a point of view toward good and
evil.
English poetry, all the while, either evaded the responsibility, or
assumed it with too little seriousness. The Englishman had too much fear, or too
much respect, for morality to dream that possibly or necessarily he should be
concerned with it, vom Haus aus, in poetry. This it is that makes some of the
most distinguished English poets so trifling. Is anyone seriously interested in
Milton's view of good and evil? Tennyson decorated the morality he found in
vogue; Browning really approached the problem, but with too little seriousness,
with too much complacency; thus the " Ring and the Book" just misses
greatness--as the revised version of "Hyperion" almost, or just, touches it. As
for the verse of the present time, the lack of curiosity in technical matters,
of the academic poets of to-day (Georgian et cætera) is only an indication of
their lack of curiosity in moral matters. On the other hand, the poets who
consider themselves most opposed to Georgianism, and who know a little French,
are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgment only as a lavish display of
Bengal lights, Roman candles, catherine-wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons.
Vous, hypocrite lecteur . . . .
* Not without qualification. M.
Valéry is a mathematician; M. Benda is a mathematician and a musician. These,
however, are men of exceptional intelligence.