Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/692

BATUM. composed chiefly of Russians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Persians.

BATWA, bat'wa. A pygmy tribe in the mountainous country of the Wissmann Falls dis- trict, southern-central Africa. According to Ver- ner they are sometimes less than 4 feet high; their heads are small and well shaped, their eyes small, bright, and deeply set, and their color chocolate; they are trimly built and symmetri- cal, with leg muscles well developed, and arms less so; the feet and hands are small and well formed; the hair is kinky, and there is no beard. The villages are not regularly laid out; the houses are beehive-shape. The Batwa are under the protection of the Bakuba, who have taught them to cultivate a few vegetables. They are by habit meat-eaters. In addition larva; of in- sects and wild roots are eaten. Their weapons are bows, arrows, and knives. The boys are taught to hunt and the girls dig edible roots. Household furniture consists of a few Bakuba earthen pots, a bed of sticks woven together, bas- kets, quivers, nets, and bamboo fish-traps. They do not make pottery, weave, or work metals, and have no musical instruments. The bruised root of a species of Euphorbia furnishes arrow-poison. Their knowledge of the habits of wild animals is remarkable, and sight, smell, and hearing are well developed. They are monogamous, and faithful and affectionate toward their children. Charms and amulets are worn. In their funeral customs the men abstain from hunting and dancing, while the women remain in the huts and weep.

BATYUSHKOFF, ba'tiish-k6f, Konstantin Nikolayevitch (1787-1855). A Russian elegiac poet. He was born at Vologda and educated at Saint Petersburg. Here he mastered the Italian, German, and French languages, and very early began to write poetry. He entered the military service: took part in 1807 in the Niemen cam- paign: later was in Finland, and entered Paris with the Army of the Allies in 1814. His un- bounded admiration for Voltaire and France had received a rude shock when Moscow was burned by 'the modern Vandals:' but the sight of Paris made him forget it all, and he imme- diately went to Voltaire's grave. In 1818 he was appointed attaché of the Russian Embassy at Naples, and the dream of his life — to visit sunny Italy — was realized; but his happiness did not last long. In 1822 he fell a victim to a brain disease, after years of mental aberration. In addition to his elegies, of which the chief is, perhaps, The Death of Tasso, his original works include epistles and narrative and lyric poems. He also made excellent translations from the Latin of Tibullus, the French of Parny, the Italian of Petrarch, and the German of Mat- thisson. His whole life was devoted to the formal perfection of Russian poetry — a struggle from which he came out victorious — so that he is the real teacher of Pushkin in this respect. The best edition of his works is that by his brother, P. N. Batyushkoff (3 vols.. Saint Petersburg, 1834), with an exhaustive biography by L. N. Maykoff and commentaries by the latter and V. I. Sayitoff.

BAUAN, bou'.an, or BAUANG, bou'ang. A town of Luzon, Philipiunes, in the Province of Batangas (Map: Luzon, F 12). It is situated on the Bay of Batangas, about 4 miles northwest of Batangas, the capital of the province. Population, in 1898, 39,659.

BAU'BO (Gk. Βαυβώ, Baubō). A mythical woman of Eleusis, whom Hesychius calls "the Nurse of Demeter," and about whom there are many stories. These seem to have been the inventions of later times, coined for the purpose of giving a mythical origin to the jokes in which women used to indulge at the festival of Demeter. She was in some way connected with the Eleusinian Mysteries, and is introduced by Goethe into the second part of Faust as the type of feminine lust.

BAUCHER, bo'sha', (1790-1873). A French hippologist, born in Versailles. He published a new system of equestrian training, under the title of Méthode d'équitation basée sur des nouveaux principes (Paris, 1867) — a unique work, which occasioned considerable comment, and which has been translated into several European languages (English translation under the title A New Method of Horsemanship, Philadelphia, 1856). Under Napoleon III. Baucher was appointed to a position in the imperial manège.

BAU'CIS. See.

BAUDELAIRE, bod'lar'. (1821-67). A French poet, born in Paris, April 9, 1821. He was the forerunner of the decadent school in modern French poetry, and in his kind greater than any of his successors. His parents sought to turn him from literature by travel in the Orient, and, as might have been foreseen, confirmed him in his perversity. The imagery, the colors, the odors of those scenes, that splendid nature, new and strange, fired his eccentric imagination and seemed to command a poetic expression. Yet at first this morbid hyperæsthesia, which was to rise at times to emotional hysteria, was controlled by a strong critical bent. Baudelaire's early essays show remarkable keenness and prescience of the trend of lyric poetry, and his translations of Poe's Tales (1856) made that author almost as much a classic of French as of American romantic fiction. But Baudelaire's cardinal work in French literature is the Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), 1857, in which the restless reaction from the confident outlook of scientific determinism finds its first, its most morbidly pessimistic, and possibly its strongest expression. Baudelaire lived for ten years longer, "cultivating hysteria with delight and terror." as he tells us, and died in a hospital at last after a year of semi-lunacy induced by the excessive use of nervous stimulants. Baudelaire's topsy-turvy ethics regard nature as evil, the natural as ugly", decay as a release, and death as a blessing. Possibly he was insincere; certainly he was intentionally brutal, and strained after effects in "the last convulsions of expiring individualism," as though drunk with the lees of romantic wine. There are 151 of these rank night-shade Flowers, all short poems, compactly built, with a mastery of technique unsurpassed in France, carefully polished and elaborated moral paradoxes, in which a shuddering at the vileness of life alternates with futile aspirations for an emancipation from it. For even while Baudelaire worshiped Satan, he clung to the Cross, and became toward the close of his life as morosely ascetic in resolution as he was extravagantly