critic had conceived a high expectation. Of this expectation CHARLES BAUDELAIRE was the object. In periods very rich in literature — Alexandrian, Victorian, Elizabethan, or Periclean - by a very common process the larger fames throw over the smaller undue eclipse, and evoke a one-sidedness of view which in more than one instance has run into some permanent plastic antipathy or neglect. Precisely as Egyptian superstition proscribed free study of the human frame, and for centuries, as a result, repeated its crude shapeless goddesses and gods, so the proscription which such men as Shakspeare or Lamartine exercised over minor contemporaries, by the very glory of their gift left the public taste crude and unresponsive to other phases of art. We cannot catch the weaker lustres of heaven when heaven is filled from east to west by one great presence. But to be true to our age and to the many-sidedness which through broadened civilisation and higher culture has expanded the thin but noble material of antique thought, we must cast an eye on subordinate growths, and strive through them to attain an unbroken circle of thought.

No literature offers more numerous instances of neglect than the French. When the national life leapt up into some passionate individuality, it was forgotten that this very height was conditioned by individualities lower indeed, by artists less intense, but not a whit less exponents of contemporary thought. When Lamartine in 1820 stood at the door of Firmin-Didot with his Méditations Poétiques under his arm - those cries of a loving and tender adolescence — the mighty shadow of Chateaubriand lay over the fields; René, Atala, were in all hearts; the literary posterity of Werther and La Nouvelle Héloïse had multiplied like an evil progeny of Iocasta ; and the graceful young Greek face of André Chénier had been forced to withdraw into the mists of French terrorism. There appeared to be no place for the author of Jocelyn, however melodious his appeal might be. It resembled the summons of foolish virgins whose lamps were without oil, and who had no right to disturb the supreme possession within. So when the sweetness of Lamartine's verse had wrought a channel for itself, more artfully and more disintegratingly than the keenest acid, into the intellectual associations of the Restoration, it was found that this lordly tree shed a twilight which menaced with blight the whole poetical growth of France. Careful observers, however-reverent gleaners could detect many a rich talent that had noiselessly developed under the shadow of the preponderant one. There were Casimir Delavigne, Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, three lovely singers, not to mention others—three nightingales (to resort to the favorite metaphor of the Minnesänger), who were singing songs of delicate sweetness and tenderness while all the world was breathlessly absorbed in the great autocrat; who sang just because they could not help it, from the pure rapture which the singing gave their own sympathetic souls, whether the world listened or not. Now we can never think of a Catullus and his band as writing their marvellous little bits of sensuality or grace without a compliment, a plaudite, which the antique world exacted of even unwilling audiences. But in Moïse, in Eloa, in Rolla, in Les Sept Messéniennes, who can help fancying the wings of the poet's own. heart fluttering in rapture at his own performance, the hands of his

own spirit clapping in glee over the wonderful beauty it had called into being? In the anthologies, Brunck's Analecta for example, we have remnants of song so sweet, honey from such undoubted Hyblas, that we almost reproach the great poets of antiquity for being so great and so completely extinguishing these delicate fires by the light of their own pitiless genius. No doubt Greece had Alfred de Mussets and André Chéniers enough if we had but record of them. And it is precisely to these minor poets, to these ripples rather than rivers, who feed a national life, to whom we look most diligently for interpretation of their epoch, for translation of national sentiment into current tongues, for clear discs on which lie figured the subtlest phases of contemporary life.

Among the poets who were born, grew up and died, who in birth, life and death were embraced by the generous amplitude of days accorded to Lamartine, was the poet whose name heads this paper. Of intellectual type most unique, the characterisation of the man, the mind, and the literary fate demands an analysis more exact than is usually allotted the personality of the poet. Our age has grown indifferent to the pose in which Victor Hugo places his thought, to the odd acrobatic feats which his imagination, like an actor on the trapèze of the Cirque des Champs Elysées, periodically rehearses; but with the queer, cold, ghostly music of the Poet of Evil, with this Manichean in art, it will be a long time before the world feels itself on intimate terms. It would be difficult for the most searching criticism to define the salient angle of this nature, or rather, just the environment which compressed an originally fair poetic nature into the masque in which the world sees it. Baudelaire's circumstances were good. He was born in wealth and respectability, he was surrounded by appreciative and powerful friends, he had had rare advantages of travel; yet nothing could erase from his nature the deep underscoring of incurable malady. The melancholy which had come with Jean-Jacques, and which had flowed in a dark, sullen stream through De Staël, Chateaubriand, St. Pierre, Sénancour, was bequeathed to him, only intensified, embittered, pessimistic. The three mystical sisters of De Quincey, the Mater Lacrymarum, the Mater Suspiriorium and the Mater Tenebrarum, had been the fairy godmothers who presided at his birth and enriched him with their fatal gifts. To these was added the Mater Malorum, the Mother of Evil, a sinister Israfel of the sweet lute. The entire literature of France of his time is impregnated with sighs, wet with tears, rent with the divine wound of grief, imbued with the eloquence which the idea that everything is in decline communicates; there is a voluptuous sadness, such as melts through poetry when the poets have become a mere luxury of a complicated and spiritual civilisation. In Baudelaire this sadness, this sweet reverie, took an acrid turn, and resulted in a nausea at the very evil which he commemorates more frequently than any other theme. Not that he was misanthropic; it is a simple impossibility for him to see good in anything. Not that he saw good and misinterpreted it to the purposes of malice; with him it was the old legend of color to the blind. It was his destiny (the saddest of all) not to technicalise a vague perversity and label it "original sin," as the theologians have

done, but simply to open his eyes, and open them on evil alone. It was with him a mathematical result, a dominant mental state, a coloring inherent, not adherent. In him was exhibited as a young man that remarkable quality which often displays itself in elderly painters an organic defect in the vision which makes them see things differently from other people, and differently from themselves at earlier stages a persistent yellow or blue hanging like gauze between them and nature, and spreading, unknown to themselves, a jaundice over their artistic activity.

It was towards the year 1849 that Baudelaire first became known known, that is, to a small knot of celebrated men whose acquaintance was fame. In a quarter of Paris not specially remote there was an old hôtel which, although not famous then, has become so since. It was here Hôtel Pimodan-in one of those quaint but gorgeous salons of the purest Louis XIV style, with its nymphs and satyrs, its vast chimney-piece, its fauteuils and sofas rich with pictorial tapestry, its great rococo clock, its Frenchified mythological imprint everywhere, delicious to the heart of Watteau's marquis and marquises, that the Hashisch-club met, rendered so notable since by the charming articles of Gautier in the Revue des deux Mondes. Here were assembled famous men and women -women who had sat as models for immortal marbles, women who had given to Ary Scheffer the exquisite suggestion of his Mignon-poets, critics, artists, testing the mysterious drug, and providing for themselves while under its influence a rarer aesthetic séance by the luxury of the surroundings. It was the Cenacle in its exaltation. Among these choice spirits Baudelaire was at first known only as a morbidly eccentric dreamer, propounding, as Gautier says, with the utmost naturalness theories whose Satanic damnableness chilled the blood and shook even the bold visionaries of Hashisch. His manner was curiously impressive, insisting, pertinacious; to his syllables a strange emphasis clung; every other word was an enclitic doubling the accent, more sharply accentuating the lines, freighted not only with unusual thought but with all the supernumeraries of it, voice, gesture, the rhetoric of tone. There were sacred letters in his words -letters which were scarcely breathed above a whisper for the awe or the passion that lay coiled within them. It was further remarked that their was an exotic savor, an Oriental peculiarity or other about him which gave to all he said a yet more un-European expression. Baudelaire travelled much in the Indian seas; he had visited the isle which St. Pierre has made illustrious; and like all really great Frenchmen who have travelled-like Joinville, Froissart, Chateaubriand, De Tocqueville- he brought back with him the haunting genius loci, an abiding home-sickness for the lands he had visited. This lurked about him like an indefinable perfume, restless, penetrating, cancelling, so to speak, his letters of naturalisation, producing in him moral expatriation. He brooded continually over the land of the sun, the richness of vegetation that is the malady of the East, the fantastic scenery, the great languorous sea, the perfumes of the flowers that create swoon and vertigo, the graceful half-naked Hindoo women with their voluptuousness, their fire and their indolence. Constantly through his saddest as through his sunniest poems the beautiful exotic life, the

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deathful jungles of the Orient croon mysteriously up. So on antique pedestals whereon dance or writhe or supplicate antique gladiators or gods, there are garlands of smiling child-faces in relief, flowers, or Cupids, or acanthus-leaves as a sort of aesthetic indemnification. So in the old masters wreaths of cherub-countenances stir in legions round some episode of martyrdom or triumph, as if to shadow forth the pity of genius in the beauty of little children. This gave him, in whatever company he might be, an air of isolation, an abstraction which, in the incessant flash and eagerness, rivalry and vivacity in French social life, at times made him a bore and a dead-weight. in his early academic examinations he had never been noted for quickness or brilliancy, for his nature had little of that sparkling iettiness which we commonly attribute to all the literary grand-children of Voltaire; but his friends saw in the unequalled flame of his eye a warmth and a resource which were invisible to others. He was tranquilly ripening to the harvest, slowly imbibing like yellowing wheat just the mellowness and soundness which will fit it afterward for the king's granaries. He is described as of marked personal beauty, neat to finicalness in attire and habit, a genuine Mahommedan in his love of water, and inclined to dandyism like Lord Byron - by the rigorous call of a nature craving all the riches of sensuous forms. No nature perhaps was ever more fully imbued with artificiality, or was ever in more perfect discord with the great figures of the Pagan past; save in a few exquisite lines he openly disclaimed all allegiance to them. He admired them as he would have admired figures cloven from the eternal marble, but he infinitely preferred their manifold progeny as it developed in the Byzantine and late Roman era. He could even delight curiously in the Medieval Latin, in the old hymnologies, in the crude and multiple diction of Apuleius and Petronius rather than in the music of the Virgilian and Ciceronian period. It is this radical modernness indeed that singles him out from the classical brotherhood by whom he was surrounded; from the essentially pagan genius-pagan by sympathy, imagery, subject-of Chénier; from the exquisire Attic suavity of Sainte-Beuve; from the statuesque classical form of Casimir Delavigne; from everything which one would think pre-arranged to paganise a substance so plastic as a poet's brain. For on all sides — in history, criticism, philosophy, belles-lettres there were streams of influence bearing directly on him and deriving their most frequent inspiration from the shores of the Ægean. There was the great critic of the Revue des deux Mondes; there was the great philologian who courts and dallies with Homer as with a lover, M. Littré; there was Renan with his queer Oriental instincts; there were the Institut and the Académie Française, the very Areopagus of classicism; there were personal friends like Gautier, Boissard, de Banville, full of the reading of the ancients: but none of these could check that inordinate passion for the literature of decadence which had stamped its signet on the mind of Baudelaire. There is even pathos in the tenacity with which he clung to the corrupt and luxurious literatures of the latest form of Greek thought or Latin philosophy, as if the language of the great models were too thin a medium to convey the abounding thought of a modern. He utters

himself boldly on this point. "Does it not appear to the reader," says he, "as to me, that the language of the latest Latin decadencethe supreme sigh of a strong man already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life-is singularly proper for expressing passion such as the poetic modern world has conceived and felt it? The words, taken in a new sense, reveal the charming maladroitness of the Northern barbarian on his knees before Roman beauty." Thus by ingenious quibbling even he made haste to acknowledge no debt to the ancients, and to break the golden bowl of classical tradition.

The book by which Baudelaire is best known is his translation of the tales and poems of Edgar Poe, translations so skilfully inwrought into the current phraseology and idiom of French thought that the works of the American writer seem new works in their foreign garb. Poe has even been claimed as a "talent" peculiarly French; but should we grant what the Germans claim from us - Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson-together with what the French, we should have little left that is distinctively American. It is not too much to say that Baudelaire owes to Poe a good moiety of his inspiration. Whole fields of thought, entire phrases, the phylacteries which Poe wore as his proudest claim to originality, the secret subsoil that underlies and makes peculiar all which has been regarded as most intensely Baudelairean, came over the seas from the keen-witted American contemporary. It is somewhat singular that M. Gautier, in his notice on M. Baudelaire's life, prefixed to the Lévy edition, quotes with approbation, as characteristically his friend's, whole pages that teem with Poe's grotesque theories. Poe's Essay on the Poetic Principle has furnished Baudelaire with the idea that is ever-recurrent with him: that the will is the supreme literary agent; that the destiny of poetry is neither didactic nor exegetical truth, but like virtue it is its own highest consummation. In common with Baudelaire, this was the theory of Balzac. As with Poe, so with Baudelaire there are mysterious ideal women — all moonshine and melancholy-flitting across the vision; lovely, wan apparitions, ideally sweet, perplexingly vague, gifted with strange magnetic eyes that fix themselves on the reader and exercise over him a weird spell. There is a hush, too, in his style as if the ear were listening for mysterious footfalls in the night, and all that accompaniment of indefinable pomp, muffled music, vapory splendor, torturing anxiety that gather at the threshold of Poe's stories and escort the reader into their mazes. To the lines "To Helen" may, it is thought, be traced the mystic fondness that Baudelaire has for describing eyes, eyes that peer out like gargoyles at the most unexpected points coupled with epithets most quaint. There are other oddities which, like the monkish devices in old manuscripts, signalise the individuality of the writer, if they do not mark certain nervous idiosyncrasies of his. M. Gautier notices, among other curious traits, the predilection which his friend had for cats-their velvety ways, the sphinx-like attitude they assume in repose, the strange perfume that seems to emanate from them, the ready sympathy they show sedentary folk, the gentle elegance of their demeanor, and the sinister night-side to their lives when with mysterious cries they seem to enter into communion with the supernatural. He had addressed many beautiful