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Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediaeval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars.
I think of these facts and think of Baudelaire's prose poem, that poem in which he tells how a dog will run away howling if you hold to him a bottle of choice scent, but if you offer him some putrid morsel picked out of some gutter hole, he will sniff round it joyfully, and will seek to lick your hand for gratitude. Baudelaire compared that dog to the public.
He knew a hawk from a handsaw despite his temperament of a mystic. "He who carries his own most intimate emotions to their highest point becomes the first in a file of a long series of men"; but, adds Mr. Ellis: "To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men." El Greco, like Charles Baudelaire, cultivated his hysteria.
Le 28 Juillet is the only one of his works in which he depicts modern life, and was a striking refutation to those who complained that modern costume is too ugly or prosaic to be treated in painting. "Every old master," Baudelaire usefully pointed out, "has been modern in his day. The greater number of fine portraits of former times are dressed in the costume of their period.
Indeed in one of his books he refers to Huysmans as his friend. It is further apparent that he is acquainted with the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly, Josephin Péladan, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Catulle Mendès, and Jules Laforgue, especially the Laforgue of the "Moralités Legendaires." But Saltus surpasses Poe in almost every respect save as a poet.
'All Balzac's characters; said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius. A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades.
It pricks the nerves, it pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the formless, but there is something uncanny about it all, like some huge, prehistoric bird, an awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes, horrid snout and scream. Berlioz, like Baudelaire, has the power of evoking the shudder.
Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a master of style. "Style, you know," he added, "is the man." "Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the colonel assented; he wondered who Flaubert was. Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.
M. Guys was an artist selected by M. Baudelaire as the fine flower of modern art, and the true, though hurried, designer of the fugitive modern beauty. It is recorded that M. Guys was once sent to draw a scene of triumph and certain illuminations in London, probably about the end of the Crimean War.
It was a pity, I sometimes felt, that he had not studied German as thoroughly as French; Goethe might have done more for him than Baudelaire or Balzac, for in spite of all his stodgy German faults, Goethe is the best guide through the mysteries of life whom the modern world has yet produced.
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