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But he took only a casual interest in its welfare. "My dear Betteridge," he used to say, "if you were aware of the large issues of art and life, you would see that it would be a mere waste of time worrying about such a little thing as discipline in a house. You should widen your intellectual horizon. Read Verlaine and Baudelaire and then see life as it is."
All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as it was, Swinburne's lines on Baudelaire: "There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life durable...."
'But is there nothing else? he asked. 'Only a temper, so natural to genius disturbed or diverted in the process of composition, and a passion for the felidae, such as has often been remarked in the great. There was Charles Baudelaire, Mahomet 'I don't know what you mean, sir, and, said Mrs. Gisborne, rising, and snapping her reticule, 'I think I was a fool for answering your advertisement.
You know the sonnet in which Baudelaire compares the bird on the wing to the poet with the Muse beside him, and the albatross on deck to the poet in the drawing-room. You remember the sonnet, how the sailors teased the bird with their short black pipes." "But the breast feathers?" "We didn't kill the bird; I wouldn't allow him to be killed.
"'Besides, she added with that really very charming smile of hers, 'probably you have not looked carefully at either of them. There followed several compliments on my figure, to which I found nothing to reply, so completely had she disarmed me by those four lines from Baudelaire. "She condescended to explain further: 'Le Mesge is a learned gentleman whom I find useful.
But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoïevsky, its compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in the very roots of his being, and recorded as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche the fluctuations of his sick will.
Baudelaire, whose critical flair never failed him, wrote in his Curiosités Esthétiques: "Daumier's distinguishing note as an artist is his certainty. His drawing is fluent and easy; it is a continuous improvisation.
Wagner, who suffered from the hostility or indifference of the public in 1860, at the time when Tannhäuser was performed at the Opera, had already found, however, a few understanding people in Paris who discerned his genius and sincerely admired him. The most interesting of the writers who first began to understand musical emotion is Charles Baudelaire.
When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' della vagina della membre sue, to use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean phrases he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine.
The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess that modern esthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the beauty disease. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses.
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