poems, in which a particular
kind of French verse realises its ideal. Mallarme is the poet of a few,
a limited poet, perfect within his limits as the Chinese artist of his
own symbol. In a beautiful poem he compares himself to the painter of
tea-cups who spends his life in painting a strange flower

_Sur ses tasses de neige a la lune ravie_,

a flower which has perfumed his whole existence, since, as a child, he
had felt it graft itself upon the 'blue filigree of his soul.'

A very different image must be sought if we wish to sum up the
characteristics of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. An uncertain artist, he was
a man of passionate and lofty genius, and he has left us a great mass of
imperfect work, out of which we have to form for ourselves whatever
notion we can of a man greater than his work. My first impression, on
looking at the twenty stories which make up the present selection, was
that the selection had been badly made. Where is _Les Demoiselles de
Bienfilatre_? I asked myself, remembering that little ironical
masterpiece; where is _Le Convive des Dernieres Fetes_, with its
subtlety of horror; _Sentimentalisme_, with its tragic and tender
modernity; _La Reine Ysabeau_, with its sombre and taciturn intensity?
Story after story came into my mind, finer, it seemed to me, in the
artistic qualities of the story than many of those selected. Second
thoughts inclined me to think that the selection could scarcely have
been better. For it is a selection made after a plan, and it shows us,
not indeed always Villiers at his best as a story-teller, but,
throughout, Villiers at his highest point of elevation; the man whom we
are always trying to see through his work, and the man as he would have
seen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater
nobility than these _Histoires Souveraines_ in which a regal pomp of
speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who
mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the
idealist is at home in his own world, among his ideals.

1897, 1899.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one
English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate
about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to
English readers: in the columns of the _Spectator_, it is amusing to
remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in
his book