on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on
his death, _Ave atque Vale_. There have been occasional outbreaks of
irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally
mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random
in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up,
over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of
the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?

It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection,
and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only
did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life,
not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain
things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of
the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his
whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry
has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a
fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which
his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a
marvellous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire
had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English
poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the
greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they
influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He
discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his
vast materials, his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in
contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote
neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to
write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it
is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his
nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record
of sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a
moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To
'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader
(_Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere_) as a judge rather than
as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist,
with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered
the world, even