in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live
as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary,
secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, _le
mauvais moine_ of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the
brothel.

To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not
only the four volumes of his collected works, but every document in
Crepet's _Oeuvres Posthumes_, and, above all, the letters, and these
have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor
who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crepet. Baudelaire
put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given
moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every
observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read
the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he
showed his business side, or the letters to la Presidente, the
touchstone of his _spleen et ideal_, his chief experiment in the higher
sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it
is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear
of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The
tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry,
Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a little
clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains
baffling, and will probably never be discovered.

As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into
his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see.
Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out,
through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding
him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he
defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the _Petits Poemes
en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur
constante (bonne humeur necessaire, meme pour traiter des sujets
tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules,
de musiques, de reverberes meme, voila ce que j'ai voulu faire!_ And,
writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more
explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: _Avez-vous observe qu'un
morceau de ciel apercu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminees, deux
rochers, ou par une a