be bad.  Poetry cannot, under penalty of death or forfeiture, assimilate itself to science or morality.  It has not Truth for object, it has only itself.  Truth’s modes of demonstration are different and elsewhere.  Truth has nothing to do with ballads; all that constitutes the charm, the irresistible grace of a ballad, would strip Truth of its authority and power.  Cold, calm, impassive, the demonstrative temperament rejects the diamonds and flowers of the muse; it is, therefore, the absolute inverse of the poetic temperament.  Pure Intellect aims at Truth, Taste shows us Beauty, and the Moral Sense teaches us Duty.  It is true that the middle term has intimate connection with the two extremes, and only separates itself from Moral Sense by a difference so slight that Aristotle did not hesitate to class some of its delicate operations amongst the virtues.  And accordingly what, above all, exasperates the man of taste is the spectacle of vice, is its deformity, its disproportions.  Vice threatens the just and true, and revolts intellect and conscience; but as an outrage upon harmony, as dissonance, it would particularly wound certain poetic minds, and I do not think it would be scandal to consider all infractions of moral beauty as a species of sin against rhythm and universal prosody.

“It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of the Beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacle as a sketch, as a correspondent of Heaven.  The insatiable thirst for all that is beyond that which life veils is the most living proof of our immortality.  It is at once by poetry and across it, across and through music, that the soul gets a glimpse of the splendors that lie beyond the tomb.  And when an exquisite poem causes tears to rise in the eye, these tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment, but rather the testimony of a moved melancholy, of a postulation of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect, which wishes to take immediate possession, even on earth, of a revealed paradise.

“Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human aspiration toward superior beauty; and the manifestation of this principle is enthusiasm and uplifting of the soul,—­enthusiasm entirely independent of passion,—­which is the intoxication of heart, and of truth which is the food of reason.  For passion is a natural thing, even too natural not to introduce a wounding, discordant tone into the domain of pure beauty; too familiar, too violent, not to shock the pure Desires, the gracious Melancholies, and the noble Despairs which inhabit the supernatural regions of poetry.”

Baudelaire saw himself as the poet of a decadent epoch, an epoch in which art had arrived at the over-ripened maturity of an aging civilization; a glowing, savorous, fragrant over-ripeness, that is already softening into decomposition.  And to be the fitting poet of such an epoch, he modeled his style on that of the poets of the Latin decadence; for, as he expressed it for himself and for the modern school of “decadents” in French poetry founded upon his name:—­