“Does it not seem to the reader, as to me, that the language of the last Latin decadence—­that supreme sigh of a robust person already transformed and prepared for spiritual life—­is singularly fitted to express passion as it is understood and felt by the modern world?  Mysticism is the other end of the magnet of which Catullus and his band, brutal and purely epidermic poets, knew only the sensual pole.  In this wonderful language, solecisms and barbarisms seem to express the forced carelessness of a passion which forgets itself, and mocks at rules.  The words, used in a novel sense, reveal the charming awkwardness of a barbarian from the North, kneeling before Roman Beauty.”

Nature, the nature of Wordsworth and Tennyson, did not exist for Baudelaire; inspiration he denied; simplicity he scouted as an anachronism in a decadent period of perfected art, whose last word in poetry should be the apotheosis of the Artificial.  “A little charlatanism is permitted even to genius,” he wrote:  “it is like fard on the cheeks of a naturally beautiful woman; an appetizer for the mind.”  Again he expresses himself: 

“It seems to me, two women are presented to me, one a rustic matron, repulsive in health and virtue, without manners, without expression; in short, owing nothing except to simple nature;—­the other, one of those beauties that dominate and oppress memory, uniting to her original and unfathomable charms all the eloquence of dress; who is mistress of her part, conscious of and queen of herself, speaking like an instrument well tuned; with looks freighted with thought, yet letting flow only what she would.  My choice would not be doubtful; and yet there are pedagogic sphinxes who would reproach me as recreant to classical honor.”

In music it was the same choice.  He saw the consummate art and artificiality of Wagner, and preferred it to all other music, at a time when the German master was ignored and despised by a classicized musical world.  In perfumes it was not the simple fragrance of the rose or violet that he loved, but musk and amber; and he said, “my soul hovers over perfumes as the souls of other men hover over music.”

Besides his essays and sketches, Baudelaire published in prose a novelette; ‘Fanfarlo,’ ‘Artificial Paradises,’ opium and hashish, imitations of De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an Opium Eater’; and ’Little Prose Poems,’ also inspired by a book, the ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’ of Aloysius Bertrand, and which Baudelaire thus describes:—­

“The idea came to me to attempt something analogous, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather a modern and more abstract life, the methods he had applied to the painting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque.  Which one of us in his ambitious days has not dreamed of a miracle of poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements