Poetry cannot assimilate itself to science or morals, under pain of death or forfeiture. Itself, not truth, is its end. The modes of demonstrating truth are different, and are to be sought for elsewhere. Truth has nothing to do with songs: the very causes that tend to make a song charming, graceful, and irresistible, would deprive truth of its authority and power. Cold, calm, and impassible, the demonstrative temper repels the gems and flowers of the Muse, and is therefore absolutely the opposite of the poetic temper.

"Pure intelligence aims at truth, taste shows us beauty, and moral sense teaches us duty. It is true that the middle one of these senses is intimately connected with the two extreme ones, and that it is distinguished from the moral sense by so slight a difference that Aristotle did not hesitate to class some of its delicate workings among the virtues. That is why what especially exasperates a man of taste when he beholds vice is the difformity, the disproportion of it. Vice is harmful to the just and the true, revolting to the intellect and the conscience. On the other hand as an outrage against harmony, as a dissonance, it hurts more specially certain poetic minds, and I do not think it is scandalous to look

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upon every infraction of morality, of moral beauty, as a sort of sin against universal prosody and rhythm.

"It is this admirable, this immortal instinct for the beautiful that leads us to look upon the earth and the sights it offers us as a sort of summary of, as something corresponding to, heaven. The insatiable desire for all that is beyond and concealed by life is the most living proof of our immortality. It is at once by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul obtains a glimpse of the splendours that lie beyond the tomb. And when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, these tears do not mean excess of enjoyment; rather do they testify to irritation of melancholy, to postulation of the nerves, to the existence of a nature exiled within the imperfect, that seeks to seize at once, and even while upon this earth, upon the paradise that has been revealed to it.

"Thus, the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human aspiration to a higher beauty, and the principle manifests itself in enthusiasm, in rapture of the soul, an enthusiasm which is wholly independent of passion, the intoxication of the heart, and of truth, the food of reason. For passion is a natural

thing, too natural indeed not to introduce an unpleasant, a discordant tone into the domain of pure beauty; too familiar and too violent not to scandalise the pure desires, the gracious melancholy, and the noble despair that inhabit the supernatural regions of poetry."

Although few poets have been endowed with more spontaneous originality and inspiration, Baudelaire, no doubt through disgust at the sham lyricism that pretends to believe that a tongue of fire settles upon the head of the writer who is striving hard to rime a stanza, maintained that a true writer called up, directed and modified at will the mysterious power of literary production; and I find in a very curious passage prefixed to the translation of Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem "The Raven," the following semi-ironical, semiserious lines, in which Baudelaire formulates his own views while appearing to be simply analysing those of the American author:

"We are told that poetics are made and modelled after poems. Here is a poet who affirms that his poem has been composed in accordance with his poetics. He certainly was possessed of greater genius and inspiration than any other man, if inspiration be taken to mean energy, intellectual enthusiasm, and the power of main

taining one's faculties bright. But he was also fonder of work than any other man, and though a thorough eccentric, was given to repeating that originality is a thing to be learned by serving an apprenticeship to it, which does not mean that it is a thing which can be transmitted by teaching. His two great foes were chance and the incomprehensible. Did he claim to be, through strange and amusing vanity, less original than he naturally was? Did he undervalue the natural gift that was in him on purpose to make the share of the will larger? I am rather inclined to believe he did, although it must not be forgotten that ardent and swift as was his genius, he was passionately fond of analysis, combinations, and calculations. Another of his favourite axioms was that everything in a poem, as in a novel, in a sonnet, as in a tale, ought to work for the end. A good author is already thinking of his last line as he is penning his first.' Thanks to this admirable method, an author can begin his work at the end and go on with it when he pleases and in whatever part he pleases. The amateurs of a fine frenzy may perhaps revolt at such cynical maxims, but no one need take more than he likes. It will always be useful to show them the benefit art may derive from deliberation, and men of the world the amount of labour

required to produce that piece of luxury called poetry. After all, a little charlatanism is always allowable in genius, and indeed is not unbecoming to it. Like rouge upon the cheeks of a naturally beautiful woman, it is an additional seasoning to the mind."

The latter sentence is characteristic of the poet and reveals his peculiar love of the artificial. Nor did he attempt to conceal his preference; he took pleasure in the kind of composite, and at times somewhat fictitious beauty wrought out by very old or very corrupt civilisations. To illustrate this by a readily apprehended comparison, I shall say that he would have preferred to a maiden who used no other cosmetic than the water in her basin, a more mature woman who availed herself of all the resources of skilled coquetry, sitting in front of a dressing-table covered with bottles of scent, cosmetics, ivory-backed brushes, and steel pincers. The penetrating perfume of a skin steeped in aromatics, like Esther's, who was purified for six months with myrrh, and six months with sweet odours, before being presented to King Ahasuerus, exercised an intoxicating influence upon him. He by no means disliked a touch of china rose or hortensia rouge upon a blooming cheek, patches alluringly placed at the corner of the mouth or the eye, eyelids