l
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 day