Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/30

 had been distinguishing itself for many a long year in Paris, but it reached its final and most tremendous development in Charles Baudelaire,—a writer to whom I must now direct the reader's attention.

"Je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!" "I seek the Black, the Empty, and the Nude!" Fleurs de Mal.

before me, as I write, the portrait of Baudelaire, the memoir by Gautier, the original edition of the "Fleurs de Mal," and the collected edition of Baudelaire's works, published since his death.

Gautier's memoir is a miracle of cunning writing, containing hardly a syllable with which one disagrees, and yet skilfully and secretly poisoning the mind of any unsuspicious reader. The best antidote I can recommend against such clever trash is the tiniest pinch of humour, the least sense of the absurd; for directly the whole thing is put in the proper light, contempt yields to laughter, and laughter dies away in pity for the poor "æstheticized" figures to whom we are being introduced. It may also be as well, at the same time, to call to mind how even the mighty genius of George Sand, at first so promising and so commanding (in those days when even Mazzini's pure soul did it homage), slowly decomposed under the inner action of the artistic