Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/35

 stews, this fifth-rate littérateur, who, adopting to a certain extent the self-explanatory and querulous system of the Italian school of poets, and carefully avoiding the higher issues of that noble school of which Hugo is the living head, has been chosen (by no angel certainly) to be the godfather as it were of the modern Fleshly School, and thus to fill the select salon of English literature with a perfume to which the smell of Mrs. Aphra Behn's books is savoury, and that of Catullus' "lepidum novum libellum" absolutely delicious.

This is our double misfortune—to have a nuisance, and to have it at second hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean thing, if it had been in some sense a product of the soil. We have never been foolish purists, here in England. We freely forgave Byron many a wicked turn, because we knew he loved much, because we saw how much he was the product of national forces darkly working to the light. We welcomed Goethe, even when he sent the "Elective Affinities" and the cerebellic autobiographies. But to be overrun with the brood of an inferior French sonnetteer, whose only originality was his hideousness of subject, whose only merit was in his nasal appreciation of foul odours, surely that is far too much: it would have been a little too much twenty years ago, when the Empire began creating its viper's nest in the heart of France; it is a hundred times too much now, when the unclean place has been burnt with avenging fire.

A few years before his death, Baudelaire published his chief work—"Fleurs de Mal." This book was a little too strong even for Paris under the Empire; so the censor came down, and some of the vilest poems were ruthlessly