Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/43

 human ordure; and although he wishes us to infer that his own wares are too fine for so coarse a monster, the reader cannot help feeling that there is something in the nature of excrement in his very choice of a foul metaphor to express his meaning. Indeed, throughout all his writings there is a parade of the olfactory faculty, which awakens the suspicion that Baudelaire, like Fabullus, had one day, after smelling some choice unguent, prayed God to "make him all nose"—

Quod tu cum olfacies, Deos rogabis, Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum! ., lib. xiii.

—and that the prayer had been actually granted. There is plenty of sensitiveness to smell, to touch, even to colour; there is even a kind of perception, neither very acute nor very exquisite, of the beauties of external form; but of that higher sensibility which perceives the subtle nuances of spiritual life and trembles to the beating of a tender human heart, there is not one solitary sign.This poetry is like absinthe, comparatively harmless perhaps if sipped in small quantities well diluted, but fatal if taken (as by Mr. Swinburne) in all its native strength and abomination. Here I must leave the writings of Charles Baudelaire, only observing in conclusion that, in spite of their seeming originality, they belong really to the Italian school, in so far as they are the posings of an affected person before a mirror, the self-anatomy of a morbid nature, the satiated love-sonnets of a sensualist who is out of tune with the world and out of harmony with the life of men. They are, from another point of view, the reductio ad horribilem of that intellectual sensualism which Goethe (in one of a giant's weak moments)