CHARLES BAUDELAIRE A STUDY BY ARTHUR SYMONS LONDON ELKIN MATHEWS CORK STREET MCMXX TO JOHN QUINN [Illustration: ÉMILE DE ROY, 1844] CONTENTS CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES. NOTES. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Émile de Roy, 1844. _Frontispiece_ I. Jeanne Duval: Drawing by Baudelaire, 1860. II. Baudelaire, designed by himself, 1848. III. Les fleurs du mal, 1857. IV. Les paradis artificiels, 1861. V. Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859. VI. Gustave Courbet, 1848. VII. Edouard Manet, 1862. VIII. Edouard Manet, 1865. IX. Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865. BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY I When Baudelaire is great, when his genius is at its highest point of imaginative creation, of imaginative criticism, it is never when he works by implication--as the great men who are pure artists (for instance, Shakespeare) work by implication only--but always from his personal point of view being simply infallible and impeccable. The pure artist, it has been said, never asserts: and the instances are far from being numerous; Balzac asserts, and Balzac is always absolutely just in all his assertions: he whose analysis of modern Society--_La Comédie Humaine_--verges almost always on creation; and despite certain deficiencies in technique and in style, he remains the greatest of all novelists. As for Baudelaire, he rarely asserts; he more often suggests or divines--with that exquisite desire of perfect and just work that is always in him. With his keen vision he rarely misses the essential; with his subtle and sifted prose he rarely fails in characterizing the right man in the right way and the wrong man--the man who is not an artist--in forms of ironical condemnation. Shelley in his time and Blake in his time gave grave enough offence and perplexity; so did Baudelaire, so did Poe, so did Swinburne, so did Rossetti, so did Beardsley. All had their intervals of revolt--spiritual or unspiritual, according to the particular trend of their genius; some destroy mendacious idols, some change images into symbols; some are supposed to be obscurely original. All had to apprehend, as Browning declared in regard to his readers and critics in one of his Prefaces, "charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh." And all these might have said as he said: "I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since."