Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than _The Pit and the Pendulum_ and _The Cask of Amontillado_ of Poe; they are more than analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' _Contes Cruels,_ such as his _Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne_ and _Les amants de Tolède._ And--what is more astonishing in his prose than in any of the writers I have mentioned--is his satire; a satire which is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais and of Swift. Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a mystification, and a fantastic genius--such as that of Baudelaire and of Poe--can never resist it when opportunity offers. Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, _épris des hauteurs,_ as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a reprobate--and so cast out of God's sight. "For, till the thunder in the trumpet be, Soul may divide from body, but not we One from another; I hold thee with my hand, I let mine eyes have all their will of thee, I seal myself upon thee with my might, Abiding alway out of all men's sight Until God loosen over sea and land The thunder of the trumpets of the night." I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves--which are utterly lacking in Baudelaire--but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as-- "One faint eternal eventide of gems,"