In our approach to the poetry, or to the prose, of any famous writer, with whom we are concerned, we must necessarily approach his personality; in apprehending it we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. As for Baudelaire, I must confess that, in spite of the fact that one might hate or love the man according to the judgment of the wise or of the unwise, I find him more lovable than hateful. That he failed in trying to love one woman is as certain as his disillusion after he had possessed her; that, in regard to Jeanne Duval, she was to him simply a silent instrument that, by touching all the living strings of it, he awakened to a music that is all his own; that whether this "masterpiece of flesh" meant more to him than certain other women who inspired him in different ways; whether he thirsted to drain her "empty kiss" or the "empty kiss" of Rachel, of Marguerite, of Gabrielle, of Judith, is a matter of but little significance. A man's life such as his is a man's own property and the property of no one else. And Baudelaire's conclusion as to any of these might be, perhaps, summed up in this stanza: "Your sweet, scarce lost estate Of innocence, the candour of your eyes, Your child-like, pleased surprise, Your patience: these afflict me with a weight As of some heavy wrong that I must share With God who made, with man who found you, fair." "In more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels," says Saint Augustine; and Beardsley's sacrifice, along with that of all great decadent art, the art of Rops or of Baudelaire, is really a sacrifice to the eternal beauty, and only seemingly to the powers of evil. And here let me say that I have no concern with what neither he nor I could have had absolute knowledge of, his own intention in his work. A man's intention, it must be remembered--and equally in the case of much of the work of Poe and of Baudelaire, much less so in the case of Balzac and Verlaine--from the very fact that it is conscious, is much less intimately himself than the sentiment which his work conveys to me. Baudelaire's figures, exactly like those designed by Beardsley and by Rodin, have the sensitiveness of the spirit and that bodily sensitiveness which wastes their veins and imprisons them in the attitude of their luxurious meditation. They have nothing that is merely "animal" in their downright course towards repentance; no overwhelming passion hurries them beyond themselves; they do not capitulate to an open assault of the enemy of souls. It is the soul in them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. Their bodies are eager and faint with wantonness; they desire fiercer and more exquisite pains, a more intolerable suspense than there is in the world.