I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet of _Les fleurs du mal_ loved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours, listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis, the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrase _la langue de faisandée_ suits the exotic style of Baudelaire! Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whose _Litanies de Satan_ have that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity, in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain chastisements, in this world as in the next. I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe's _Satan:_ "Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!" in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend. And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in." III Has Baudelaire _l'amour du mal pour le mal?_ In a certain sense, yes; in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God--the primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences.