But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental; and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others. So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who dances silent dances--for, indeed, all dancers are silent--but without music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of dancing; both are instinctive. The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse, lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire, infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror, in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine, however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of love. The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange, metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art--formal art--was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent him _Les fleurs du mal_: "I devoured your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it."