Browning's whole life was divided equally between two things: love and art. He subtracted nothing from the one by which to increase the other; between them they occupied his whole nature; in each he was equally supreme. _Men and Women_ and the love-letters are the double swing of the same pendulum; at the centre sits the soul, impelled and impelling. Outside these two forms of his greatness Browning had none, and one he concealed from the world. It satisfied him to exist as he did, knowing what he was, and showing no more of himself to those about him than the outside of a courteous gentleman. Nothing in him blazed through, in the uncontrollable manner of those who are most easily recognized as great men. His secret was his own, and still, to many, remains so. [Illustration: MANET, 1862] I have said above, of Browning: "His secret was his own, and still, to many, remains so." Exactly the same thing must be said of Baudelaire. He lived, and died, secret; and the man remains baffling, and will probably never be discovered. But, in most of his printed letters, he shows only what he cares to reveal of himself at a given moment. In the letters, printed in book form, that I have before me, there is much more of the nature of confessions. Several of his letters to his mother are heart-breaking; as in his agonized effort to be intelligible to her; his horror of her _curé_; his shame in pawning her Indian shawl; his obscure certainty that the work he is doing is of value, and that he ought not to feel shame. Then comes his suggestion that society should adjust these difficult balances. Again, in his ghastly confession that he has only sent Jeanne seven francs in three months; that he is as tired of her as of his own life: there is shown a tragic gift for self-observation and humble truthfulness. It would have taken a very profound experience of life to have been a good mother to Baudelaire: or she should have had a wiser _cure._ Think of the _curé_ burning the only copy of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ that Baudelaire had left in "papier d'Hollande," and the mother acquiescing. I give two quotations, which certainly explain themselves if they do not explain Baudelaire: "I must leave home and not return there, except in a more natural state of mind. I have just been rewriting an article. The affair kept me so long that when I went out I had not even the courage to return, and so the day was lost. Last week I had to go out and sleep for two days and nights in a hideous little hotel because I was spied on. I went out without any money for the simple reason that I had none.