Some of these qualities Baudelaire finds in Gautier; to my mind there are many more of these strange and occult qualities to be found in Baudelaire. I have said somewhere that there is no such thing, properly speaking, as a "natural" style; and it is merely ignorance of the mental process of writing which sometimes leads one to say that the style of Swift is more natural than that of Ruskin. Pater said to me at Oxford that his own _Imaginary Portraits_ seemed to him the best written of his books, which he qualified by adding: "It seems to be the most _natural_." I think then he was beginning to forget that it was not natural to him to be natural. Gautier had a way of using the world's dictionary, whose leaves, blown by an unknown wind, always opened so as to let the exact word leap out of the pages, adding the appropriate shades. Both writers had an innate sense of "correspondences," and of a universal symbolism, where the "sacredness" of every word defends one from using it in a profane sense. To realize the central secret of the mystics, from Protagoras onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes betrays in its "As things are below, so are they above;" which Boehme has classed in his teaching of "signatures;" and which Swedenborg has systematized in his doctrine of "correspondences," one arrives at Gérard de Nerval, whose cosmical visions are at times so magnificent that he seems to be creating myths, as, after his descent into hell, he plays the part he imagines assigned to him in his astral influences. Among these comes Hoffmann. In his _Kreislerione,_ that Baudelaire read in the French translation I have before me, printed in 1834, he says: "The musician whose sense of music is conscious swims everywhere across floods of harmony and melody. This is no vain image, nor an allegory devoid of sense, such as composers use when they speak of colours, of perfumes, of the rays of the sun that appear like concords." "Colour speaks," says Baudelaire, "in a voice evocatory of sorcery; animals and plants grimace; perfumes provoke correspondent thoughts and memories. And when I think of Gautier's rapidity in solving all the problems of style and of composition, I cannot help remembering a severe maxim that he let fall before me in one of his conversations: 'Every writer who fails to seize any idea, however subtle and unexpected he supposes it to be, is not a writer. _L'Inexprimable n'existe pas._'" It is either Delacroix or Baudelaire who wrote: "The writer who is incapable of saying everything, who takes unawares and without having enough material to give body to an idea, however subtle or strange or unexpected he may suppose it to be, is not a writer." And one has to beware of the sin of allegory, which spoils even Bunyan's prose. For the deepest emotion raised in us by allegory is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.