So, in much of Baudelaire's verse I find not only the exotic (rarely the erotic) but, in the peculiar technique of the lines, certain andante movements, lingering subtleties of sound, colour, and suggestion, with--at times, but never in the excessive sense of Flaubert's--the almost medical curiosity of certain researches into the stuff of dreams, the very fibre of life itself, which, combined, certainly tend to produce a new thing in poetry. A new order of phenomena absorbs his attention, which becomes more and more externalized, more exclusively concerned with the phenomena of the soul, with morbid sensation, with the curiosities of the mind and the senses. Humanity is now apprehended in a more than ever generalized and yet specialized way in its essence, when it becomes, if you will, an abstraction; or, if you will, for the first time purely individual. In certain poets these have been foiled endeavours; in Baudelaire never: for one must never go beyond the unrealizable, never lose one's intensity of expression, never let go of the central threads of one's spider's web. Still, in regard to certain direct pathological qualities, there is a good deal of this to be found in much of the best poetry--in Poe, in Rossetti, in Swinburne's earlier work, and much in Baudelaire; only all these are moved by a fascination: in Poe for the fantastically inhuman; in Rossetti for the inner life of the imagination, for to him, as Pater said, "life is a crisis at every moment;" in Swinburne for the arduous fulness of intricate harmony, and for the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost unparalleled abundance. There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the artist--whether he be Baudelaire or Verlaine-- should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is not written by a man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing on impulse, hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does not remember, in some "close corner of his brain," and exerts the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and, aiming at much more minor things in the world than pure beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end must be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought to serve, but by the success or failure in one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness of what he is doing.