Arthur Symons on Charles Baudelaire

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Baudelaire [pictured left] desired perfection, and we have never realised that
perfection is a thing to aim at. He only did what he could do supremely
well, and he was in poverty all his life, not because he would not work,
but because he would work only at certain things, the things which he
could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of the men of letters of our
age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his whole life in writing one
book of verse (out of which all French poetry has come since his time),
one book of prose in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism
which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which his generation produced,
and a translation which is better than a marvellous original. What
would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire had never existed? As
different a thing from what it is as English poetry would be without
Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the greatest poets, but they
are more fascinating than the greatest, they influence more minds. And
Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He discovered Poe, Wagner, and
Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his vast materials, his vast
general talent for criticism, went wrong in contemporary judgments,
Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote neither verse nor prose with
ease, but he would not permit himself to write either without
inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it is without waste. It
is made out of his whole intellect and all his nerves. Every poem is a
train of thought and every essay is the record of sensation. This
'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a moderation which
becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To 'cultivate one's
hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader (Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère)
as a judge rather than as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to
be so much a moralist, with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil:
that has always bewildered the world, even in his own country, where the
artist is allowed to live as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire
lived and died solitary, secret, a confessor of sins who has never told
the whole truth, le mauvais moine of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.
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— Arthur Symons, 1906.