Some French Writers

six months which Baudelaire spent in the East, and which coloured so profoundly and for all the rest of his life his thought, feeling, and consequently verse. None of Baudelaire's later associates could ever learn the exact truth concerning this mysterious voyage; for Baudelaire was one of those who "embroider." Other people, of the kind who couldn't embroider if they would, are eager to denounce them as liars. Liars they are not?but, it may be, persons who dislike the bare simplicity of the letter. According to one critic, a profound instability was the chief moral characteristic of CharlesBaudelaire. It should, however, be remembered that none found Baudelaire more "unstable" than did Baudelaire himself to his undoing. Why must a man be hated, despised, and denounced because?doing nobody else any harm?he is what people denominate "his own enemy"? Isn't it enough to err and to suffer, without being also pharisaically damned ? Baudelaire's charlatan fondness for singularity in dress, speech, and manner is also one of the battle-horses of the anti-Baudelaireans. No doubt a dash of charlatanism was a necessary ingredient of Baii- delaire's temperament, without which we should not now have his art. Untrustworthy he may have been, but likewise charming, seductive, interesting in an extraordinary degree. And never more so than on his first coming to Paris, as a returned Oriental traveller, a critic, a poet, a dandy, and a capitalist, just turned twenty-one. ...