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He
would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have
never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of
criticism but the noble pleasure of praising. " The Frenchman has said
that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is
impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.

Theophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les
Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire
as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's gifts
as a critical essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an
incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hotel Pimodan about 1844. In this
Hotel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His
fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,
poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day--that is, carefully selected
ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Merimee, and others whose verve or
genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this cave of
forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured the same sort
of scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimodan. Gautier
eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls, where
the beautiful Jewess, Maryx, who had posed for Ary Scheffer's Mignon
and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb Madame Sabatier, the
only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original of that extraordinary
group of Clesinger's--the sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand--la
Femme au Serpent, a Salammbo a la mode in marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so
Gautier writes, by Boissard and Baudelaire. As for the creator of
Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such nonsense. He had to work
for his living at journalism, and he died in harness, an irreproachable
father, while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense,
unstable temperament, soon devoured his patrimony of 75,000 francs, and
for the remaining years of his life was between the devil of his dusky
Jenny Duval and the deep sea of hopeless debt.

It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less wicked
than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire encountered
Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and encouraged
the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have seen
an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent of about
the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the
"horrific"--that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics.
Baudelaire
admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations of
Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces of a
painter's technique; also how to compose a palette--a rather meaningless
phrase nowadays. At least, he did not write of the arts without some
technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and
when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846, 1855, and 1859,
the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to the training and
knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.

The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor
spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are
the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.
Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the
English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed
too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds, "to read a
criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no means a
sure method of recognizing the picture afterward. " Now, word-painting
was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of
competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and
marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed,
how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree
with Mr. Saintsbury.