THE SPECIAL representative of the French “Satanic” or “Degenerate School,” Baudelaire is condemned by Tolstoi as a poet whose “feelings expressed are always intentionally original and silly,” with a “deliberate obscurity especially remarkable in prose where the author might speak simply if he wished.”

  It might be supposed that the translation is responsible for the way in which the words “original and silly” are coupled, but Tolstoi is wholly impatient of the originality which makes its possessor exclusive by making him unintelligible to the mass of mankind. Nevertheless, this species of originality was greatly striven after during the Fin de Siècle period; and Baudelaire, who is perhaps its most characteristic representative, if not the founder of the school, has had many imitators. He was born at Paris, April 9th, 1821, and died there August 31st, 1867. His most characteristic work in verse is perhaps the “Flowers of Evil,” poems first published in 1857. As an essayist he is most noted for his “Little Poems in Prose,” the work Tolstoi disapproves as “intentionally original and silly.” It is certainly eminently Parisian. No writer, born and bred out of Paris, could have compared the mist of twilight covering a clear sky to the black gauze over the white skirts of a ballet dancer.