French Poets and Novelists Author:HENRY JAMES Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. As a brief discussion was lately carried on) touching the merits of the writer whose name we have prefixed to these lines, it may not be a... more »miss to introduce him to some of those readers who must have observed the contest with little more than a vague sense of the strangeness of its subject. Charles Baudelaire is not a novelty in literature; his principal work) dates from 1857, and his career terminated a few years later. But his admirers have made a classic of him and elevated him to the rank of one of those subjects which are always in order. Even if we differ with them on this point, such attention as Baudelaire demands will not lead us very much astray. He is not, in quantity (whatever he may have been in quality), a formidable writer; having died young, he was not prolific, and the most noticeable of his original productions are contained in two small volumes. His celebrity began with the publication of "Les Fleurs du Mai," a collection of verses of which some had already appeared in periodicals. The "Revue des Deux Mondes" had taken the responsibility of iutroducing a few of them to the world—or rather, though it held them at the baptismal font of public opinion, it had declined to stand godfather. An accompanying note in the "Revue" disclaimed all editorial approval of their morality. This of course procured them a good many readers; and when, on its appearance, the volume we have mentioned was overhauled by the police a still greater number of persons desired to possess it. Yet in spite of the service rendered him by the censorship, Baudelaire has never become in any degree popular; the lapse of twenty years has seen but five editions of "Les Fleurs du Mai." The foremost feeling of the reader of the present day will be one of surprise, and even amus...« less