Charles Baudelaire, His Life

All these merits were appreciated by Baudelaire, who has more than once addressed beautiful poems to cats – the "Flowers of Evil" contain three – where he celebrates their physical and moral virtues, and often he makes them pass through his compositions as a sort of additional characteristic. Cats abound in Baudelaire's verse, as dogs in the pictures of Paul Veronese, and form there a kind of signature.

It also must be added that in these sweet animals there is a nocturnal side, mysterious and cabalistic, which was very attractive to the poet. The cat, with his phosphoric eyes, which are like lanterns and stars to him, fearlessly haunts the darkness, where he meets wandering phantoms, sorcerers, alchemists, necromancers, resurrectionists, lovers, pickpockets, assassins, grey patrols, and all the obscene spectres of the night. He has the appearance of knowing the latest sabbatical chronicle, and he will willingly rub himself against the lame leg of Mephistopheles. His nocturnal serenades, his loves on the tiles, accompanied by cries like those of a child being murdered, give him a certain satanical air which justifies up to a certain point the repugnance of diurnal and practical minds, for whom the mysteries of Erebus have not the slightest attraction. But a doctor Faustus, in his cell littered with books and instruments of alchemy, would love always to have a cat for a companion.

Baudelaire himself was a voluptuous, cajoling cat, with just its velvety manners, alluring mysteries, instinct with power concealed in suppleness, fixing on things and men his penetrating look, disquieting, eccentric, difficult to withstand, but faithful and without perfidy.

Many women pass through the poems of Baudelaire, some veiled, some half discernible, but to whom it is impossible to attribute names. They are rather types than individuals. They represent l'éternel féminin, and the love that the poet expresses for them is the love and not a love. We have seen that in his theories he did not admit of individual passion, finding it too masterful, too familiar and violent.

Among these women some symbolise unconscious and almost bestial prostitution, with plastered and painted masks, eyes brightened with kohl, mouths tinted with scarlet, seeming like open wounds, false hair and jewels; others, of a colder corruption, more clever and more perverse, like marchionesses of Marteuil of the nineteenth century, transpose the vice of the body to the soul. They are haughty, icy, bitter, finding pleasure only in wickedness; insatiable as sterility, mournful as ennui, having only hysterical and foolish fancies, and deprived, like the devil, of the power of love. Gifted with a dreadful beauty, almost spectral, that does not animate life, they march to their deaths, pale, insensible, superbly contemptuous, on the hearts they have crushed under their heels. From the departure of these amours, allied to hate, from pleasures more wounding than sorrow, the poet turns to his sad idol of exotic perfume, of savage attire, supple and wheedling as the black panther of Java, which remains always and compensates him for the spiteful Parisian cats with the pointed claws, playing with the heart of the poet as with a mouse. But it is to none of these creatures of plaster, marble, or ebony that he gives his soul. Above this black heap of leprous houses, this infectious labyrinth where the spectres of pleasure circle, this impure tingling of misery, of ugliness and perversity, far, far distant in the unalterable azure floats the adorable spirit of Beatrice, the ever-desired ideal, never attained; the supreme and divine beauty incarnated in the form of an ethereal woman, spiritualised, fashioned of light, fire, and perfume; a vapour, a dream, a reflection of the enchanted and seraphic world, like the Sigeias, the Morellas, the Unas, the Leonores of Edgar Poe, and the Seraphita-Seraphitus of Balzac, that marvellous creation.

From the depths of his fall, his errors, and his despairs, it is towards this celestial image, as towards the Madonna of Bon-Secours, that he extends his arms with cries, tears, and a profound contempt for himself. In his hours of loving melancholy it is always with her he wishes to fly away and hide his perfect happiness in some mysterious fairy refuge, some cottage of Gainsborough, some home of Gerard Dow, or, better still, some marble palace of Benares or Hyderabad. Never did his dreams lead him into other company.

Can one see in this Beatrice, this Laura whom no name designates, a real young girl or woman, passionately loved by the poet during his life-time? It would be romantic to suppose so, but it has not been permitted to us to be intimate enough with the secret life of his soul to answer this question affirmatively or negatively.

In his metaphysical conversations, Baudelaire spoke much of his ideas, little of his sentiments, and never of his actions. As to the chapter of his loves, he for ever placed a seal upon his fine and disdainful lips. The safest plan would be to see in this ideal love a pleading only of the soul, the soaring of the unsatisfied heart, and the eternal sigh of the imperfect aspiring to the absolute.

At the end of the "Flowers of Evil" there is a set of poems on "Wine," and the different intoxications that it produces, according to the brain it attacks. It is unnecessary to say that they are not Bacchic songs celebrating the juice of the grape, or anything like it. They are hideous and terrible paintings of drunkenness, but without the morality of Hogarth. The picture has no need of a legend and the "Wine of the Workman" makes one shudder. The "Litanies of Satan," god of evil and prince of the world, are one of those cold, familiar ironies of the author, in which one would be wrong to see impiety. Impiety is not in the nature of Baudelaire, who believed in the superior law established by God for all eternity, the least infraction of which is punished by the severest chastisement, not only in this world, but in the future.

If he has painted vice and shown Satan in all his pomp, it is without the least complacence in the task. He also had a singular prepossession of the devil as a tempter in whom he saw a dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime, and perversity. Fault in Baudelaire was always followed by remorse, contempt, anguish, despair; and the punishment was far worse than any corporal one could have been. But enough of this subject; we are critic, not theologian.

Let us point out, among the poems which comprise the "Flowers of Evil," some of the most remarkable; amongst others, that which is called, "Don Juan aux Enfers." It is a picture of tragic grandeur, painted in sombre and magisterial colours on the fiery vault of hell. The boat glides on the black waters, carrying Don Juan and his cortège of victims. The beggar whom he tried to make deny God, wretched athlete, proud in his rags like Antisthenes, paddles the oars to the domain of Charon. At the stern, a man of stone, a discoloured phantom, with rigid and sculptural gestures, holds the helm. The old Don Luis shows his whitened locks, scorned by his hypocritically impious son. Sganerelle demands the payment of his wages from his henceforth insolvent master. Donna Elvira tries to bring back the old smile of the lover to the disdainful lips of her husband; and the pale lovers, brought to evil, abandoned, betrayed, trampled under foot like flowers, expose the ever-open wounds of their hearts. Under this passion of tears, lamentations, and maledictions Don Juan remains unmoved; he has done what he has wished. Heaven, hell, and the world judge him, according to their understanding; his pride knows no remorse; the shot has been able to kill, but not to make him repent.

By its serene melancholy, its cheerful tranquillity, and oriental kief the poem entitled "La Vie Antérieure" contrasts happily with the sombre pictures of monstrous modern Paris, and shows that the artist has, on his palette, side by side with the blacks, bitumens, umbers, and siennas, a whole gamut of fresh tints: light, transparent, delicate roses, ideal blues, like the far-away Breughel of Paradise, with which to depict the Elysian Fields and mirage of his dreams.

It is well to note particularly the sentiment towards the artificial betrayed by the poet. By the word artificial one must understand a creation owing its existence entirely to Art, and from which Nature is entirely absent. In an article written during the life-time of Baudelaire, we pointed out this odd tendency of which to poem entitled "Rêve parisien" is a striking example. Here are the lines which endeavoured to lender this splendid and sombre nightmare, worthy of the engravings of Martynn: "Imagine a supernatural landscape, or rather a perspective in metal, marble, and water, from which all vegetation is banished. All is rigid, polished, mirrored under a sky without sun, without moon, without stars. In the midst of the silence of eternity rise up, artificially lit, palaces, colonnades, towers, stair-cases, fountains from which fall heavy cascades like curtains of crystal. The blue waters are encircled, like the steel of antique mirrors, in quays, basins of burnished gold, or run silently under bridges of precious stones. The crystallised ray enshrines the liquid, and the porphyry flagstones of the terraces reflect the surrounding objects like ice. The Queen of Sheba, walking there, would lift up her robe, fearing to wet her feet, so glistening is the surface. The style of this poem is brilliant, like black, polished marble."

Is it not a strange fantasy, this composition made from rigid elements, in which nothing lives, throbs, breathes, and where not a blade of grass, not a leaf, not a flower comes to derange the implacable symmetry of forms invented by Art? Does it not make one believe in the unblemished Palmyra or the Palenqué remaining standing on a dead planet bereft of its atmosphere?

These are, undoubtedly, strange imaginings, anti-natural, neighbours of hallucination and expressions of a secret desire for unattainable novelty; but, for our part, we prefer them to the insipid simplicity of the pretended poets who, on the threadbare canvas of the commonplace, embroider, with old wools faded in colour, designs of bourgeois triviality or of foolish sentimentality: crowns of roses, green leaves of cabbages, and doves pecking one another. Sometimes we do not fear to attain the rare at the expense of the shocking, the fantastic, and the exaggerated. Barbarity of language appeals to us more than platitude. Baudelaire has this advantage: he can be bad, but he is never common. His faults, like his good qualities, are original, and, even when he has displeased, he has, after long reasoning, willed it so.

Let us bring this analysis, already rather too long, however much we abridge it, to a close by a few words on that poem which so astonished Victor Hugo – "Petites Vieilles" The poet, walking in the streets of Paris, sees some little old women with humble and sad gait pass by. He follows them as one would pretty women, recognising from the threadbare cashmere, worn out, mended a hundred times, from the end of lace frayed and yellow, the ring – sorrowful souvenir, disputed by the pawn-broker and ready to leave the slender finger of the pale hand – a past of happier fortune and elegance: a life of love and devotion, perhaps; the remains of beauty under ruin and misery and the devastations of age. He reanimates all these trembling spectres, reclothes them, puts the flesh of youth on these emaciated skeletons, revives in these poor wounded hearts illusions of other days. Nothing could be more ridiculous, nothing more touching, than these Venuses of Père-Lachaise and these Ninons of Petits-Ménages who file off lamentably under the evocation of the master, like a procession of ghosts surprised by the day.

III

The question of versification and scansion, disdained by all those who have no appreciation of form – and they are numerous to-day – has been rightly judged by Baudelaire as one of the utmost importance. Nothing is more common now than to mistake technique in art for poetry itself. These are things which have no relation.

Fénelon, J. J. Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Chateaubriand, George Sand are poetic in principle, but not poets – that is to say, they are incapable of writing in verse, even mediocre verse, a special faculty often possessed by people of inferior merit to that of the great masters. To wish to separate technique from poetry is a modern folly which will lead to nothing but the annihilation of Art itself. We encountered, in an excellent article of Sainte-Beuve on Taine, à propos of Pope and Boileau, lightly treated by the author of "The History of English Literature" this clear and judicial paragraph, where things are brought to light by the great critic who was from the beginning, and is always, a great poet.

"But, à propos of Boileau, must I then accept this strange judgment of a man of esprit, this contemptuous opinion that M. Taine takes of him, and fear to endorse it in passing? – 'There are two sorts of verse in Boileau: the most numerous, which are those of a pupil of the third form of his school; the less numerous, which are those of a pupil of rhetoric.' The man of letters who speaks thus (Guillaume Guizot) does not feel that Boileau is a poet, and, I will go further, he ought not to be sensible of poetry in such a poet. I understand that one does not put all the poetry into the metre; but I cannot at all understand that, when the point in question is Art, one takes no account of Art itself, and depreciates the perfect workers who excel in it. Suppress with a single blow all the poetry in verse, or else speak with esteem of those who possess the secrets. Boileau was of the small number of those; Pope equally." One could not express it better nor more justly. When it is a question of a poet, the composition of his verse is a considerable thing and worthy of study, for it constitutes a great part of his intrinsic value. It is with this stamp his gold, his silver, his copper are coined.

The verse of Baudelaire is written according to modern methods and reform. The mobility of the cesura, the use of the mot d'ordre, the freedom of expression, the writing of a single Alexandrine, the clever mechanism of prosody, the turn of the stanza and the strophe – whatever its individual formula, its tabulated structure, its secrets of metre – bear the stamp of Baudelaire's sleight of hand, if one may express it thus. His signature, C. B., claims each rhyme he has made.

Among his poems there are many pieces which have the apparent disposition and exterior design of a sonnet, though "sonnet" is not written at the head of each of them. That undoubtedly comes from a literary scruple, and a prosodical conscience, the origin of which seems to us traceable to an article where he recounts his visit to us and relates our conversation. It must not be forgotten that he had just brought us a volume of verses of two absent friends, that he was commissioned to make known, and we remarked these lines in his narrative: "After having rapidly run through the volume, he remarked to me that the poets in question allowed themselves too often to write libertine sonnets, that is to say unorthodox, willingly breaking through the rule of the quadruple rhyme."

At this period the greater part of the "Flowers of Evil" was already composed, and in it there are to be found a large number of libertine sonnets, which not only have the quadruple rhyme, but in which also the rhymes are alternated in a quite irregular manner.

The young scholar always allows himself a number of libertine sonnets, and we avow it is particularly disagreeable to us. Why, if one wishes to be free and to arrange the rhyme according to individual fancy, choose a fixed form which admits of no digression, no caprice? The irregular in what should be regular, lack of form in what should be symmetrical – what can be more illogical and annoying? Each infraction of a rule disturbs us like a doubtful or a false note. The sonnet is a sort of poetical fugue in which the theme ought to pass and repass until its final resolution in a given form. One must be absolutely subservient to law, or else, if one finds these laws antiquated, pedantic, cramping, not write sonnets at all.

Baudelaire often sought musical effect by one or more particularly melodious lines recurring alternately, as in the Italian strophe called sextine, of which M. le Comte de Gramont offers in his poetry several happy examples. He applied this form, which has the vague, rocking sound of a magical incantation half heard in a dream, to the subjects of melancholy memory and unhappy loves. The stanzas, with their monotonous rustling, carry and express the thoughts, balancing them as the waves carry on their crests a drowning flower fallen from the shore.

Like Longfellow and Poe, Baudelaire sometimes employed alliteration; that is to say, the repetition of a certain consonant to produce in the interior of the verse a harmonious effect. Sainte-Beuve, to whom none of these delicate touches is unknown, and who continually practises them in his exquisite art, has once said in an Italian sonnet of deep gentleness: "Sorrente m'a rendu mon doux reve infini."

Any sensitive ear can understand the charm of this liquid sound four times repeated, and which seems to sweep one away to the infinity of a dream, like the wing of a gull in the surging blue of a Neapolitan sea. Alliteration is often to be found in the prose of Beaumarchais, and the Scandinavian poets make great use of it. These trifles will undoubtedly appear frivolous to utilitarians, progressive and practical men who think, with Stendhal, that verse is a childish form, good for primitive ages, and ask that poetry should be written in prose to suit a reasonable age. Yet all the same, these are details which make verse good or bad, and which make a man a poet or not.

Many-syllabled and full-sounding words pleased Baudelaire, and, with three or four of these, he often makes a line which seems immense, the sound of which is vibrant and prolongs the metre. For the poet, words have in themselves, and apart from the meanings they express, intrinsic beauty and value, like precious stones still uncut and not set in bracelets, in necklaces or in rings. They charm the connoisseur who watches and sorts them in the little chalice where they are put in reserve, as a goldsmith would his jewels. There are words of diamond, ruby, sapphire, emerald, and others which glisten phosphorescently when struck.

The great Alexandrines of which we have spoken, that come in times of lull and calm to die on the shore in the tranquillity and gentle undulation of the swelling surge, sometimes dash themselves to pieces in the foam and throw up their white spray against the sullen rocks, only to be tossed back immediately into the salt sea.

The lines of eight feet are brisk, strong, striking, like a cat-o'-nine-tails, lashing the shoulders of those who, with a wicked conscience, perform hypocritical actions. They also display strange caprices; the author encases in his metre, as in a frame of ebony, the nightly sights of a cemetery where the eyes of the owls shine in the shadows; and, behind the bronze-green curtains of the yew-trees, slide, with spectral steps, pick-pockets, devastators of tombs, thieves of the dead.

In these eight-feet lines he paints sinister skies where, above the gibbet, rolls a moon, grown sickly from the incantations of Canidies. He describes the chill ennui of a dead person, who has exchanged his bed of luxury for the coffin, who dreams in his solitude, starting at each drop of icy rain that filters through his coffin-lid. He shows us, in his curiously disordered bouquet of faded flowers, old letters, ribbons, miniatures, pistols, daggers, and phials of laudanum. We see the room of the coward gallant where, in his absence, the ironical spectre of suicide comes, for Death itself cannot quench the fires of lust.

IV

From the composition of the verses let us pass to the style. Baudelaire intertwines his silken and golden threads with strong, rude hemp, as in a cloth worked by Orientals, at the same time gorgeous and coarse, where the most delicate ornamentations run in charming caprice on the fine camel's-hair, or on a cloth coarse to the touch like the sail of a boat. The most delicate, the most precious even, is hurled in with savage brutalities; and, from the scented boudoir and voluptuously languorous conversations, one falls into ignoble inns where drunkards, mixing blood with wine, dispute at the point of their knives for some Hélène from the streets.

"The Flowers of Evil" are the brightest gem in Baudelaire's crown. In them he has given play to his originality, and shown that one is able, after incalculable volumes of verse where every variety of subject seems to be exhausted, to bring to light something new and unexpected, without hauling down the sun and the stars, or making universal history file past as in a German fresco.

But what has especially made his name famous is his translation of Edgar Poe; for in France little is read of the poet except his prose, and it is the feuilletons that make the poems known. Baudelaire has almost naturalised for us this singular and rare individuality, so pregnant, so exceptional, who at first rather scandalised than charmed America. Not that his work is in any way morally shocking – he is, on the contrary, of virginal and seraphic chastity; but because he disturbed accepted principles and practical common sense, and, also, because there was no criterion by which to judge him.

Edgar Poe had none of the American ideas on progress, perfectibility, democratic institutions, and other subjects of declamation dear to the Philistines of the two worlds. He was not a worshipper of the god of gold; he loved poetry for itself and preferred beauty to utility – enormous heresy! Still, he had the good fortune to write well things that made the hair of fools in all countries stand on end. A grave director of a review or journal – a friend of Poe, moreover, and well-intentioned – avowed that it was difficult to employ him, and that one was obliged to pay him less than others, because he wrote above the heads of the vulgar – admirable reason!

The biographer of the author of the "Raven" and "Eureka," said that Edgar Poe, if he had regulated his genius and applied his creative powers in a way more appropriate to America, would have become a money-making author; but he was undisciplined, worked only when he liked, and on what subjects he pleased. His roving disposition made him roll like a comet out of its orbit from Baltimore to New York, from New York to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Boston or Richmond, without being able to settle anywhere. In his moments of ennui, distress, or breakdown, when to excessive excitement, caused by some feverish work, succeeded that despondency known to authors, he drank brandy, a fault for which he has been bitterly reproached by Americans, who, as every one knows, are models of temperance.

He was not under any delusion as to the effects of this disastrous vice, he who has written in the "Black Cat" this prophetic phrase: "What illness is comparable to alcohol!" He drank without drunkenness, just to forget, to find himself in a happy mood in regard to his work, or even to end an intolerable life in evading the scandal of a direct suicide. Briefly, one day, seized in the street by an attack of delirium tremens, he was carried to the hospital where he died, still young and with no signs of decaying power. The deplorable habit had had no influence on his intellect or his manners, which remained always those of an accomplished gentleman; nor on his beauty, which was remarkable to the end.

We indicate but rapidly some traits of Edgar Poe, as we are not writing his life. The American author held so high a place in the intellectual esteem of Baudelaire that we must speak of him in a more or less developed way, and give, if not an account of his life, at least of his doctrines. Edgar Poe has certainly influenced Baudelaire, his translator, especially during the latter part of his life, which was, alas! so short.

"The Extraordinary Histories," "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," "The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," "Eureka," have been translated by Baudelaire with so exact a correspondence in style and thought, a freedom so faithful yet so supple, that the translations produce the effect of original work, and are almost perfect. "The Extraordinary Histories" are preceded by a piece of high criticism, in which the translator analyses the eccentric and novel talent of Poe, which France, with her utter heedlessness of the originalities of foreigners, ignored profoundly till Baudelaire revealed them. He brought to bear upon this work, necessary to explain a nature so beyond the vulgar idea, a metaphysical sagacity of the rarest delicacy. The pages may be counted the most remarkable he has ever written.

Great excitement was created by these histories, so mathematically fantastic, deduced in algebraical formulæ, and in which the expositions resemble some judiciary led by the most subtle and perspicacious magistrates.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Gold-Bug," enigmas more difficult to divine than those of the Sphinx, and in which the interest, sustained to the very end, excites to delirium the public, surfeited with romances and adventures. One feels deeply for Auguste Dupin, with his strange, divinatory lucidity, who seems to hold between his hands the threads, drawing one to the other, of thoughts most opposed, and who arrives at his conclusions by deductions of a marvellous correctness. One admires Legrand, cleverer still at deciphering cryptograms than Claude Jacquet, employed by the Ministry, who read to Desmarets, in the history of the "13," the letter deciphered by Ferrango; and the result of this reading is the discovery of the treasures of Captain Kidd! Every one will confess that he would have had to be very clear-sighted to trace in the glimmer of the flame, in the red characters on yellow parchment, the death's-head, the kid, the lines and points, the cross, the tree and its branches, and to guess where the corsair had buried the coffer full of diamonds, jewels, watches, golden chains, ounces, doubloons, dollars, piastres, and money from all countries, the discovery of which recompensed the sagacity of Legrand. The "Pit and the Pendulum" caused terror equal to the blackest inventions of Anne Radcliffe, of Lewis, and of the Rev. Father Mathurin, while one gets giddy watching the tearing whirlpool of the Maelstrom, colossal, funnel-like walls upon which ships run like pieces of straw in a tempest.

"The Truth of the Case of M. Waldemar," shakes the nerves even of the most robust, and the "Fall of the House of Usher" inspires profound melancholy.

Imaginative natures were deeply touched by the faces of women, so vaporous, transparent, romantically pale, and of almost spiritual beauty, that the poet named Morelia, Ligeia, Lady Rowena, Trevanion, de Tremaine, Lenore; but who are in reality only the incarnations under different forms of a unique love surviving the death of the adored one.

Henceforth, in France, the name of Baudelaire is inseparable from that of Edgar Poe, and the memory of the one immediately awakes thoughts of the other. It seems sometimes that the ideas of the American were really of French origin.

Baudelaire, like the greater number of the poets of his time, when the Arts, less separated than they were formerly, mingled more one with another and allowed of frequent transposition, had the taste for, sentiment and knowledge of, painting. He wrote noteworthy articles in the "Salon," and, amongst others, pamphlets on Delacroix, which analysed with clear penetration and subtlety the nature of a great romantic painter. He thought deeply, and we find, in some reflections on Edgar Poe, this significant phrase: "Like our Delacroix, who has raised his art to the height of great poetry, Edgar Poe likes to place his subjects on violet and green backgrounds which reveal the phosphorescence and the fragrance of the storm." How just is this sentiment, so simply phrased, incidental to the passionate and feverish colour of the painter! Delacroix, in effect, charmed Baudelaire by the "maladie" even of his talent, so troubled, restless, nervous, excitable, and so tormented with uneasiness, melancholy, febrile ardour, convulsive efforts, and the vague dreams of modern times.

At one time, the realistic school believed it could monopolise Baudelaire. Certain outrageously crude and truthful pictures in the "Flowers of Evil," pictures in which the poet had not hesitated before any ugliness, might have made some superficial minds think he leaned towards that doctrine. They did not note that these pictures, so-called real, were always ennobled by character, effect, or colour, and also served as a contrast to the smooth and idealistic work. Baudelaire, allowing himself to be drawn by these realists, visited their studios and was to have written an article on Courbet, the painting-master of Ornans, which, however, never appeared. Nevertheless, to one of the later Salons, Fantin, in the odd frame where he united round the medallion of Eugène Delacroix, like the supernumeraries of an apotheosis, the painters, and writers known as realists, placed Baudelaire in a corner of it with his serious look and ironical smile. Certainly Baudelaire, as an admirer of Delacroix, had a right to be there. But did he intellectually and sympathetically make a part of this company, whose tendencies were not in accord with his aristocratic tastes and aspirations towards the beautiful? In him, as we have already said, the employment of trivial and natural ugliness was only a sort of manifestation and protestation of horror; and we doubt if the Venus de Courbet had ever much charm for him, the amateur of exquisite elegance, refined mannerisms, and mannered evasions. Not that he was incapable of admiring grandiose beauty; he who has written "La Géante" ought to love "The Night" and the "Dawn," those magnificent colossal females that Michelangelo has placed on the voluta of the tombs of the Medici. Baudelaire had, moreover, metaphysical and philosophical tenets which could not but alienate him from this school, to which he had no pretext for attaching himself.

Far from being satisfied with reality, he sought diligently for the bizarre, and, if he met with some singular, original type, he followed it, studied it, and learnt how to find the end of the thread on the bobbin and so to unravel it. Thus he was familiar with Guys, a mysterious individual, who occupied his time in going to all the odd corners of the universe where anything was taking place to obtain sketches for English illustrated journals.

This Guys, whom we knew, was at one time a great traveller, a profound and quick observer, and a perfect humorist. In the flash of an eye he seized upon the characteristic side of men and things; in a few strokes of the pencil he silhouetted them in his album, tracing the cursive lines with the pen like a stenographer, and washing them over with a flat tint to indicate the colour.

Guys was not what is properly called an artist, but he had the particular gift of sketching the chief points of things rapidly. In a flash of the eye, with an unequalled clear-sightedness, he disentangled from all the traits – just the one. He placed it in prominence, instinctively or designedly, rejecting the merely complementary parts.