Excerpt from Charles Baudelaire: A Study Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convic tions, and he can but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire a method of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible annunciation of evil which he called The M ystem'ous rose-garden, the lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the falling roses, tidings of more than pleasant sins. And in Baudelaire, as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on them. And with these unlike other satirists of our day - it is always the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts and out of these bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing and out of their feet, that have run after vanities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.