We do not need those Love-Letters at all - to prove that a master can
draw sweet strains from communion with one mistress, from a lute with
one string; a formidable array of songsters, on the other hand, will
demonstrate how much fuller and richer the melody grows when the
instrument is provided with the requisite five, the desirable fifty.
Monogamous habits have been many a bard's undoing.
Twenty years' devotion to that stupid and spiteful old cat of a
semi-negress! They make one conscious of the gulf between the logic of
the emotions and that other one - that logic of the intellect which ought
to shape our actions. Here was Baudelaire, a man of ruthless
self-analysis. Did he never see himself as others saw him? Did he never
say: "You are making a fool of yourself"?
Be sure he did.
You are making a fool of yourself: are not those the words I ought to
have uttered when, standing in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo - the
sunny centre: so it had been inexorably arranged - I used to wait and
wait, with eyes glued to the clock hard by, in the slender shadow of
that obelisque which crawled reluctantly, like the finger of fate, over
the burning stones?
