484 Modernity and Bourgeois Life
There are odours succulent as young flesh,
4 Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) Correspondences
Of all Baudelaire's poems this is the one that seems most clearly to have spoken to the
interests of the advanced artists of his time and of subsequent decades, combining as it
did a series of motifs that were to have clear relevance to the preoccupations of painting,
and particularly to those which helped direct the Symbolist movement in the 1880s and
1890s (see Section Vic). These were, firstly, the idea that nature is both concealed and
revealed by an intervening forest of symbols, and that art is at best a form of matching
artifice; secondly, the idea of a synaesthetic correspondence between scents, colours,
sounds, tastes and tactile sensations; and thirdly, a fascination with intense sensual effects
pursued, at least in imagination, to -the point of corruption. The poem was originally
published in Baudelaire, Les Reurs du Mal, Paris, 1857, in the section 'Spleen et Ideal'
(Spleen and Ideal). This text is from Les Reurs du Mal· The Complete Text of The Flowers of
Evil, in a new translation by Richard Howard, London: Pan Books, 1892, p. 15.
Correspondances
La Nature est un temple OU de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe:i travers des forets de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
Les parfums, les couleurs et lessons se repondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
- Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses inftnies,
Comme l'ambre, Ie muse, Ie benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.
Correspondences
The pillars of Nature's temple are alive
and sometimes yield perplexing messages;
forests of symbols between us and the shrine
remark our passage with accustomed eyes.
Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else
into one deep and shadowy unison
as limitless as darkness and as day,
the sounds, the scents, the colours correspond.
IIID The Conditions of Art 485
sweet as flutes, and green as any grass,
while others - rich, corrupt and masterful -
possess the power of such inftnite things
as incense, amber, benjamin and musk,
to praise the senses' raptures and the mind's.
5 Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) 'Critical Method - on the
Modern Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine Arts'
In 1855, Baudelaire wrote three parts of a review of the art included in the Exposition
. Universelle in Paris, of which this was the first. In the case of a substantial review, it was a
common convention in nineteenth-century France for the opening section to address some
general issue raised by the work on view, before the writer proceeded to address the
individual artists and their works. It was thus often in such opening sections that critics
Jehded to expound their theories or to nail their colours to the mast. In this case the
opportunity to compare the artistic offerings of different nations led Baudelaire to an
admission of his lack of any system and to a declaration of his reliance upon feeling or
intuition. His ensuing critique of the idea of progress serves as a warning to his compa-
triots against any complacency over the recent achievements of French art. Baudelaire
was originally commissioned to write on the Exposition Universelle for the Parisian journal
Le Pays. The present section was published in that journal on 26 May and a second, on
Delacroix, on 3 June. Thereafter another writer was assigned to the exhibition, though
Baudelaire published a further article on the substantial showing of Ingres's work in Le
Portefeui/le, Paris, 12 August. He subsequently reassembled the three sections with some
additional material and they appeared in this form in the posthumously published collection
Curiosites esthetiques, C. Asselineau and T. de Banville (eds), Paris: Poulet-Malassis,
1868. Our excerpt is taken from the translation of the latter version in Jonathan Mayne
(ed), Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baude-
laire, London: Phaidon, 1964: 'Exposition Universelle I. Critical Method - on the Modern
Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine Arts - on the Shift of Vitality', pp. 121-8, but
without the later additions.
There can be few occupations so interesting, so attractive, so full of surprises and
revelations for a critic, a dreamer whose mind is given to generalization as well as to
the study of details - or, to put it even better, to the idea of an universal order and
.hierarchy - as a comparison of the nations and their respective products. When I say
'hierarchy', I have no wish to assert the supremacy of anyone nation over another.
Although Nature contains certain plants which are more or less holy, certain forms
more or less spiritual, certain animals more or less sacred; and although, following the
promptings of the immense universal analogy, it is legitimate for us to conclude that
certain nations (vast animals, whose organisms are adequate to their surroundings)
have been prepared and educated by Providence for a determined goal- a goal more
or less lofty, more or less near to Heaven; - nevertheless all I wish to do here is to
assert their equal utility in the eyes of Him who is indefmable, and the miraculous way
in which they come to one another's aid in the hannony of the universe.
486 Modernity and Bourgeois Life
Any reader who has been at all accustomed by solitude (far better than by books) to
these vast contemplations will already have guessed the point that I am wanting to
make; and, to cut across the periphrastics and hesitations of Style with a question
which is almost equivalent to a formula, I will put it thus to any honest man, always
provided that he has thought and travelled a little. Let him imagine a modern
Winckelmann (we are full of them; the nation overflows with them; they are the
idols of the lazy). What would he say, if faced with a product of China - something
weird, strange, distorted in fOrln, intense in colour and sometimes delicate to the
point of evanescence? And yet such a thing is a specimen of universal beauty; but in
order for it to be understood, it is necessary for the critic, for the spectator, to work a
transformation in himself which partakes of the nature of a mystery - it is necessary
for him, by means of a phenomenon of the will acting upon the imagination, to learn
of himself to participate in the surroundmgs which have given birth to this singular
flowering. Few men have the divine grace of cosmopolitanism in its entirety; but all
can acquire it in different degrees: The best endowed in this respect are those solitary
wanderers who have lived for years in the heart of forests, in the 'midst of illimitable
prairies, with no other companion but their gun - contemplating, dissecting, writing.
No scholastic veil, no university paradox, no academic utopia has intervened between
them and the complex truth. They know the admirable, eternal and inevitable
relationship between form and function. Such people do not criticize; they contem-
plate, they study.
If, instead of a pedagogue, I were to take a man of the world, an intelligent being,
and transport him to a faraway country, I feel sure that, while the shocks and surprises
of disembarkation might be great, and the business of habituation more or less long
and laborious, nevertheless sooner or later his sympathy would be so keen, so
penetrating, that it would create in him a whole new world of ideas, which would
form an integral part of himself and would accompany him, in the form of memories,
to the day of his death. Those curiously-shaped buildings, which at first provoke his
academic eye (all peoples are academic when they judge others, and barbaric when
they are themselves judged); those plants and trees, which are disquieting for a mind
filled with memories of its native land; those'men and women, whose muscles do not
pulse to the classic rhythms of his country, whose gait is not measured according to
the accustomed beat, and whose gaze is not directed with the same magnetic power;
those perfumes, which are no longer the perfumes of his mother's boudoir; those
mysterious flowers, whose deep colour forces an entrance into 'his eye, while his
glance is teased by their shape; those fruits, whose taste deludes and deranges the
senses, and reveals to the palate ideas which belong to the sense of smell; - all that
world of new harmonies will enter slowly into him, will patiently penetrate him, like
the vapours of a perfumed Turkish bath; all that undreamt-of vitality will be added to
his own vitality; several thousands of ideas and sensations will enrich his earthly
dictionary, and it is even possible that, going a step too far and transforming justice
into revolt, he will do like the converted Sicambrian [Oovis] and burn what he had
formerly adored - and adore what he had formerly burnt.
Or take one of those modern 'aesthetic pundits', as Heinrich Heine calls them
[Salon of 1831]- Heine, that delightful creature, who would be a genius if he turned
more often towards the divine. What would he say? what, I repeat, would he write if
lITo The Conditions of Art 487
faced with such unfamiliar phenomena? The crazy doctrinaire of Beauty would rave,
no doubt; locked up within the blinding fortress of his system, he would blaspheme
both life and nature; and under the influence of his fanaticism, be it Greek, Italian or
Parisian, he would prohibit that insolent race from enjoying, from dreaming or from
thinking in any other ways but his very own. 0 ink-smudged science, bastard taste,
more barbarous than the barbarians themselves! you that have forgotten the colour of
the sky, the movement and the smell of animality! you whose wizened fingers,
paralysed by the pen, can no longer run with agility up and down the immense
keyboard of the universal co"espondences!
Like all-my friends I have tried more than once to lock myself up within a system in
order to preach there at my ease. But a system is a kind of damnation which forces one
to a perpetual recantation; it is always necessary to be inventing a new one, and the
drudgery involved is a cruel punishment. Now my system was always beautiful,
spacious, vast, convenient, neat and, above all, water-tight; at least so it seemed to
me. But always some spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality would
come to give the lie to my childish and superannuated wisdom - that lamentable child
of Utopia! It was no good shifting or stretching my criterion - it always lagged behind
universal man, and never stopped chasing after multiform and multi-coloured Beauty
as it moved in the infinite spirals oflife. Condemned unremittingly to the humiliation
of a new conversion, I took a great decision. To escape from the horrot of these
philosophical apostasies, I haughtily resigned myself to modesty; I became content to
feel; I returned to seek refuge in impeccable naivete. I humbly beg pardon of the
academics of all kinds who occupy the various workrooms of our artistic factory. But it
is there that my philosophic conscience has found its rest; and at least I can declare - in
so far as any man can answer for his virtues - that my mind now rejoices in a more
abundant impartiality.
Anyone can easily understand that if those whose business it is to express beauty
were to conform to the rules of the pundits, beauty itself would disappear from the
earth, since all types, all ideas and all sensations would be fused in a vast, impersonal
and monotonous unity, as immense as boredom or total negation. Variety, the sine qua
non of life, would be effaced from life. So true is it that in the multiple productions of
art there is an element of the ever-new which will eternally elude the rules and
analyses of the school! That shock of surprise, which is one of the great joys produced
by art and literature, is due to this very variety of types and sensations. The aesthetic
pundit - a kind of mandarin-tyrant - always puts me in mind of a godless man who
substitutes himself for God.
With all due respect to the over-proud sophists who have taken their wisdom from
books, I shall go even further, and however delicate and difficult of expression my
idea may be, I do not despair of succeeding. The Beautiful is always strange. I do not
mean that it is coldly, deliberately strange, for in that case it would be a monstrosity
that had jumped the rails of life. I mean that it always contains a touch of strangeness,
of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and that it is this touch of
strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty. It is its endorsement, so to
speak - its mathematical characteristic. Reverse the proposition, and try to imagine a
commonplace Beauty! Now how could this necessary, irreducible and infinitely varied
strangeness, depending upon the environment, the climate, the manners, the race, the
488 Modernity and Bourgeois Life
religion and the temperament of the artist - how could it ever be controlled, amended
and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on
this planet, without mortal danger to art itself? This dash of strangeness, which
constitutes and defines individuality (without which there can be no Beauty), plays
, .
in art the role of taste and of seas9ning in cooking (may the exactness of this
comparison excuse its triviality!), since, setting aside their utility or the quantity of
nutritive substance which they contain, the only way in which dishes differ from one
. '
another is in the idea which they reveal to the palate.
Therefore, in the glorious task of analysing this fme e~ibition, so varied in its
elements, so disturbing in its variety, and so baffling for the pedagogues, I shall
endeavour to steer clear of all kind of pedantry. Others enough will speak the jargon of
the studio and will exhibit themselves to the detriment of the pictures. In many cases
erudition seems to me to be a childish thing and but little revealing of its true nature. I
would find it only too easy to discourse subtly upon symmetrical or balanced
composition, upon tonal equipoise, upon warmth and coldness of tone, etc. 0 Vanity!
I choose instead to speak in the name of feeling, of morality and of pleasure. And I
hope that a few people who are learned without pedantry will find my ignorance to
their liking.
The story is told of Balzac (and who would not listen with respect to any anecdote,
no matter how trivial, concerning that great genius?) that one day he found himself in
front of a beautiful picture - a melancholy winter-scene, heavy with hoar-frost and
thinly sprinkled with cottages and mean-looking peasants; and that after gazing at a
little house from which a thin wisp of smoke was rising, 'How beautiful it is!" he
cried. 'But what are they doing in that cottage? What are their thoughts? What are
their sorrows? has it been a good harvest? No doubt they have bills to pay?'
.;
Laugh if you will at M. de Balzac. I do not know the name of the painter whose
honour it was to set the great novelist's soul a-quiver with anxiety and conjecture; but
I think that in his way, with his delectable naivete, he has given us an excellent lesson
in criticism. You will often fmd me appraising a picture exclusively for the sum of
ideas or of dreams that it suggests to my mind.
Painting is an evocation, a magical operation (if only we could consult the hearts of
children on the subject!), and when the evoked character, when the reanimated idea
has stood forth and looked us in the face, we have no right - at least it would be the
acme of imbecility! - to discuss the magician's formulae of evocation. I know of no
problem more mortifying for pedants and philosophizers than to attempt to discover
in virtue of what law it is that artists who are the most opposed in their method can
evoke the same ideas and stir up analogous feelings within us.
There is yet another, and very fashionable, error which I am anxious to avoid like
the very devil. I refer to the idea of 'progress'. Transported into the sphere of the
imagination - and there have been hotheads, fanatics of logic who have attempted to
do so - the idea of progress takes the stage with a gigantic absurdity, a grotesqueness
which reaches nightmare heights. The theory can no longer be upheld. The facts are
too palpable, too well known. They mock at sophistry and confront it without
flinching. In the poetic and artistic order, the true prophets are seldom preceded by
forerunners. Every efflorescence is spontaneous, individual. Was Signorelli really the
begetter of Michelangelo? Did Perugino contain Raphael? The artist stems only from
.;
'"I
IIID The Conditions of Art 489
himself. His own works are the only promises that he makes to the coming centuries.
He stands security only for himself. He dies childless. He has been his own king, his
own priest, his own God.
It is just the same with the nations that joyfully and successfully cultivate the arts of
the imagination. Present prosperity is no more than a temporary and alas! a very
short-termed guarantee. There was a time when the dawn broke in the east; then the
"light moved towards the south, and now it streams forth from the west. It is true that
I.
I France, by reason of her central position in the civilized world, seems to be sum-
moned to gather to herself all the ideas, all the poetic products of her neighbours and
to return them to other peoples, marvellously worked upon and embroidered. But it
must never 6e forgotten that nations, those vast collective beings, are subject to the
same laws as individuals. They have their childhood, in which they utter their first
stammering cries and gradually grow in strength and size. They have their youth and
maturity, the period of sound and courageous, works. Finally they have their old age,
when they fall asleep upon their piled-up riches. It often happens that it is the root
principle itself that has constituted their strength, and the process of development
that has brought with it their decadence - above all when that root principle, which
was formerly quickened by an all-conquering enthusiasm, has become for the majority
(y 'a kind of routine. Then, as I half suggested a moment ago, the vital spirit shifts and
goes to visit other races and other lands. But it must not be thought that the
newcomers inherit lock, stock and barrel from their predecessors or that they receive
from them a ready-made body of doctrine. It often happens (as happened in the
Middle Ages) that all being lost, all has to be re-fashioned.
Anyone who visited the Exposition Universe/Ie with the preconceived idea of finding
the children of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo among the Italians, the spirit of
DOrer among the Germans, or the soul of Zurbaran and Velasquez among the
Spaniards, would be preparing himself for a needless shock. I have neither the
time, nor perhaps sufficient knowledge, to investigate what are the laws which shift
, I artistic vitality, or to discover why it is that God dispossesses the nations sometimes
[,
. for a while only, and sometimes for ever; I content myself with noting a very frequent
, . occurrence in history . We are living in an age in which it is necessary to go on
repeating certain platitudes - in an arrogant age which believes itself to be above the
misadventures of Greece and Rome. [ ... ]
6 Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) 'The Queen of the Faculties'
The following passage is taken from Baudelaire's 'Salon of 1859'. Section I of this review,
'The Modern Artist', is taken up by a critical account of those who degrade the artist's
calling through 'discredit of the imagination, disdain of the great' and 'exclusive practice of
technique'. The succeeding section, on 'The Modern Public and Photography', is included
below as text IVc5. In the present text, which forms the third section of the Salon,
Baudelaire develops the positive counterpart to his opening negative account, in the
process distancing himself from the more doctrinaire forms of Realism prevalent at the
time. By 'The Queen of the Faculties' he means imagination, which he is careful to
distinguish from Idealism. As is often the case in Baudelaire's writing on art, this passage