No More Learning

In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in
the Louvre he enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of
the poet's preferences. He was also attracted by El Greco--not an
unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own
genius. Of Goya he has written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his
touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his Derves ruined by abuse of
drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful
than Nature herself. The country itself, he declared, was odious. Like
Whistler, whom he often met--see the Hommage a Delacrois by
Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet,
Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic,
and De Balleroy--he could not help showing his aversion to "foolish
sunsets. " In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too much
moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism and
fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor
of Jean, Duc d'Esseintes, in Huysmans's _A Rebours_. Huysmans at first
modelled himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a
continuation of Petits Poemes en Prose. And to Baudelaire's account must
be laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite his pursuit of
perfection in form, his influence has been too often baneful to
impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, and
high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no extravagance, absurd or
terrible, that he did not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on ice
to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer.
In his criticism alone was he the
sane logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to see the success of
the Impressionist group, he surely would have acclaimed their theory and
practice. Was he not an impressionist himself?

As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed
his aesthetic consciousness. Read Volume II of his collected works,
_Curiosites Esthetiques_, which contains his Salons; also his essay, _De
l'Essence du Rire_ (worthy to be placed side by side with George
Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are
considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire was as
conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around miles of mediocre canvas,
saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling over with holy
indignation or indulging in glacial irony, before the rash usurpers
occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with
promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.
He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his head
over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William
Hausollier, now so little known. He praised Deveria, Chasseriau--who
waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists
were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer and
the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth, Cruikshank,
Pinelli and Breughel proclaims his versatility of vision. In his essay
Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics to recognize
the peculiar quality called "modernity," that naked vibration which
informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale,
and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and Raffaelli with their
evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his Volume III, entitled
L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to the new century were then
subjects of furious quarrels. This book contains much just and brilliant
writing.