The
polemics
of historical schools were a cross for
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly.
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly.
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
Some would put them above Diderot's.
Mr.
Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the
English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed
too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds, "to read a
criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no means a
sure method of recognizing the picture afterward. " Now, word-painting
was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of
competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and
marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed,
how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree
with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when the imagination is
that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it
down scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. He did not paint
pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages
with technical terms. But the spirit of his subject he did disengage in
a few swift phrases.
The polemics of historical schools were a cross for
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic, he
judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life,
he asserted, and long before Jules Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art,
yet, having breadth of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for
seeing both sides of his own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could
write: "The puerile utopia of the school of art-for-art, in excluding
morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All
literature which refuses to advance fraternally between science and
philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal literature. "
Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of
music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of
democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental
fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation
the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those
things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden
uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary etude. Brave
lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the region of the
ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished.
He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of
abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated
a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have
contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in art the democrat
is always reactionary.
Saintsbury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire among the
English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism observed
too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds, "to read a
criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no means a
sure method of recognizing the picture afterward. " Now, word-painting
was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh impossible feat of
competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of canvas and
marble. And, if he with his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed,
how could a less adept manipulator of the vocabulary? We do not agree
with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine too much when the imagination is
that of a poet. Baudelaire divined the work of the artist and set it
down scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. He did not paint
pictures in prose. He did not divagate. He did not overburden his pages
with technical terms. But the spirit of his subject he did disengage in
a few swift phrases.
The polemics of historical schools were a cross for
him to bear, and he wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic, he
judged more by form than theme. There are no types; there is only life,
he asserted, and long before Jules Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art,
yet, having breadth of comprehension and a Heine-like capacity for
seeing both sides of his own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could
write: "The puerile utopia of the school of art-for-art, in excluding
morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All
literature which refuses to advance fraternally between science and
philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal literature. "
Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of
music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of
democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental
fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation
the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those
things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden
uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary etude. Brave
lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the region of the
ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished.
He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of
abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated
a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have
contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in art the democrat
is always reactionary.
