The Arcades Project - Operi

'Nachtgedanken" , by Goethe: "'I pity you, unhappy stars / who
are so beautiful and shine so splendidly, / gladly guiding the struggling sailor with
your light / and yet have no reward from gods or men: / for you do not love you
have never known love! / Ceaselessly by everlasting hours / your dance is led
across the wide heavens. / How vast a journey you have made already / since I,
reposing in my sweetheart's arms, / forgot my thoughts of you and of the midnight!""O
[J22a,lJ
The following argument-which dates from a period in which the decline of
sculpture had become apparent, evidently prior to the decline of painting-is
very instructive. Baudelaire makes exactly the same point about sculpture from
the perspective of painting as is made today about painting from the perspective
of film. "A picture, however, is only what it wants to be; there is no other way of
looking at it than on its own terms. Painting has but one point of view; it is
exclusive and absolute, and therefore the painter's expression is much 1110re
forceful." Baudelaire, Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 128 ("Salon de 1846"}.Just before this
(pp. 127 -128): "The spectator who moves around the figure can choose a hundred
different points of view, except the right one."'" J4, 7. [J22a,2J
On Victor Hugo, around 1840: "At that same period he began to realize that if
man is the solitary animal the solitary man is a man of the crowds [po 39] . . . . It
was Victor Hugo who gave Baudelaire that sense of the irradiant life of the crowd,
and who taught him that 'multitude and solitude [are] equal and interchangeable
'122 terms for the poet who is active and productive . ... Nevertheless, what a difference
between the solitude which the great artist of spleen chose for himself' in
Brussels in order "to gain an inalienable individual tranquillity and the solitude of
the magus of Jersey haunted at that same moment by shadowy apparitions! ...
Hugo's solitude is not an envelope, a Noli me tangere, a concentration of the
individual in his difference. It is, rather a participation in the (osmie mystery an
entry into the realm of primitive forces? (pp. 40-41). Gabriel Bounoure, "'Ahuues
de Vietor Hugo," Mesllres (July 15, \936), PI" 39--41. [J22a,3J
From Le Collier des jom's , vol. 1, cited hy Remy de Gourmont
in Judith Gautier (Paris, 1904), p. 15: 'A ring of the hell interrupted us and
then, without a sound, a very singular person entered the room and made a slight
how of the head. I had the impression of a priest without his cassock. "Ah, here's
Baldelarius!' cried my father, extending his hand to the newcomer." Baudelaire
offers a gloomy ,jest on the subject of Judith's nickname, "Ouragall" dlulTieane>.
[J23,lJ
'At the cafe called the Divan Le Peletier, Theodore de Banville would see Baudelaire
sitting fiereely, like an angry Goethe' (as he says in a poem), next to "the
gentle Asselineau. m Leon Daudet, Le Stupide XIXe Siecle (Paris, 1922), pp. 139l.
3,