The Arcades Project - Operi

"Stupidity is often the ornament of beauty. It is what gives to the eyes that gloomy
limpidity of blackish pools and that oily calm of tropical seas." Ch. B., Oeuvres,
vol. 2, p. 622 ("Choix de maximes consolantes sur l'amour").257 [J4S,7]
"'A last, general rule: in love, beware of the moon and the stars; beware of the
Venus de Milo." Ch. B., Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 624. ("Choix de maximes consolantes
sur l'amour").2 5H [J4S,S]
Baudelaire was always after the gist. His epoch forbade him to formulate it in
such a way that its social bearing would become immediately intelligible. Where
he sought in fact to make it comprehensible-in the essays on Dupont, as in the
theoretical musings in a Christian vein-he instead lost sight of it. Nevertheless,
the formulation he attains at one point in this context-"How much can you get
for a lyre, at the pawnshop?"-gives apt expression to his insistence on an art
that can prove itself before society. The sentence from Ch. B., OeuvreJ, vol. 2,
p. 422 (".cEcole pa'ienne"). 259 [J48,9]
With regard to allegory: "What do you expect from heaven or from the stupidity of
the public? Enough money to raise altars to Priapus and Bacchus in your attics?
... I nnderstand the rage of iconoclasts and of Muslims against images. I admit all
the remorse of Saint Augnstine for the too great pleasure of the eyes." Ch. B.,
Oeuvres, vol. 2, pp. 422,423 (,,"L'Ecole pai'cnne").2(jO [J4Sa,1]
It belongs to the physiognomic profile of Baudelaire that he fosters the gestures of
tile poet at the expense of the professional insignia of the writer. In this, he is like
the prostitute who cultivates her physiognomy as sexual object or as "beloved" in
order to conceal her professional dealings. [J48a,2]
If the poems of LeJ EpaveJ, in Proust's great inlage,261 are the foamy wave crests in
the ocean of Baudelairean poetry, then the poems of "Tableaux parisiens)) are its
safe harbor. In particular, these poems contain hardly any echo of the revolution,
ary storms that were breaking over Pa1s. In this respect they resemble the poetry
of Heym, composed forty years later, in which the corresponding state of affairs
has now risen to consciousness while the "Marseillaise" has been interred. '111e
last two tercets of the sonnet "Berlin III;' which describes the sunset in Berlin in
winter, read as follows :
A paupers' graveyard upheaves black, stone after stone;
The dead look out on the red sunset
From dleir hole. It tastes like strong wine.
They sit knitting all along the wall,
Sooty caps on their naked temples,
To the old attack song, the "Marseillaise."
Georg Heym, Dichtungen (Munich, 1922), p. 11. [J48a,3]