Baudelaire as Art Critic

it is often said that no form of writing is so ephemeral as art criticism; and one has to be careful, in writing about contemporary art, not to be dominated by a sense of ultimate futility. But such despair is not justified, and I know of no better proof of this than Baudelaire’s art criticism, written about a hundred years ago, but only recently adequately presented in an English edition. ² It will be said that Baudelaire is unique—that he was a poet who abolished the distinction between creation and criticism, and who knew (he alone) how to transform his volupté into connaissance. Baudelaire is certainly unique, but not in this respect—in France Gautier and Mérimée had the same faculty, in England Ruskin (and if we no longer read Ruskin, it is a reflection on our own dullness of sensibility, and not on his continuing vitality). Baudelaire’s uniqueness consists not in his method, but in certain idées fixes to which he returned in almost every article he wrote. “We are living in an age in which it is necessary to go on respecting certain platitudes,” he wrote, “in an arrogant age which believes itself to be above the misadventures of Greece and Rome. We may not now be so confident of ourselves, but we still live in the same age—the age of “steam, electricity and gas—miracles unknown to the Romans—whose discovery bears full witness to our superiority over the ancients”.