Volume 4, Number 1 · February 11, 1965
Baudelaire as Critic
By Roger Shattuck
Baudelaire as a Literary Critic
translated and edited by Lois Boe Hyslop, by Francis E. Hyslop Jr.
Pennsylvania State University, 387 pp., $7.50
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne
Phaidon, 224, 54 plates (1 in color) pp., $6.95
While writing his classic criticism of the tyranny of the majority and the disappearance of genius in America, Tocqueville nevertheless went out of his way in 1830 to compose a lyric passage about 'how the Americans inject a kind of heroism into their way of engaging in commerce.' Baudelaire hated the creed of progress and the commercial spirit of his age with a deep-seated spleen that Tocqueville never tasted. Yet in his first published articles fifteen years later, Baudelaire declares his faith in 'the heroism of modern life.' Did that sprawling century of materialism really achieve anything akin to heroism? Tocqueville meant the energy and resourcefulness of Atlantic coast merchants; Baudelaire meant the elegance, crime, and vice of Parisian boulevardiers and voyous. By the time he died he had become the first major French poet since Villon to have discovered the secret of attracting by repelling. But Baudelaire the critic concerns us here, in whom it is still surprising to run across terms like 'americanize' and 'magic realism' carrying the very meanings we know today. I shall have to come back to the matter of heroism.
Review, 2120 words
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