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Baudelaire and Stendhal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Margaret Gilman
Margaret Gilman*
Affiliation:
Bryn Mawr College
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Extract

In recent years Baudelaire has come to be recognized as one of the greatest of French critics, a critic whose judgments have an almost uncanny sureness, and whose principles of art and of criticism have a lasting validity. He was from the beginning a most independent and original critic. But he was also an avid reader, and his mind was full of ideas which he had read or heard. It is from a tangled skein of other people's ideas that he slowly wove a harmonious and original pattern that is unlike any of its single threads. In much of his early critical work, however, some at least of the strands are easily distinguishable. Among these are the works of Baudelaire's two greatest predecessors in art criticism, Diderot and Stendhal.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 1939 , pp. 288 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1939

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References

1 Pommier, J., “Les Salons de Diderot et leur influence au xixe siècle: Baudelaire et le Salon de 1846,” Revue des Cours et Conférences, 37e année, 2e série (1936), 289–305, 437–452.Google Scholar

2 I have used the following abbreviations for works frequently quoted : C.E.: Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, éd. J. Crépet (Paris: Conard, 1923); A.R.: Baudelaire, Art Romantique, éd. J. Crépet (Paris: Conard, 1925); H.P.I.: Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, éd. P. Arbelet (Paris: Champion, 1924).

3 Baudelaire, Correspondance, éd. Y. G. Le Dantec (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française) i (1933), 17.

4 Champfleury, Souvenirs et Portraits de jeunesse (Paris: Dentu, 1872), p. 137.

5 Compare for example:“Chaque artiste devrait voir la nature à sa manière” (H.P.I. I, 168), and: “le beau est partout et. . . chaque homme non seulement le voit, mais doit absolument le rendre à sa manière” (Delacroix, Journal [Paris: Plon, 1932], ii, 395). It is worth noting that Delacroix was an enthusiastic reader of the Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, as a note in the article on Michael Angelo's Last Judgment shows (Delacroix, Œuvres littéraires [Paris: Crès, 1923], ii, 222).

6 Corsaire-Satan, 3 mars 1846, signed Baudelaire-Dufays.

7 Journaux intimes, éd. Van Béver (Paris: Crès, 1919), p. 117.

8 Ibid., p. 26.

9 Ibid., pp. 118,119–121, 128.

10 De l'Amour, éd. D. Muller and P. Jourda (Paris: Champion 1926), i, 53, 73–74; ii, 123 ff.

11 It is hardly necessary to recall Stendhal's definition of cristallisation (De l'Amour, i, 20) : “Ce que j'appelle cristallisation, c'est l'opération de l'esprit, qui tire de tout ce qui se présente la découverte que l'objet aimé a de nouvelles perfections.“

12 Journaux intimes, pp. 120–127.

13 L'Esprit public, 15 avril 1846, signed Baudelaire Dufays. A.R. pp. 267–278.

14 Many of Stendhal's ideas were far from being original with him (here the debt to Cabanis is evident), but it seems unquestionable that it was from Stendhal that Baudelaire got them.

15 This article had already been sent to PMLA when the same parallel was pointed out in an article by Jean Pommier, “Un Plagiat de Baudelaire,” Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg, mai-juin 1937.

16 Baudelaire, Les Paradis artificiels, La Fanfarlo, éd. J. Crépet (Paris, Conard, 1928), p. 238.

17 Ibid., p. 240.