Channels, Spring 2017

Page 2 Werneburg • Encountering the Phantasmagoria element would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation” (681). Baudelaire does not give primacy to any single historical period’s iteration of beauty. Each work of art and each conception of beauty is determined, due to the circumstantial element of beauty, by the artist’s historical moment. As an example of a perfect flaneur , Baudelaire presents “Monsieur C. G.,” based on the journalist Constantin Guys. This journalist’s sketches of the Crimean War, some of them depicting the desolation of the battlefield, certainly contrast with the idealized human figures in a Raphael or a Titian (682). Nineteenth century academies ascertained in Raphael’s paintings a conception of beauty predicated on distinction from the mundane; Raphael captured the ideal beauty of the human form, not the ungainly spectacle of the ordinary human body. In opposition to the Raphaelite notion of a distinct, absolute beauty, Baudelaire asserts that “the mainspring of [monsieur G.’s] genius is curiosity” (681). Baudelaire compares Monsieur G. to a “convalescent . . . lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, . . . rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life” (682- 3). The convalescent is not drawn to distinction; rather, since he has nearly lost his life, he is enamored with the entirety of the human experience—he sees everything as if for the first time. Baudelaire emphasizes the relational, spiritual element of beauty when he writes of the artist, “His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd” (683). This religious phrase, “one flesh,” suggests a spiritual union between the artist and his subject: an idea further developed in Baudelaire’s description of the artist as a “lover of universal life, [who] enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.” He is like a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of [the crowd’s] movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’” (683- 4). Through the artist’s spiritual marriage with the crowd, the synthesis of the ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’, he finds his vision. In the perfect flaneur ’s work of art, “the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator”—it is what Baudelaire calls a “phantasmagoria . . . distilled from nature” (684). The work of art is alive—it has a living soul that is the product of the artist’s immersion in the reservoir of lived experience, of his becoming one flesh with the crowd. Baudelaire’s description of the “dandy” contrasts sharply with the perfect flaneur . The dandy is “in love with distinction above all things” (687). He is caught up in an elaborate “cult of the self which can nevertheless survive the pursuit of a happiness to be found in someone else” (687). He relishes the “joy of astonishing others” and obtains a “proud satisfaction” from never “being astonished” by anyone or anything else. Even if he experiences suffering, “he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth” (687). Clearly, the dandy is much like Browning’s Duke of Ferrara, who would like to tell the duchess “Just this / Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, / Or there exceed the mark.” And yet he cannot express his feelings to the duchess, for “E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose / Never to stoop” (37-9, 42-3). The duke cannot tell the duchess what he wants because doing so would be to admit that she has the ability to rankle and in some sense astonish him. Baudelaire asserts that “the distinguishing characteristic of the