MERYON AND BAUDELAIRE
By WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY
ALL French poets of the middle part of the nineteenth century were interested, theoretically at least, in painting and the graphic arts, which afforded them an ideal and an example of objectivity for their own verbal representations of reality. From Théophile Gautier, godfather of Parnassianism, who reserved for his prose the full resources of his superb Turneresque palate, to Verlaine, creator of decadence, with his limpid and lovely aquarelles, pictorial preoccupations were, on the whole, paramount. Charles Baudelaire almost alone appears, in part, an exception to this rule; but if, in his work, the purely visual element is less pronounced than in that of most of his contemporaries—if the images of sight yield there in number and in clear evocative power to those of sound and of scent, thereby preluding the way for a new poetic dispensation—he nevertheless fits into the late romantic tradition, if only by reason of his keen æsthetic appreciation of the arts of design, and of his association, as a disinterested friend or sympathetic critic, with many of the most illustrious artists of the age. Himself a rebel and an outlaw in the domain of orthodox taste, though with a distinct tinge of the traditional, he was especially drawn to the insurgent leader, like Delacroix, his championship of whom is as famous as his espousal of the cause of Wagner’s music in Paris, or to the solitary attardé of romanticism who, like Constantin Guys, worked out his own salvation in his own way. It is not that he did not welcome new movements in all their collectivity of talents and temperaments; but these, to find favor with him, must be vouched for by unmistakable evidences of creative vigor and originality in the individual artists, not merely by plausible theories or pretentious dogmas professed scholastically. Intellectual distinctions counted but little with him in matters of art, and a new way of rendering what was actually seen or felt seemed to him of infinitely more importance than any merely academic discussion as to what an artist should or should not look for, deliberately, in order to put it into or leave it out of his pictures.
Thus it was that while he shrugged his shoulders at the realists who were not really observers, he turned an attentive eye to the work of the group of young painter-etchers who, about 1859, were beginning to attract attention in the salons. Baudelaire thought highly of etching because it afforded an opportunity for “the most clean-cut possible translation of the character of the artist,” and he was attracted to those who were engaged in reviving this almost obsolete medium, because they gave clear proof in their work of that personal force and distinction which he valued above all else, and which he was always on the alert to discover in the productions of the new and the unknown.
In his article, Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, included in the volume of his collected works entitled L’Art Romantique, Baudelaire mentions the following etchers as among those through whose efforts the medium was to recover its ancient vitality: Seymour Haden, Manet, Legros, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Meryon, Millet, Daubigny, Saint-Marcel, Jacquemart, and Whistler. With at least two of these, on the evidence of his published correspondence,[2] he had personal relations: Bracquemond and Meryon. The name of the former occurs frequently in the letters with reference to a device which Baudelaire wished to adopt as a frontispiece to the second edition of Fleurs du Mal. The idea of this device came to him, as he writes to Félix Nadar (May 16, 1859), while turning the leaves of the Histoire des Danses Macabres, by Hyacinthe Langlois. It was to be “an arborescent skeleton, the legs and the ribs forming the trunk, the arms extended in the form of a cross breaking into leaf and shoot, and protecting several rows of poisonous plants arranged in rising tiers of pots, as in a greenhouse.” In casting about for an artist to execute this design, Baudelaire mentions and dismisses Doré, Penguilly—whom he afterward wished he had taken—and Célestin Nanteuil. Finally, perhaps at the instance of his publisher, Poulet-Malassis, he chose Bracquemond,—a most unhappy selection as it turned out, for that artist was either unable or unwilling to grasp the poet’s conception, and the plate which he etched for this purpose was not used. A few proofs were pulled, however, and impressions in both the first and second states of the plate are now in the Samuel P. Avery collection in the New York Public Library.
[2] Charles Baudelaire: Lettres, 1841-1866. Paris, 1907.
Bracquemond. Frontispiece for “Les Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire
The seven plants symbolize the Seven Deadly Sins, and the outstretched arms of the skeleton will support, later, the Fruits of Evil. This romantic and remarkable frontispiece was never used. Baudelaire criticized the drawing of the skeleton severely, as well as the spirit and arrangement of the whole design.
Size of the original etching, 6¾ × 4⁵⁄₁₆ inches