Charles Baudelaire

hideous Child of Doom

Endeavour hard some grievance from his heart to tear

lucid spirit veil

however much we may like general beauty, which is expressed by the classical poets and artists, we nonetheless make a mistake to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance, the description of manners.

my purpose at this moment is to discuss the painting of our contemporary social scene

These engravings can be translated into beauty or ugliness: in ugliness they become caricatures; in beauty, antique statues.

The past, whilst retaining its ghostly piquancy, will recapture the light and movement of life, and become present.

And if to the illustration representing each age he were to add the philosophic thought which that age was mainly preoccupied with or worried by, a thought which the illustration inevitably reflects, he would see what a deep harmony informs all the branches of history, and that, even in the centuries which appear to us the

most outrageous and the most confused, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

Beauty is made up, on the one hand, of an element that is eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult, and, on the other, of a relative circumstantial element, which we may like to call, successively or at one and the same time, contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion.