abel redefining the sister arts baudelaire s response to the art of delacroix 1980

8/7/2019 Abel redefining the sister arts Baudelaire s response to the art of Delacroix 1980

1/23


2/23

Redefining the Sister Arts:Baudelaire's Response to the Art of Delacroix

E-lizabeth Abel

Like other areas of criticism, theories about the relationships among thedifferent arts undergo revision periodically. Reacting to the excesses ofGeistesgeschichtestudies that deliberately ignored the distinguishingfeatures of different arts in order to reveal their manifestations of acommon spirit, formalist critics, particularly Rene'Wellek, insisted on thedeterminative role of each art's specific medium, an emphasis consistentwith the growth of intrinsic criticism in the 1940s and '50s. Althoughgeneral cultural studies in the Geistesgeschichtetradition, for exampleWylie Sypher's Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literatureand Mario Praz'sMnemosyne:The Parallel betweenLiteratureand the VisualArts, continued toappear, they tended to provoke hostile reactions from the moreestablished formalist camp. With the loosening grip of the intrinsic ap-proach to literature, however, a new interest has developed in definingthe relationship of poetry and painting in ways that are free of both theGeistesgeschichteabuses and the formalist restraints. This essay is intendedas a contribution to the growing number of studies that incorporate asense of each art's formal qualities into the definition of their broadersimilarities.Recent studies of relationships among the arts can to a large extentbe characterized by their deliberately modest claims and goals. Recogniz-ing the difficulties of defining the arts and their relationships in univer-sal terms, critics have turned to analyzing particular relationships withina given style or period and have called for an empirical, flexible ap-proach responsive to the changing features of these relationships. At-tempts to generalize about the nature of the arts or about their funda-(o1980 bv The University of Chicago. 0093 1896/80/0603 0002$01 .86

363


3/23

364 ElizabethAbel Redefining the Sister Artsmental relationships are invariably problematic because each art formundergoes significant developments that alter its relation to the otherarts. Thus, when Jacques Maritain asserts in CreativeIntuition in Art andPoetrythat poetry originates with the inner life of the poet and paintingwith the impact of the outer world on the artist, we might protest thatpoetry can be descriptive as well as expressive, that painting can beexpressive as well as representational, and that Maritain's distinctiondoes not apply to such modern developments as concrete poetry andabstract expressionism. Similarly, despite Lessing's famous distinctionbetween the sequential, arbitrary signs of poetry and the simultaneous,natural signs of painting, we find that the words of poetry can be orga-nized spatially or demand a simultaneous apprehension, while paintingis sometimes ordered sequentially and invariably involves a temporalprocess of perception. And since Ernst Gombrich's analysis in Art andIllusion of the "language" of painting, we realize that the painter's signsmay be just as conventional as the poet's. The relationship between twoarts changes over time: the similarities between a painting by Picasso anda poem by Apollinaire differ from those between a painting by Claudeand a poem by Thomson or a painting by Hogarth and a scene fromDickens.

Recent appraisals have met this problem in various ways. Onecollection, Encounters:Essayson Literatureand the VisualArts, deliberatelyjuxtaposes studies of literature and painting in different historicalperiods to counter the assumption that their relationship is constant,while a recurrent call in the essays comprising the New LiteraryHistoryissue devoted to "Literary and Art History" is for more limited studies ofinterart relationships within specified stylistic contexts. Alastair Fowlersummarizes this sense of the field in claiming that "the notion of auniversally valid systematic correspondence between the arts must beregarded as a chimera. Real correspondences exist and may be worthanalyzing. But they change with time, and change so fundamentally as tomake diachronic investigation a necessary preliminary to discussingthem, if full rigor of method is to be achieved."' Just as the historicalimpulse of Geistesgeschichteoverplayed the Zeitgeist as a transcendentforce assimilating different forms of art into analogous expressions of asingle spiritual state, the aesthetic orientation of formalist criticism can1. "Periodization and Interart Analogies," New LiteraryHistory 3, no. 3 (Spring 1972):

486.

Elizabeth Abel is an assistant professor of English at the Universityof Chicago. A coeditor of CriticalInquiry,she is currently writing a book onliterary and psychoanalytic representation of female identity.


4/23

CriticalInquiry Spring 1980underplay the role of history by positing a constant and determinativerole for the aesthetic medium. Diachronic studies can avoid these twoextremes by focusing on relationships between the differing expressionsof related styles or subject matter in two forms of art.The period of inquiry here is the Romantic era, particularly its de-velopment in mid-nineteenth-century France just prior to the transitioninto the symbolist movement. Because the interaction between poetryand painting underwent a fundamental change in the Romantic period,a change for which a method of analysis has not been clearly formulated,their relationship during this time is difficult to analyze. From the Ren-aissance through the eighteenth century, the "sister arts," poetry andpainting, share a common subject matter; thus, fewer methodologicalproblems are involved in studying their connections.2 Panofsky's studiesof iconography have demonstrated the use that Renaissance paintersmade of literary sources, and literary scholars such as Jean Hagstrumand Elizabeth Manwaring have pointed out the influence of painting oneighteenth-century poetry. The shift from a mimetic to an expressivetheory of art, however, deprives these arts of a common ground in theirobjects of imitation and thrusts them into a less apparent, more prob-lematic relationship. Indeed, the critical commonplace about theRomantic period-that music replaced painting as the analogue toliterature-is itself an indication of the supremacy of expression overimitation. Yet the relationship between what were formerly sister artspersisted, even though it frequently took a different form from that ofthe preceding centuries. My purposes here are to define this new re-lationship, to discuss to some extent the theoretical model best equippedto handle it, and, finally, to analyze in some detail the ways it is exem-plified in Baudelaire's response to the art of Delacroix.

The sister arts tradition began to dissolve in the middle of theeighteenth century under pressure from various sources. One importantpressure was the reassertion of the neoclassical norm of purity of genrethat had been violated by the vogue for allegorical painting and pictorialpoetry inspired by the theory of the sister arts. Lessing's Laokobn,though2. I do not mean to imply an invariant tradition from the sixteenth through theeighteenth century; the baroque period provides a partial exception to the use of visualcontent to relate the two art forms. The combination of a religious orientation whichconceived of art as a vehicle of transcendent experience and an aesthetic orientation

toward fusion and totality produced an art in which pictorialism was not the primaryfeature or the exclusive link between the arts. Nevertheless, despite the appearance ofmore generally aesthetic, less narrowly pictorial, similarities between the arts, the bond ofsubject matter continued to play a more important role than in relationships between thearts in the Romantic period. For a fuller discussion of the continuities and discrepanciesbetween the baroque and the sister arts, see Jean Hagstrum's The SisterArts: TheTraditionofLiteraryPictorialismand English PoetryfromDrydento Gray(Chicago and London, 1958), pp.93-128.

365


5/23

366 ElizabethAbel Redefining theSister Artsinfluenced by the empiricist interest in perception, also called for a re-turn to certain neoclassical ideals. Lessing's insistence on the importanceof the aesthetic sign in determining the subject matter of a form of artfinds a modern echo in Wellek and Warren's assertion that "the'medium' of a work of art . . . is not merely a technical obstacle to beovercome by the artist in order to express his personality, but a factorpreformed by tradition and having a powerful determining characterwhich shapes and modifies the approach and expression of the individ-ual artist."3 Like Lessing, Wellek and Warren are reacting against thefailure to appreciate the role of the aesthetic medium. Ultimately, thisline of thought leads to a denial of relationships among the arts. YetLessing's critique of the sister arts tradition was in turn challenged froma perspective that points forward toward a Romantic conception of thearts rather than backward toward a neoclassical one. Johann GottfriedHerder's response to the Laokoiinin the first of his KritischeWdlder takesissue with Lessing's conception of the external nature of aesthetic signs.Poetry may use successive signs, claimed Herder, but their sequentialityis less important than the energy (Kraft)which they contain, an energywhich excites us to an emotional state that endures through the passageof words. In a later essay, Plastik, Herder expanded this view of energyinto his concept of the basic source of art and the force relating all thearts to one another. The arts do not need to be related through theircommon subject matter nor sharply differentiated through their particu-lar signs; instead, they could be recognized as different expressions of acommon source, an idea which would be significant throughout theRomantic era. Herder also proclaimed the highest art to be the one thatcould express the greatest quantity of energy. For him this art waspoetry, which involves both sight and sound, thereby fusing the qualitiesof painting and music into a composite art that alone is capable of fullyexpressing the unifying function of energy. This ideal of the compositeart as the one best suited to expressing the synthesis performed by imag-inative energy was also pervasive throughout the Romantic period.Herder's belief that poetry and painting are related not throughsubject or through sign but as expressions of a unifying source that hecalled energy prefigured the theory that art is the expression of imagina-tion and that the arts could be related through their efforts to portraythe synthesizing power of imagination. The change from the empiricistconception of the passive, picturing mind to a belief in the imagination'sactive force affected the view of poetry and painting as nature'sdaughters, and fostered a new conception of these arts as the analogousbut different products of an imagination that could combine aspects ofboth in its creation of unity. The ideal of ut pictura poesis is rarely voicedin the criticism of the Romantic period; on the contrary, the imitation of

3. Reni Wellek and Austin Warren, Theoryof Literature(New York, 1949), p. 128.


6/23

Spring 1980 367painting in poetry serves often as an instance of what is to be avoided.4Coleridge and Hazlitt both insist that the poet must evoke an imaginativeor emotional response rather than simply depict concrete visual imagery.This attitude reveals the influence of Burke's association of poetry withthe emotional sources of the sublime and of painting with the descriptiveclarity that creates the beautiful. The conception of painting, however,was also changing to emphasize its imaginative qualities, making possiblenew similarities between the former sister arts.5 As the source of art wasseen to change from an external to an internal one, the basis of the arts'relationship similarly shifted from the imitation of shared subject matterto the analogous expression of a common inner source whose subjectmatter changes but whose nature is the same.Since an important aspect of the imaginative source of Romantic artwas its unifying power, the capacity of poetry and painting to unifyfeatures of both arts emerged as an important bond between them. Theideal of aesthetic totality recurs in various ways throughout the Romanticperiod. Coleridge defined beauty as "in the abstract, the unity of themanifold, the coalescence of the diverse" and proclaimed "unity of mul-teity ... as the principle of beauty."6 Imagination, for Coleridge, was a"synthetic and magical power" which "reveals itself in the balance orreconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with dif-ference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; theindividual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness,with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with

4. Roy Park discusses this and other aspects of the relationship of poetry and paintingin Romantic criticism in his valuable article " 'Ut Pictura Poesis': The Nineteenth-CenturyAftermath," TheJournal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism28, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 155-64, inwhich he provides a particularly illuminating collection of quotations from the majorRomantic critics.5. A few indications of this change may be found in some of the critics who mostinfluenced Baudelaire's approach to art. Diderot, for example, whose art criticism wasundergoing a revival in the 1840s and whose tone and point of view are frequently re-flected in Baudelaire's Salon reviews during that decade, warned painters not to be boundby the external world: "Illuminate objects according to your sun, which is not that ofnature; be the disciple of the rainbow, but do not be its slave," he commands in one of his"Pensees detachies," in Essais sur la peinture, ed. Roland Desne (Paris, n.d.), 5:139 (mytranslation). Stendhal, whose influence on Baudelaire was so great that the poet took somekey passages of his review of the 1846 Salon directly from the Histoire de la peintureen Italie,insisted that art reflects the temperament of the artist and his culture rather than anabsolute ideal of beauty. But the most important influence on Baudelaire, of course, wasDelacroix's belief that the painter should use nature only as a source of imagery throughwhich he could externalize his own internal states. As Baudelaire explains in his review ofthe 1846 Salon: "Now this is the principle from which Delacroix sets out-that a pictureshould first and foremost reproduce the intimate thought of the artist, who dominates themodel as the creator dominates his creation" ("The Salon of 1846," in Art in Paris1845-1862, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne [New York, 1965], p. 58).6. Coleridge, "On Poesy or Art," BiographiaLiteraria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Lon-don, 1907), 2:257, 262.

CriticalInquiry


7/23

368 ElizabethAbel Redefining the Sister Artsmore than usual order .. ."7or, one might add, of poetry with painting(the general with the concrete, the idea with the image). A similar idealof totality recurs in Hegel's criterion for the highest art; for Hegel,tragedy claimed this honor because it synthesized the objectivity of epicwith the subjectivity of lyric and the physicality of action with the idealityof language. Hazlitt suggested an analogous ideal for painting both inhis praise of "gusto," the quality which arises "where the impressionmade on one sense excites by affinity those of another,"8 and in hiscriticism of Claude-one of the most highly revered artists in theeighteenth century-for emphasizing purely visual impressions and fail-ing to evoke the other senses through his art. For his part, Baudelaireinsisted that fusing features of the different arts was an aesthetichallmark of his period: "It is, moreover, one of the characteristicsymptoms of the spiritual condition of our age that the arts aspire if notto take one another's place, at least reciprocally to lend one another newpowers."9 The culmination of this ideal of imaginative totality was at-tained in Wagner's actual fusion of a number of different arts in hisversion of the perfect art, the Gesamtkunstwerk.But the ideal of aestheticsynthesis recurs in definitions of beauty throughout this period, as inDelacroix's claim that "the beautiful implies the reunion of several qual-ities ... in a word, harmony would be the broadest expression of it."10This desire for the integration of different qualities governed the re-lationship of poetry and painting for Romantic artists and critics. Insteadof imitating one another, poetry and painting absorbed some of eachother's features into their own media to attain the harmony of dif-ferences essential to beauty.1lBaudelaire's response to Delacroix's art and theories provides a par-ticularly fruitful focus for a study of the new rapport between theformer sister arts. There is little similarity between Delacroix's action-filled exotic subjects and Baudelaire's more intimate and private poetry;their arts must therefore be related in some domain apart from content.We are aided in deciphering this domain by Baudelaire's extensive

7. "Chapter 14,"BiographiaLiteraria, 2:12.8. "On Gusto," TheCompleteWorksof WilliamHazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London,1930), 4:78.9. "The Life and Work of Eugene Delacroix," The Painter of Modern Life and OtherEssays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York, 1964), p. 43. Other references to thisessay, to "Richard Wagner and Tannhauserin Paris,"and to "Philosophic Art,"all included inthis volume, will be noted by page numbers within the text.10. Journal de Eugene Delacroix, ed. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and Andre Joubin, 2 vols.(Paris, 1932), 2:142. Since this passage is not included in any of the English translations oftheJournal, I have provided the translation.11. I am not suggesting that there was a uniform relationship of poetry and paintingin the Romantic period. Relationships of content did persist: the similar subjects of Con-stable and Wordsworth or of Baudelaire's prose poems and Constantin Guys' drawings aresimply two examples that come to mind. Rather, I am focusing on what changed in thisrelationship and how this change reflects a new attitude toward art.


8/23

Spring 1980 369commentary on Delacroix. Moreover, perhaps because of its subtlety,the relationship between these arts has not received the attention it de-serves. 2 Yet no sooner is the possibility for such a study recognized thanthe problems it entails become apparent. Without the focus of commonsubjects, where does one begin? The dangers of impressionistic compari-sons of style are readily apparent in the tendency of Geistesgeschichtestudies to transfer stylistic terms from one art form to another, creatingsuch bizarre transpositions as "the visible chamber music of the bentfurniture" or the "Titian style of the madrigal" in Spengler's Declineof theWest or Wylie Sypher's suggestion that a Shakespearean play is like aRenaissance painting because it makes use of "perspective" to create areal and believable world.13 And indeed it would be misleading to lookfor particular stylistic similarities between Delacroix and Baudelaire. De-lacroix's dissolution of solid color masses into separate strokes of differ-ent colors, for example, would appear to be closer to Rimbaud's dis-jointed language than to Baudelaire's carefully interwoven sentences.Only by viewing the two art forms as interconnected systems can wedetermine their relationship. If the new affiliation of poetry and paint-ing in the Romantic period derives from the expression of imaginativeunity, a critical approach to their relationship must be attuned to differ-ent ways of expressing unity. The theoretical framework that accountsmost completely for the kind of relationship existing between Delacroixand Baudelaire is provided by the structuralists, although, as we shallsee, even this approach has limitations.Structuralist claims that human creations are related as expressionsof certain mental processes have affinities with the Romantic theory thatthe arts are related as expressions of imagination. According to Levi-Strauss, for example, the products of the human mind are homologues,

12. There are several studies of Baudelaire's aesthetics and criticism, such as AndreFerran'sL'EsthetiquedeBaudelaire (Paris, 1968), Margaret Gilman'sBaudelaire theCritic(NewYork, 1943), and Jean Prevost's Baudelaire: essai sur l'inspirationet la creationpoetiques(Paris,1953), which contain sections on the influence of Delacroix but do not extend theiranalysis into Baudelaire's poetry as a whole. More specific works, such as Lucie Horner'sBaudelairecritiquede Delacroix(Geneva, 1956) and Pierre-George Castex's Baudelairecritiqued'art (Paris, n.d.), also focus on Delacroix's influence on Baudelaire's criticism and onparticular poems inspired by his paintings. The full-length book by Armand Moss,BaudelaireetDelacroix (Paris, 1973), provides a detailed study of their relationship based ontheir correspondence and references to one another, but no analysis of the relation be-tween their two art forms. Some studies of Baudelaire's poetry, such as Lloyd JamesAustin's L'Universpoetiquede Baudelaire: symbolsmeet symbolique(Paris, 1956) and MartinTurnell's Baudelaire:A Study ofHis Poetry (London, 1953), point out aspects of Baudelaire'spoems that appear relevant to the relationship with Delacroix, but they do not make theseconnections themselves. Most commentary on the relationship of Delacroix to Baudelaire'spoetry is limited to those few poems that Baudelaire wrote on Delacroix's paintings.13. Wellek and Warren quote the comments on Spengler in Theoryof Literature, p.131. Sypher's comments are in Four Ages of Renaissance Style: Transformationsin Art andLiterature1400-1700 (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp. 79-80.

CriticalInquiry


9/23

370 ElizabethAbel Redefining the Sister Artsrelated by their function rather than their content. For both struc-turalists and Romantics, the relationships between systems dependneither on content nor material but on the patterns of relationshipswithin the different forms. Saussure's approach to language providesthe model for the structuralist method: the linguistic sign consists ofboth a signifier and a signified whose conventional relationship can bedissolved to analyze the system of relationships among the signifiers.Any signifying system can be similarly analyzed regardless of the natureor meaning of its signs. The ways in which the constituent units arecombined are important, not the units themselves. Saussure provides analternative to Lessing's distinction by focusing attention on the structuralrules that define a system instead of on our manner of perceiving differ-ent kinds of signs. This concern with structure allows a conception ofhomology to replace that of similarity and points the way toward for-mulating the relationship between arts affiliated by modes of function-ing despite dissimilarities between their subjects and their signs.There is a significant connection between structuralist analysis andBaudelaire's and Delacroix's conceptions of artistic activity. According toRoland Barthes: "The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexiveor poetic, is to reconstruct an 'object' in such a way as to manifest therebythe rules of functioning (the 'functions') of this object. Structure is there-fore actually a simulacrumof the object, but a directed, interestedsimula-crum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remainedinvisible or, if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object. Structuralman takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it...."14 As Barthes'definition suggests, "structuralist activity" can incorporate both criticaland creative activity because the fundamental process of decomposingreality and recomposing it occurs in art as well as criticism. Baudelaire inparticular invokes a similar model of artistic creation. Note how close hisconcept of imagination is to Barthes' definition of structuralist activity:"It [imagination] is both analysis and synthesis.... In the beginning ofthe world it created analogy and metaphor. It decomposes all creation,and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance withrules whose origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of thesoul, it creates a new world."15Baudelaire found a similar view of artisticcreation in Delacroix. As Baudelaire puts it: "Nature, for Eugene De-lacroix, is a vast dictionary whose leaves he turns and consults with a sureand searching eye" ("The Salon of 1846," pp. 58-59). Delacroix recom-poses the images of this dictionary in his creation of a work of art. Barthessuggests that surrealism may have been the first "structural literature,"but he seems to have overlooked the reconstructive nature of Romantic

14. "The Structuralist Activity," inEuropeanLiteraryTheoryand Practice,ed. Vernon W.Gras (New York, 1973), p. 158.15. Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859," in Art in Paris 1845-1862, p. 156. Other refer-ences to Baudelaire's Salon reviews will be to this edition and will be noted by page numberswithin the text.


10/23

CriticalInquiry Spring 1980art, expressed succinctly if not uniquely in Coleridge's description of thesecondary (artistic) imagination as the power which "dissolves, diffuses,dissipates in order to re-create." The Romantic assertion of the primacyof imagination over the materials it orders, whether these are under-stood as the signs or their referents, finds an echo in the structuralistconcern with the mind's ordering processes regardless of material. Thechange in aesthetic emphasis from content to structure is analogous to thechange in critical interest from the meanings suggested by signs to thepatterns of the signs themselves. As the study of iconography is appro-priate to the relationship between two arts in which content is primary,and the emphasis on different signs is appropriate to arts in which thenature of the sign is considered to be primary, the study of relationshipsamong the signs themselves is appropriate to arts in which the power ofimagination is held the primary feature.Though structuralism provides a theoretical model for discussingthe relationship of Baudelaire and Delacroix, it unfortunately does notprovide a precise methodology for this analysis. Structuralist analysis hasin general been less successful in relation to poetry than to fiction, wherethe process of creating a world through signs is particularly amenable tothe study of signifying systems. Moreover, the dichotomy between theinterest in literature as a system, what Barthes calls the "science of litera-ture," and the analysis of individual works, which Barthes designates bythe traditional term "criticism," makes it difficult to translate generalstructuralist theory into practical criticism. The concern with the con-ventions of writing and reading that constitutes the science of literatureinvolves a level of abstraction quite detached from specific texts, whilestructuralist criticism, unless it relies heavily on the linguistic model thattends to reduce poetry to bare grammatical and phonetic patterns, maybe difficult to differentiate from more familiar analyses of individualtexts.16 Structuralist criticism has been most successful in studying re-

16. The most distinctive form of structuralist criticism of poetry makes use of linguis-tic categories to analyze the literary text. Some of the best-known examples of this methodare Jakobson's analyses, including his analysis of poems by Baudelaire. Jakobson's method,however, fails to account for much of poetry's effect. He assumes that grammatical andphonetic patterns are the primary feature of any poem and he derives his interpretationsexclusively from these patterns, disregarding the interplay of meaning with grammaticalform. Jakobson's success is also his failure. By analyzing only patterns of linguistic signsdivorced from what they signify, he demonstrates a pure form of structuralist analysiswhile indicating the emptiness of this pure form; he fails to tell us much that is significantabout the poem. The limitations of this approach have been analyzed quite fully byJonathan Culler in StructuralistPoetics: Structuralism,Linguistics,and the Study of Literature(Ithaca, N.Y., 1975). Michael Riffaterre also provides a cogent critique of Jakobson's andLevi-Strauss' analysis of Baudelaire's poem "Les Chats" in "Describing Poetic Structures:Two Approaches to Baudelaire's 'Les Chats,' " in Structuralism,ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Gar-den City, N.Y., 1970), pp. 188-230. Structuralist criticism of poetry is thus in a strange di-lemma: having defined a specific perspective on literary study, it appears to succeed in itsefforts only when it compromises this perspective by allowing some of the outlawed sig-nificance back into consideration.

371


11/23

372 ElizabethAbel Redefining theSisterArtslationships within a writer's work, subordinating meaning to the processof defining the relationships that prevail beyond the meanings of theindividual terms, an enterprise admittedly not fundamentally differentfrom that of other criticism, yet still somewhat distinctive in its emphasison the nature of relationships among the different parts instead of onthe nature of the specific parts themselves. This orientation suggests anapproach to defining the similarities between Delacroix's paintings andBaudelaire's poems: we can characterize the relationships that prevailwithin each artist's work and see what similarities exist between theirgoverning patterns. Delacroix's writings on art and Baudelaire's writingson Delacroix provide a convenient link between the two art forms.Delacroix's view of art is particularly congenial to a structuralistperspective. Delacroix himself conceived of painting as a unified net-work of signs that expresses a state of mind primarily through re-lationships rather than through the referential value of the signs. In hisJournal, Delacroix comments repeatedly that painting is superior topoetry because it is more concrete and indirect, resisting the immediatetranslation of sign to meaning that occurs in verbal art. Good painting,Delacroix claims, is not reducible to statement; rather, it expresses andevokes a state of mind indirectly through the interplay of all its parts.Thus he asserts:

I confess my predilection for the silent arts, for those mutethings of which Poussin made profession, as he said. Words are in-discreet; they break in on your tranquillity, solicit your attentionand arouse discussion. ...The work of the painter and the sculptor is all of a piece likethe works of nature. The author is not present in it, and is not incommunication with you like the writer or the orator. He offerswhat might be called a tangible reality, which is, however, full ofmystery.... This mute charm operates with the same force andseems to grow, every time that your eyes fall on the work.17Rather than speaking through his signs as the writer does, the paintermakes signs interact with each other in an interrelated whole that be-comes an expressive object rather than a referential statement.Delacroix's conception of painting is fundamentally different fromthe conception presented by Lessing. While Lessing assumes that thepainter uses "natural" signs to represent discrete objects, Delacroixsuggests that the painter creates a work of art whose signs respond toone another as much as they represent things. Delacroix even objects tothe overt use of gestures to portray emotion in painting. At one point inhisJournal he distinguishes between "poetic" painting, which communi-

17. "September 23, 1854," TheJournal of Eugene Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (NewYork, 1948), p. 437. All further references to the Journal will be noted by page numberswithin the text.


12/23

CriticalInquiry Spring 1980cates through the interrelationships of all its parts, and "prosaic" paint-ing, limited to the direct "statement" of a figure's gestures and lackingoverall unity. In poetic painting, Delacroix's ideal, expression is spreadthroughout the total form, not isolated in any one portion in which it isset forth directly.In his own paintings Delacroix attempted to achieve his ideal ofindirect expressiveness through his methods of relating colors on thecanvas. This was the aspect of his painting to which Baudelaire re-sponded most enthusiastically. In his review of the Universal Expositionof 1855, Baudelaire points out that Delacroix achieves his expressiveeffect independently of the figures represented:

First of all it is to be noted-and this is very important-that evenat a distance too great for the spectator to be able to analyze oreven to comprehend its subject-matter, a picture by Delacroixwill already have produced a rich, joyful or melancholy impressionupon the soul. It almost seems as though this kind of painting,like a magician or a hypnotist, can project its thought at a distance.This curious phenomenon results from the colourist's specialpower, from the perfect concord of his tones and from the harmony,which is pre-established in the painter's brain, between colourand subject-matter. ... It seems to me that M. Delacroix's colourthinksfor itself, independently of the objects which it clothes.Further, these wonderful chords of colour often give one ideas ofmelody and harmony, and the impression that one takes away fromhis pictures is often, as it were, a musical one. ["The ExpositionUniverselle 1855," p. 141]According to Baudelaire, Delacroix's paintings work through evocationrather than representation and are analogous to music in their ability tobe expressive independently of reference to the external world.Baudelaire was the first art critic to appreciate and explain De-lacroix's ideals and methods. Throughout his salon reviews, Baudelairestresses Delacroix's unprecedented achievement in harmonizing color.Delacroix was such a successful colorist, Baudelaire explains, because herealized that color in the natural world consists not of isolated colorblocks, but of the interaction of different shades and tones which affectone another such that "nature seems like a spinning-top which revolvesso rapidly that it appears grey, although it embraces within itself thewhole gamut of colours."

The sap rises, and as the principles mix, there is a flowering ofmixedtones; trees, rocks and granite boulders gaze at themselves inthe water and cast their reflectionsupon them; each transparentobject picks up light and colour as it passes from nearby or afar....Some colours cast back their reflections upon one another, and bymodifying their own qualities with a glaze of transparent, borrowed

373


13/23

Redefining the Sister Artsqualities, they combine and recombine in an infinite series ofmelodious marriages which are thus made more easy for them....This great symphony of today, which is an eternal variation of thesymphony of yesterday, this succession of melodies whose varietyever issues from the infinite, this complex hymn is called colour.["The Salon of 1846," pp. 48-49]

Delacroix managed to recreate this intensity and harmony, Baudelaireexplains, not simply by using bright colors, which would only clash, butby breaking up masses of color into separate brush strokes of differenttones which fuse in the spectator's eye, creating a more luminous im-pression than that of uniform color blocks. At the same time Delacroixrealized that complementary colors, which cancel each other out whenmixed upon the palette, both harmonize and intensify their impact whenjuxtaposed upon the canvas. Since a color's complement could be usedfor shadows in the place of black or gray, there are no holes caused byshadows or impure tones in Delacroix's paintings. Instead, the puretones of the entire canvas fuse in a luminous whole rather than fallinginto separate areas with little relation to each other, thus creating animpression of harmonious overall color.Delacroix's color relationships animate his paintings with a sense oflife and motion as well as harmony. In his first salon review, Baudelaireexplains that there are different types of drawing; that of Raphael andIngres captures the form of details with precision, while that of a coloristlike Delacroix or Rubens portrays the imperceptible movements of na-ture and emotion through the fluidity and lightness of their lines. De-lacroix's three major preoccupations, Baudelaire claims, are movement,color, and atmosphere. He continues:These three elements necessarily demand a somewhat undecidedcontour, light and floating lines, and boldness of touch. Delacroix isthe only artist today whose originality has not been invaded by thetyrannical system of straight lines; his figures are always restlessand his draperies fluttering. From Delacroix's point of view the linedoes not exist; for, however tenuous it may be, a teasing geometri-cian may always suppose it thick enough to contain a thousandothers: and for colourists, who seek to imitate the eternal throb-bings of nature, lines are never anything else but the intimate fu-sion of two colours, as in the rainbow. ["The Salon of 1846," p. 59]

Delacroix's use of color prevents lines from imprisoning forms in fixedor static patterns, dissolving boundaries into the pervasive harmony ofcolors.Delacroix's paintings are dynamic; their curving, fluid lines andcolors echo and pursue each other in perpetual interaction. They arenot, however, formless. One of Delacroix's supreme virtues, in

374 ElizabethAbel


14/23

Spring 1980 375Baudelaire's opinion, was that he could balance animated movementwith order and form. Delacroix believed that control was essential to theartist, and Baudelaire admired the painter's emphasis on technique, de-scribing Delacroix as "passionately in love with passion, and coldly de-termined to seek the means of expressing it in the most visible way"("The Life and Work of Eugene Delacroix," p. 45). The controlled ex-pression of passion, the containment of movement within form, becamethe aesthetic ideal that Delacroix's paintings represented. Because paint-ing is inherently a spatial, nonprogressive art, Delacroix's emphasis onmovement counteracted what is static in the nature of the art itself. Anumber of his Journal entries suggest that Delacroix associated move-ment with the temporal art of literature: "I believe that the differencebetween the arts of design and the others derives from the fact that thelatter develop the idea only by offering impressions oneaftertheother,"heclaimed in hisJournal entry of 4 April 1854 (p. 372), and on 11 Decem-ber 1855, he asserted that the perfection of the visual arts "resides inproducing a simultaneous effect" and disparaged literature as "merely asequence of successive pictures" (p. 501). By infusing movement into thestatic form of painting, Delacroix assimilated some of literature's tem-poral development into what he felt was painting's superior simultaneity.This at least was how Baudelaire saw it. In his frequent comparisonsof Delacroix and Ingres, Baudelaire criticizes Ingres' attempt to repre-sent an ideal timeless moment abstracted from life and frozen into per-fect form. Delacroix, he explains, incorporates life's movement into thetimeless form and thus achieves a synthesis of poetry and painting.Although Baudelaire uses the terms "poetry" and "painting" somewhatloosely in his writings, he consistently associates poetry's sequentialsounds with the world of time, process, and emotion, and painting'ssimultaneous forms with a timeless, completed vision. In his review ofthe 1846 Salon, Baudelaire asserts that Victor Hugo has become a"painter in poetry," portraying a completed image of the forms ofthings, whereas Delacroix is a "poet in painting" who "throws open im-mense vistas to the most adventurous imaginations" (pp. 56-57). Thereis no doubt that for Baudelaire the ideal in either art was to externalizethe movements of emotion associated with poetry in the timeless andfully realized images characteristic of painting; Hugo's subordination offeeling to description was to Baudelaire a serious aesthetic error. De-lacroix was the true poet-painter because he could give form to emotionand "translate the wordby means of plastic images more vivid and moreappropriate than those of any other creative artist of the same profes-sion" ("The Life and Work of Eugene Delacroix," p. 42).In his art criticism, Baudelaire articulates the aesthetic ideal of theindirectly expressive whole realized through the harmonious re-lationship of parts and synthesizing qualities of poetry and painting.This ideal, to which he grants his full allegiance, he finds embodied in

CriticalInquiry


15/23

376 ElizabethAbel Redefining the Sister Artsthe art of Delacroix. The question then becomes to what extentBaudelaire's own poetry expresses this ideal and what transformationsare incurred by the change in media. This is a complicated questionbecause Baudelaire insisted on the special characteristics of each artform's medium and denounced attempts to imitate one art form inanother. In his essay on "Philosophic Art" he asks: "Is it by some fatalconsequence of decadence that today each art should evince a desire totrespass on the next, so that we have the spectacle of musical scales beingintroduced into painting, colour into sculpture, plastic devices into liter-ature?" (p. 204), and in his review of the 1846 Salon he asserts that"experiment with contradictory means, the encroachment of one artupon another" are "modern miseries" (p. 97). To avoid these miseries,the artist must not imitate the signs of other arts but must find someanalogy within the form of his own art. Poetry and painting are separatemedia and must use their own techniques. Baudelaire knew, for exam-ple, that words that refer to colors are not the same as pigments on acanvas. Unlike the overall harmony of color attained by Delacroix'sbrushstrokes, color words like red, yellow, and green remain much moredistinct and localized; they designate precise areas bounded by thenouns they modify. To analyze the relationship between Baudelaire'spoetry and his perception of Delacroix's paintings, then, we must re-member that Baudelaire would never imitate the painter's art directly.The relationship between his poems and Delacroix's paintings derivesneither from their subjects nor the actual patterns of their signs, butfrom their common emphasis on establishing interrelationships achievedin the different ways dictated by their different signs.To come to an understanding of Baudelaire's methods of creatingharmony, we must look both at techniques that recur throughout thepoetry and at an example of these techniques within a particular poem.In Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire uses recurrent images to suggest aharmonious atmosphere similar to that which he admired in Delacroix.Various critics have pointed out that Baudelaire uses color words rarely,and one critic concludes that his poetry is thus closer to the etcher's thanthe painter's art, but this position assumes that one art must replicateanother's techniques in order to achieve analogous effects. Rather thanliterally adapting painterly techniques, Baudelaire chooses images thatevoke a harmonious atmosphere. One striking aspect of Baudelaire'spoetry is the frequency with which he uses imagery of sunshine (onecritic has calculated that Baudelaire uses the word "soleil" sixty-threetimes in Les Fleurs du Mal, making it fifth in order of frequency),18especially of sunshine diffused at sunset or through mist in such a waythat it dissolves a scene into a flow of refracted light. In "La Vie an-

18. Marc Eigeldinger, "La Symbolique solaire dans la poesie de Baudelaire," Revued'histoirelittraire de la France 67, no. 2 (avril-juin 1967): 358.


16/23

CriticalInquiry Spring 1980terieure," for example, the poet's vision of his past is bathed in theswirling colors of the sunset. The "mille feux" of the "soleils marins,"diffused by the mingling of water and fire and by the plural suns, areseen only indirectly as they paint the pillars of the porch and as they arereflected in the rolling waves which blend their music with the colors.Without a single color word except "azur," Baudelaire creates a sense ofcolor which expands beyond specific things to fuse in a luminous har-mony embodying his mood. Similarly, "Harmonie du soir" takes place in"les temps" between the clarity of day and "le neant vaste et noir," atwilight time in which things lose concreteness and evaporate like theflowers or dissolve like the setting sun into a dance of color, sound, andperfume. With no detailed description and no color words (except"noir"-the color which Delacroix became known for deliberately avoid-ing), Baudelaire creates the crepuscular effect he so admired in De-lacroix. A similar atmosphere dominates "Le Balcon," in which the set-ting sun suffuses the evening with the "vapeurs roses" which veil thescene on the balcony. Sometimes, particularly in his addresses to MarieDaubrun, Baudelaire uses mist instead of sunset to diffuse the light ofthe sun: "Comme tu resplendis, paysage mouille / Qu'enflamment lesrayons tombant d'un ciel brouille!" Direct light can also be diffused byreflections. The summer sun the poet craves in "Chant d'automne" is noisolated globe of fire but a shimmering light upon the sea. The vision of"LaChevelure" is full of bright sunlight, but here again it glistens on thewater's gold and silk. Whatever its nature, light is absorbed by the sceneto become part of its life, distributed throughout, merging even withdarkness, as in the "Noir et pourtant lumineuse" spectre of "Un Fan-tome." The only type of light imagery that Baudelaire avoids, or usesonly to suggest the fixity of despair, is the direct sunshine that clarifiesobjects and defines their boundaries.The dissimilarities between Baudelaire's use of light and Delacroix'suse of color are a function of the differences between words and paint.Yet what is striking about these two art forms is that while the actualpatterns of relations within each art differ, the effect they achieve issimilar: both manage to create a harmonious atmosphere. Other aspectsof Baudelaire's language contribute to a harmonious relationship ofparts comparable in various respects to the effect of Delacroix's art.Baudelaire uses his syntax to counteract the temporal flow of languageand to reinforce our sense of a composite image. Martin Turnell pointsout that Baudelaire's long sentences that wind through whole stanzasand at times entire poems help bind the different elements together inwhat T. S. Eliot calls "a whole of tangled feelings."19 Moreover, Turnellsuggests, Baudelaire's technique of separating subject and object by sub-ordinate clauses encourages the impression of a unified image.

19. Turnell, Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry, p. 260.

377


17/23

378 ElizabethAbel Redefining the SisterArtsBaudelaire also frequently uses periodic syntax, which prevents thereader from forming a sequential image and creates instead a feeling ofsuspension until the picture takes form as a whole. It would appear atfirst that Baudelaire's attempts to counteract the temporal unwinding ofhis poetry is contrary to Delacroix's concern with movement in his paint-ings, yet here again the differences in media explain the differentemphases. Both artists are attempting to synthesize movement withform, but this synthesis must be achieved in poetry by working to sub-sume sequential language to a single vision and in painting by enliveningthe spatial form with movement. The two arts are alike as wholes and notin their individual features. Despite the stylistic differences betweenBaudelaire's deliberately constructed sentence patterns and Delacroix'sdeliberately fragmented color blocks, the functions of these differentmethods are the same in both the arts: to balance form and movement inan interrelated whole.The famed sonorities of Baudelaire's poetry are the most directanalogy to Delacroix's color harmonies, which Baudelaire frequentlydescribes in terms of sound. As Delacroix fuses colors to create a unifiedatmosphere, Baudelaire repeats certain sounds to sustain a particulartone. In addition to his emphasis on alliteration, Baudelaire's adherenceto regular and intricate rhyme schemes reinforces the insistence on par-ticular sounds. The aural harmony created by the intricate end rhymes isalso intensified frequently by internal rhymes. Like his construction ofsyntax, Baudelaire's emphasis on aural harmony works against the linearprogression of his verse by establishing a constant pattern of repeatedsounds. To assert an analogy between this pattern of sound and De-lacroix's color harmony is consistent with Baudelaire's own belief in cor-respondences among the different senses. Baudelaire argues in his essayon "Richard Wagner and Tannhiuser in Paris" that "what would be trulysurprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, thatcolours couldnot evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colourwere unsuitablefor the translation of ideas, seeing that things have alwaysfound their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy ever sincethe day when God uttered the world like a complex and indivisiblestatement" (p. 116). Baudelaire's assertions in this passage account notonly for the ability of one sense to evoke another but also for the natureof relationships among the arts. If the world is like a "complex andindivisible statement" ("une complexe et indivisible totalite") which findsnew expression through interconnected systems, the relationship amongthe different systems of expression derives not from isolated similaritiesbut from analogous organizing principles.A look at Baudelaire's procedures in a particular poem demon-strates more concretely how these relationships work. Since Baudelaire'spoems about actual paintings by Delacroix are among neither his bestnor his most characteristic works, I have chosen instead to analyze "L'In-


18/23

CriticalInquiry Spring 1980vitation au voyage." Although this poem, as we shall see, makes de-liberate use of painting, it has no direct relationship to any works ofDelacroix. It does, however, reveal characteristic aspects of Baudelaire'sstyle which here transform the imagery suggestive of Dutch paintinginto a vision more like Delacroix's than Vermeer's:

Mon enfant, ma soeur,Songe a la douceurD'aller la-bas vivre ensemble!Aimer a loisir,Aimer et mourirAu pays qui te ressemble!Les soleils mouillesDe ces ciels brouillesPour mon esprit ont les charmesSi mysterieuxDe tes traitres yeux,Brillant a travers leurs larmes.La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute,Luxe, calme et volupte.

Des meubles luisants,Polis par les ans,Decoreraient notre chambre;Les plus rares fleursMelant leurs odeursAux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,Les riches plafonds,Les miroirs profonds,La splendeur orientale,Tout y parleraitA l'ame en secretSa douce lange natale.La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute,Luxe, calme et volupte.

Vois sur ces canauxDormir ces vaisseauxDont l'humeur est vagabonde;C'est pour assouvirTon moindre desirQu'ils viennent du bout du monde.-Les soleils couchantsRevetent les champs,Les canaux, la ville entiere,D'hyacinthe et d'or;Le monde s'endortDans une chaude lumiere.

379


19/23

Redtfining the SisterArtsLa, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute,Luxe, calme et volupte.20

Jean-Bertrand Barrere suggests that possible sources for the visionof Holland in the poem include Gautier's Albertus and interiors byseventeenth-century Dutch painters.21 A glance at these sources, how-ever, reveals the extent to which Baudelaire has transformed them if hehas used them at all. Whereas Gautier describes a Flemish town in somedetail in Albertus,Baudelaire suggests only the vaguest visual details andfloods them with emotional significance. Instead of the minute specificityof a Dutch interior, Baudelaire creates a general sense of richness andharmony. Despite its subject matter, the poem is consistent with Cole-ridge's request that contemporary poets avoid the detailed copying ofobjects that he believed was characteristic of Dutch painting. Baudelaireuses the imagery of seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a vehicle forevoking a world of harmony and light analogous in all but subject to theworld of Delacroix's painting.In "L'Invitation au voyage" the speaker invites a woman to imag-ine living with him in a dreamland of harmony and luxury which is theembodiment of her spirit. The poem is structured as three consecutivepictures which embody with increasing fullness the qualities presentedmore abstractly in the refrain. By constructing a vision through succes-sive realizations of the essence of that vision, Baudelaire complies withhis own theory of the ideal method of painting. In his review of the 1859Salon he explains:

A good picture, which is a faithful equivalent of the dreamwhich has begotten it, should be brought into being like a world.Just as the creation, as we see it, is the result of several creations inwhich the preceding ones are always completed by the following, soa harmoniously-conducted picture consists of a series of picturessuperimposed on one another, each new layer conferring greater20. "Mychild, my sister, think of the rapture of going over there and living together!Of loving at leisure, of loving and dying in the country which resembles you! The moistsuns of these murky skies have, for my spirit, the charms so mysterious of your treacherouseyes, shining through their tears. There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptu-ousness. Gleaming furniture, polished by the years, would ornament our bedroom; therarest flowers mingling their fragrance with the faint scent of amber, the ornate ceilings,

the deep mirrors, the oriental splendor, all there would speak secretly to the soul its soft,native language. There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptuousness. See onthe canals those vessels sleeping; their mood is adventurous; it is to satisfy your slightestdesire that they come from the other end of the earth. The setting suns adorn the fields,the canals, the entire city, with hyacinth and gold; the world falls asleep in a warm glowinglight. There, all is order and beauty, calm and voluptuousness" (prose translation inFrenchPoetryfrom Baudelaireto thePresent, ed. Elaine Marks [New York, 1962], pp. 50-51).21. Jean-Bertrand Barrere, "Chemins, echoes et images dans 'L'Invitation au voyage'de Baudelaire," Revue de litteraturecomparee31, no. 4 (decembre 1957): 481-90.

380 ElizabethAbel


20/23

Spring 1980 381reality upon the dream, and raising it by one degree towards per-fection. On the other hand I remember having seen in the studiosof Paul Delaroche and Horace Vernet huge pictures, not sketchedbut actually begun-that is to say, with certain passages completelyfinished, while others were only indicated with a black or a whiteoutline. You might compare this kind of work to a piece of purelymanual labour-so much space to be covered in a given time-or toa long road divided into a great number of stages. As soon as eachstage is reached, it is finished with, and when the whole road hasbeen run, the artist is delivered of his picture. [P. 161]

Delacroix of course provides Baudelaire with his example of an artistwho conceives of the creation of a painting as the creation of a completeworld, unified at every stage of development, and Delacroix's Journalentry of 25 January 1857 suggests a similar idea: "The first outlinesthrough which an able master indicates his thought contain the germ ofeverything significant that the work will offer .... For intelligent eyes,the life of the work is already to be seen everywhere ... it has scarcelyopened to the light, and already it is complete" (p. 551). Most importantto both artists is the relationship among the parts at each stage of crea-tion, a relationship essential to the unity of the final work. In "L'Invita-tion au voyage" Baudelaire brings his vision into being "like a world,"unified at each stage of its gradual realization. Each of the poem's threestanzas, separated by the refrain that serves almost as a constant pictureframe within which the scenes change, presents a unified image of thepoet's dreamworld as it comes slowly into focus. Unlike the sketches of apainting, these scenes do not portray identical content, yet they all pos-sess qualities of richness, harmony, and light, expressed more com-pletely in each successive stanza.The scene of the first stanza remains quite vague, sketching inprimarily the quality of misty light that fills the woman's eyes and per-meates the dreamland that expresses her being. This world remains adream here, brought into being by the command of the poet: "Songe."The quality of indefiniteness is suggested from the beginning by thepoet's opening address to "Mon enfant, ma soeur." The woman is notimportant here as a definite character but as a melange of qualities thatevoke the poet's tenderness and become the substance of his revery. Theimprecise language of the next two lines-"Songe a la douceur / D'allerla-bas vivre ensemble"-suggests that the emotional quality of this dream-world is more important than its actual appearance. Time in this world isalso undefined, characterized by the infinitive form of the life-encompassing verbs: "Aimer et mourir." These basic rhythms of life willtake place in a nameless country defined only by its resemblance to thewoman that is loved. This resemblance is manifested not in precise de-scription but in the diffuse quality of light, made yet more pervasive bythe use of the plural in "Les soleils mouilles / De ces ciels brouilles," which

CriticalInquiry


21/23

382 ElizabethAbel Redefining the SisterArtspermeates the landscape and glistens like the woman's tear-filled eyes.By evoking a vision of a world whose only concrete quality is that of mistysunshine, Baudelaire suggests an atmosphere that permeates and har-monizes the entire vision, achieving the same effect that Delacroix at-tains by using strokes of different colors that fuse in the spectator's eye.The fluidity of the poet's vision remains an important quality in thesecond stanza, yet this stanza defines the vision more concretely throughthe image of a richly furnished room and the change in mood from theimpersonal infinitive to the conditional. The furniture in this room,however, is used to suggest pervasive qualities rather than to focus ourperception on specific things. The stanza begins with the indefinite andplural pronoun "Des," which introduces the undefined pieces of furni-ture that are described only in terms of their glow. All the objects in thisroom are presented in the plural, a technique which Baudelaire fre-quently uses to drain objects of their particularity and diffuse their out-lines. The plural ceilings in particular diffuse the image of the roomwhile maintaining its suggestion of a basic principle of order. Baudelaireuses another of his common techniques-the combination of a generaladjective with a concrete noun or a concrete adjective with a generalnoun-to emphasize the atmosphere that pervades this imagined room.He describes the flowers as simply "Les plus rares"; the superlative adjec-tive, given extra weight by its position before the noun, suggests notspecific attributes but a general exotic beauty. The adjective "riches" in"Les riches plafonds" suggests an image of deeply glowing wood withoutdefining its specific size or shape. The use of"profonds" in "Les miroirsprofonds" describes not the mirrors but the added dimension they givethe room by expanding its limits in their receding reflections while main-taining its order. The outlines of particular things dissolve into an atmo-sphere pervaded by their richness and their glow. Specific details aresubordinated to other senses and more pervasive qualities that blend in ageneral harmony. The smells of the flowers mingle with the glow ofamber perceived synesthetically as "vagues senteurs." The presence ofthe mirrors tends to dissolve things into a pattern of reflections. In a sub-tle transition from concrete nouns and general adjectives to a generalnoun and more specific adjective, Baudelaire summarizes the room'satmosphere as "Le splendeur orientale," making this splendor tangible asthe harmony of rich colors associated with an Oriental rug yet more dif-fuse than any object. Finally, the physical room disappears into the"langue natale" that it speaks, the sweet native language of the soul. Inaddition to dissolving the concrete objects into a spiritual communication,this concluding reference to language mingles sound with sight and smelland makes the harmony of sound created by the rhyme scheme anexplicit aspect of the poem's relationships. These relationships of lights,smells, and sounds that expand beyond specific things to blend in a


22/23

CriticalInquiry Spring 1980general harmony suggest the analogy to Delacroix's use of color to evadethe boundaries of objects and create a harmony evocative of music.In the third stanza the dream image is fully realized: the conditionalmood gives way to the present, the command "Songe" becomes "Vois,"the indefinite "Des" is replaced by the precise "ces." The diffuse lightsuggested in the first stanza now permeates the fields, canals, and wholecity of this final scene; the confines of the room in stanza two have beendissolved into the image of a world. Despite the change in setting thesense of harmony remains and is in fact intensified by the imagery oflight. The boats sleeping on the canals suggest an animate repose thatcontains the potential of movement ("Dont l'humeur est vagabonde")and keeps the scene from becoming static. At the same time the settingsuns clothe the whole world in the warm blue and golden light whichbecomes the substance of the scene. The fields and canals, unmodifiedand plural, become faint outlines sketched against a luminous back-ground which suffuses all of them and holds them together. Thehyacinth and golden colors are general, pervasive, and not attached tospecific things. At last the whole world sleeps within this warm andharmonizing atmosphere, exchanging its materiality for the radiance oflight. Although the setting resembles that of seventeenth-century Dutchpainting, the light that suffuses and transforms the scene endows it withthe harmony that Baudelaire admired in the art of Delacroix.The effects for which Baudelaire strives in "L'Invitation au voyage"in no way entail the deliberate intention to imitate Delacroix; theymerely suggest that Baudelaire uses language to achieve a kind of har-mony analogous to that which he admired in Delacroix. Another similar-ity between Baudelaire's poem and Delacroix's art lies in their synthesisof movement with form, the synthesis the poet felt made Delacroix a"poet-painter" and the most complete artist of his time. For Delacroixthis synthesis entailed an emphasis on movement to animate the inher-ently static nature of his art. For a poet, however, an analogous synthesisdemands the suggestion of a form that incorporates the movement ofthe poem. In "L'Invitation au voyage" Baudelaire suggests this formthrough his use of visual imagery to construct scenes which evoke paint-ings and which relate to one another as the different versions of onevision whose final expression subsumes them all as aspects of itself. Atthe same time, however, Baudelaire stresses movement through hisalternation of two lines of five syllables with a line of seven syllables,suggesting the unstable rocking motion of a voyage. "L'Invitation auvoyage" evokes both the voyage and the voyage's goal, whose qualitiesare summarized in the refrain as well as given visual form in the threestanzas. The use of the refrain reinforces the importance of order in thepoem by providing a constant and repeated element whose internalemphasis is on the word "ordre," which begins the list of qualities to be

383


23/23

384 ElizabethAbel Redefining the SisterArtsfound at the journey's end and provides a formal principle to shape theirsensual appeal. Baudelaire succeeds in "L'Invitation au voyage" in fusingmovement with order both within the separate stanzas and in the poemas a whole. Although he achieves this fusion differently from Delacroix,the resolution of these qualities is attained in both their arts and impliesthat Baudelaire, as much as Delacroix, deserves the name of "poet-painter." The arts of these two poet-painters are related as the synthesesof attributes of both the arts.It is of course impossible to generalize from one brief example of acertain kind of relationship of poetry and painting to the nature of thisrelationship throughout the Romantic period. The kind of relationshiprevealed in this example, however, does conform to the Romantic critics'notion of the synthesizing nature of the imagination and the consequentharmony of differences contained within each form of art. Other studiesare needed to determine how typical the relationship of Baudelaire andDelacroix actually is. This study, however, may provide an initial defini-tion of one kind of relationship that has been little analyzed and suggestsome approaches to investigating it. The structuralist conception of asignifying system, although it fails to provide an adequate method foranalyzing individual poems, helps us formulate appropriate questionsabout the relation of two arts not linked by subject matter. It enables usto see that though the patterns of relationships in Baudelaire's poemsand Delacroix's paintings are determined by the nature of their differentmedia and thus have different characters, the two arts are homologousbecause they share the common function of expressing harmony andsynthesizing qualities associated with both arts. But defining the ques-tions is only a beginning; it is a step toward understanding a particularrelationship that developed during the nineteenth century. The case ofBaudelaire and Delacroix suggests a fundamental change in the possiblerelationships between two forms of art, a change whose implicationsshould be probed for their significance for art from the Romantic erathrough the present.

abel redefining the sister arts baudelaire s response to the art of delacroix 1980

Documents