years ¹. It is certainly relevant, and therefore I hope not over-
presumptuous, to add that this is the first edition of these
writings to be published in any language, including French,
with a substantial appendix of reproductions of paintings and
prints discussed in the text. These include a number that have
never before been reproduced, and one at least-- Haussoullier
Fontaine de jouvence--which has long been believed to be lost.

'Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive
passion)', wrote Baudelaire in a famous passage of his autobio-
graphical commonplace-book, Mon cœur mis à nu. And perhaps
not the least rewarding approach to his art-criticism is to regard
it as a kind of lifelong glorification of this chosen cult. Early in
his Salon of 1846 Baudelaire inserted a brief manifesto of what
he meant by criticism; in this he was quick to reject a cold,
mathematical, heartless type of criticism, and to require in its
place a criticism which should be 'partial, passionate and poli-
tical'--and, he added, 'amusing and poetic'. 'Thus,' he went on
to say, 'the best account of a picture may well be a sonnet or an
elegy'--a type of 'criticism' of which we find several examples
among the Fleurs du mal.

But this, of course, is not all. To find the simplest and most
revealing exposition of Baudelaire's critical attitude, it is best to
turn to a long article which he wrote some fifteen years later
in defence of Wagner. 'All great poets naturally and fatally
become critics', he wrote there. 'I pity those poets who are
guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. But in
the spiritual life of the former [i.e. the great poets] a crisis
inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their
art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have
created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose
divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be un-