Marshall Berman
BAUDELAIRE: MODERNISM IN THE
STREETS
In the years since the Second World War, many scholars and
thinkers have tried to understand what it means to be modern.
Unfortunately, their energies have been fragmented in ways that
virtually guarantee that they will not succeed. Modernity has been
broken up into material and spiritual entities: "modernism," a species
of pure spirit, evolving in accord with its own artistic and intellectual
imperatives: and "modernization," a complex of material structures
and processes-political, economic, social-that, once it has got under
way, runs on its own momentum with little or no input from human
minds or souls. This intellectual dualism, pervasive in contemporary
culture, cuts our searchers off from one of the basic facts of modern life:
the interfusion of its material and spiritual forces, the intimate unity of
the modern self and the modern environment. The first great wave of
writers and thinkers about modernity-Goethe, Hegel and Marx,
Stendhal and Baudelaire, Carlyle and Dickens, Herzen and Dosto–
evsky-had an instinctive feeling for this unity; it gave their visions
a complexity and depth that contemporary writing about modernity
lacks.
Baudelaire did more than anyone in the nineteenth century to
make the men and women of his century aware of themselves as
moderns. He experienced modernity as a basis for self-definition, a
categorical imperative for thought and action. Paul Verlaine, in a
tribute written shortly before Baudelaire's death, and Theodore de
Banville at his graveside, portrayed him as the first full-fledged, self–
conscious modernist, and claimed that his modernity was the primary
source of his originality and greatness. But they were aware, as serious
readers of Baudelaire still are, that his vision of the modern is full of
inner tensions and ambiguities. Sometimes, especially in his great
essays on "The Heroism of Modern Life"
(1846)
and "The Painter of
Modern Life"
(1859-60),
he embraced modernity with great ardor,
celebrated its tempo, its fashion and design, its science and technology,
