Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of democracy, of the democratization of the arts, of all the sentimental fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the Dresden uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary etude. Brave lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the region of the ideal. Baudelaire’s little attack of the equality-measles soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly and injustice of abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he dedicated a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but he would not have contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that “in art the democrat is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were against Victor Hugo and Delacrois.” And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of opals, blood, and evil swamp-flowers, will never be savored by the mob.
In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in the Louvre he enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of the poet’s preferences. He was also attracted by El Greco — not an unnatural admiration, considering the somber extravagance of his own genius. Of Goya he has written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his nerves ruined by abuse of drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful than Nature herself. The country itself, he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, whom he often met — see the Hommage à Delacrois by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic, and De Balleroy — he could not help showing his aversion to “foolish sunsets.” In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism and fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary progenitor of Jean, Due d’Esseintes, in Huysmans’s A Rebours. Huysmans at first modelled himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux Epices is a continuation of Petits Poemes en Prose. And to Baudelaire’s account must be laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite his pursuit of perfection in form, his influence has been too often baneful to impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, and high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no extravagance, absurd or terrible, that he did not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on ice to skating hymns in honor of Lucifer. In his criticism alone was he the sane logical Frenchman. And while he did not live to see the success of the Impressionist group, he surely would have acclaimed their theory and practice. Was he not an impressionist himself?
—from the Introduction by James Huneker (1857–1921) to The Poems and Prose-Poems of Baudelaire published by Boni & Liveright’s Modern Library. Huneker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although mostly rememebered as a music critic, Huneker was also an important literary critic who introduced American readers to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore and Baudelaire.