Charles Baudelaire & the Unhealthy Prioritization of Beauty

Baudelaire wrote in his My Heart Laid Bare, “In childhood and still today, the most beautiful thing I found in a theater is the chandelier — a beautiful luminous crystalline, complicated, circular and symmetrical object … After all, the chandelier has always seemed to me the principal actor …” Ever since childhood, Baudelaire found himself mesmerized by the way chandeliers looked. Notice his preoccupation with the chandelier. He describes it like one who is obsessed. This was a poet who’d confessed in his poems that he’d found the beauty in nature to surpass that of a woman’s love. He was unbalanced. His letters reveal a man who’d run a woman off, then beg regretfully for her return. Baudelaire would rather have studied beauty than concentrated on his human relationships. The only time he described or glorified human beings the way he’d written of the chandelier was when his subject matter was that of an outcast or a reject, because that’s what he was. He called the chandelier the “principal actor,” which shows us he esteemed beauty above human beings. Actually, a chandelier is a man-made object. It could not respond to Baudelaire; it could only be admired and described. Baudelaire, no doubt, loved the nonhuman qualities of such objects. He was right that humanity is not nearly as beautiful as a chandelier, but humanity is real, and it must be faced and accepted for what it is. The prioritization of beauty is the escapist’s way out; it is the easy way out, and is essentially suicidal. The man who prioritizes beauty, at the expense of humanity, has committed social suicide in humanity’s midst. If only Baudelaire could’ve redirected that attention on the chandelier toward humanity! Humanity too is complicated, but was unworthy of his love and attention. He was a selfish man indeed. When Baudelaire told his woman that the Sun radiant over the sea was more meaningful to him than her love, was he not hurting her? Of course he was. That is a hurtful and stupid thing to say. And she was making a mistake by trying to love such a dreamer. Think of it! This man, while in an opera house, would stare at the chandelier! It’s a bit crazy. But this was also the same poet who could smoke opium and sit alone for days. His life was one long, lazy gaze, and his books are required reading in English courses! With Baudelaire, it was anything for a moment’s pleasure … He was absolutely miserable when unstimulated, bored to death, totally dependent on emotional highs and the sense of awe. He didn’t understand that life is more than entertainment; he didn’t care that all entertainment is false. He hated reality.

–I have published an essay on Baudelaire, available here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prince-of-the-clouds-brandon-r-burdette/1128113868?ean=9781986182492