"The Salon of 1846" Romanticism
"Properly speaking romanticism lies neither in the subjects that an artist chooses nor in his exact copying of truth, but in the way he feels.... romanticism consists, not in technical perfection, but in a view of art, analogous to the moral attitudes of the age.... Therefore, above all we must know the different aspects of nature and the human situation, which the artists of the past either disdained or did not know about. Romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing, in other words: intimacy, spirituality, colour, yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means the arts possess." -- pp.52-53 The Heroism of Modern Life "Before trying to isolate the epic quality of modern life and to show, by giving examples, that our age is no less rich than ancient times in sublime themes, it may be asserted that since every age and every people have had their own form of beauty, we inevitably have ours.... All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, have within them something eternal and something transitory -- an absolute and a particular element. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is nothing but an abstract notion, creamed off from the general surface of different types of beauty. Parisian life is rich in poetic and wonderful subjects. The marvellous envelopes and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to see it." -- pp. 104-107.
"The Painter of Modern Life" (1859) IV. Modernity
"The aim for him [the artist] is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory. .... Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past; .... every age has its own carriage, its expression, its gestures.... If a painter, patient and scrupulous but with only inferior imaginative power, were commissioned to paint a courtesan of today, and for this purpose, were to get his inspiration (to use the hallowed term) from a courtesan by Titian or Raphael, the odds are that his work would be fraudulent, ambiguous, and difficult to understand. The study of a masterpiece of that date and of that kind will not teach him the carriage, the gaze, the come-hitherishness, or the living representation of one of these creatures... -- pp. 402-405 IX. The Dandy "Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are not more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.... It is, above all the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.... dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism, but a dandy can never be a vulgar man.... Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited..... Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy." -- pp. 420-422