The product of some art

⊕The essay opens with a self-aware slam: “I remember a song, so worthless and silly that it seems hardly proper to quote from it in a work which has some pretensions to seriousness, but which nevertheless expresses very well, in its vaudeville manner, the aesthetic creed of people who do not think.” This is hilarious. In one sentence he dismisses the song, its audience, and the song’s very method of expression. And the sentence makes fun of the essay itself: it, too, has pretensions to seriousness.On the other hand it is philosophy (I speak of good philosophy) and religion which command us to look after our parents when they are poor and infirm. Nature, being none other than the voice of our own self-interest, would have us slaughter them.

Setting aside whether that statement is correct: it is hilarious that this is the start of an argument for dramatic makeup.

Evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally; Good is always the product of some art.

Maquillage [make-up] has no need to hide itself or to shrink from being suspected; on the contrary, let it display itself, at least if it does so with frankness and honesty.

You can write about anything seriously. If you pay enough attention to a thing, you can learn from it.

In this case, Baudelaire didn’t love naturalistic makeup, and did love elaborate makeup (he would have loved Euphoria). And in rationalizing that judgment, he had to argue that culture is what makes us civil, and that being civil requires shirking nature.

At the time, the fashion was the worship of nature (this is Rousseau’s eighteenth century).This essay targets Rousseau’s world: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Rousseau, Émile (1762), book I. Baudelaire was most likely in on the joke, and trying to rile up a response.

The essay he wrote was in drag makeup too.