The Salon of 1859 by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire is a French Romanticist and the precursor of symbolic movement in European literature. He considers imagination as the “queen of faculties”, truly creative power. The imagination must shape what nature makes available to it.

When nature is thought of as a dictionary a mere source of the basic elements of work of art- copying nature is at best trivial undertaking; man must breathe his own life in to his experience and his art. He feels that art imposes certain pattern in to the moral order. Art tries to observe order in the disorder of the society. It also imposes moral order in human irregularity.

In the essay “The Salon of 1859”, he has talked about symbol and imagination. Since art creates certain pattern in human irregularities, artist should but imitate nature because nature is forest of symbols, which is dull and cruel. Baudalaire thinks that the source of art should be human beings chaotic situation, disorder and irregularities. He opines that poet can see correspondence between nature and supernatural world. Baudalaire major principle is the “Principle of Correspondence”- our ideas are communicated with the external world with the help of symbols- symbol being the vehicle to correspond the ideas of human mind and outer world or of external world and spiritual world. Correspondence is the inherent quality possessed by both human mind and external world. Correspondence also refers to the communication between human mind and external world. The poet has power of understanding this communication who then turns ideas in to symbols and presents them before the readers. The symbol has the capacity to correspond between art and world.

Baudelaire glorifies universal imagination the means of expression that can master human experience. Art creates a new world and produces newer sensation. It is the governing principle, so it governs the whole world. He claims that imagination is the queen of the truth and beauty. It maintains the definite relationship with infinite things none of faculties can do without it.

In the absences of imagination, there is no virtue and morality. It has the power of synthesis, so it is the constitutive faculty that must digest and transform daily experiences and changes them in to symbols and images and the purpose of art should be both moral and aesthetic. Though nature in its crude form is barbaric, art creates aesthetic and moral meaning out of it. By knowing nature only we can't have universal imagination; instead it urges the mastery over the medium of human experience.