'Still more important is the following observation: the eminent sensual refinement of a Baudelaire has nothing at all to do with any sort of coziness. This fundamental incompatibility of sensual pleasure with what is called Gemütlichkeit is the criterion for a true culture of the senses. Baudelaire's snobbism is the eccentric formula for this steadfast repudiation of complacency, and his "satanism" is nothing other than the constant readiness to subvert this habit of mind wherever it should appear,' Walter Benjamin, 'Central Park', in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire.
'[W]e must be careful to distinguish between the moralizer and the moralist. The former believes in goodness and badness, the latter in righteousness and sin; the former is a materialist, the latter holds to spiritual values; the former is odious to Baudelaire - and not only, one may hope, to him - the latter, Baudelaire assuredly is, with his conviction that belief in original sin is the true foundation for all human attitudes to life and art. The moralist's attitude ensures an unflinching gaze at life, admits of pity but not of sentimentality in human relationships, cuts at the root of cant, of false values in creative work and critical judgments, strives, at least, to strike dead all human vanities,' P E Charvet's 'Introduction' to Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature.
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