A treatise on the self creation and creativity of society in the mid 19th century written by Charles Baudelaire. It deals mainly with the topics beauty, fashion and happiness with six further specializations. "Le Peintre de la vie moderne" is a recital of Baudelaire in the cooperation with the painter and designer Constantin Guys. Taken as a study and first published in three episodes in 1863, by Le Figaro, and an 1869 by L'Art Romantic in Paris in French.
"Truth to tell, he drew like a barbarian, or a child, impatient and clumsiness of his fingers and the disobedience of his pen. I have seen a large number of these primitive scribbles, and I in this matter, might well have been pardoned for failing to discern the latent genius which abode in such murky daubs. Today, after discovering by himself all the little tricks of his trade and accomplishing, without advice, his own education, Monsieur G. has become a powerful master in his own way, and of his early artlessness he has retained no more than what was needed to add an unexpected seasoning to his rich gifts" (p. 6)
"Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent, and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G.
Now convalescence is like a return towards childhood. The convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently the most trivial. [...] The child sees everything in a state on newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour. [...] The man of genius has sound nerves, while those of the child are weak. With the one, Reason has taken up a considerable position; with the other, Sensibility is almost the whole being. But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated." (pp. 7, 8)
"Few man are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess the power of expression. [...] All the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized, and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of a childlike perceptiveness - that is to say, a perceptiveness acute and magical by reason of its innocence!" (p.12)