Baudelaire said much the same thing as Naipaul writing about the relationship between photography and painting in The Salon of 1859, lamenting the “thousand hungry eyes” bending over the “peephole of the stereoscope.” Nevertheless, Baudelaire would most likely side with McInerney waxing nostalgically: “It is a happiness to dream, and it used to be a glory to express what one dreamt. But I ask you! Does the painter still know this happiness?” (231)

Sidestepping the obvious fallacy that photographs present facts rather than dreams and the dubious assertion that imaginative storytelling is somehow different in kind from the vivid depiction of a real scene, the “determinate rule” of these cyclical laments seems to pivot around a disdain for masking nature. But there are two “natures” involved. The photographic or verbal documentarian claims a relationship with “true reality,” but this point becomes easily confused. Baudelaire imagines a pedant who asserts:

The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should only paint in accordance with what he sees and with what he feels. He must be really faithful to his own nature. He must avoid like the plague borrowing the eyes and the feelings of another man, however great this man may be; for then his productions would lie in relation to himself and not realities. (232)

Baudelaire claims that this theory “flatters impotence no less than laziness.” It seems to me that it is more likely an underestimation of the complexity involved— we always advance masked. We half create and half perceive; only a fool would mean to say that due to current events fiction has been suspended. Or, as Baudelaire imagines his pedant to mean:

“We have no imagination, and we decree that no one else is to have any.”

Even the empiricist must deal with the mask provided by the senses, and the role any active observer is destined to play.

How mysterious is Imagination, that Queen of the Faculties! It touches all the others; it rouses them and sends them into combat. (232)