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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027272594 
 
THE GREAT FRENCH WRITERS 
 From the Series Edited 
 
 By J. J. JUSSERANd 
 
 TH&OPHILE GAUTIER 
 
In Same Series. 
 MADAME DE STAEL. By Albert Sorel. 
 A. THIERS. By P. de RfcMUSAT. 
 BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE. By Arv^de Barine. 
 
 Others to follow. 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 
 
 From a photograph by Nadar, of Paris. 
 
THfiOPHILE GAUTIER 
 
 MAXIME DU CAMP 
 
 TRANSLATED BY J. E. GORDON 
 
 PREFACE BY ANDREW LANG 
 
 With Portrait 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 MDCCCXCIII 
 
 
/^.(p^f7fi 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 Preface . . . . . . vii 
 
 Chapter 
 
 I. Youth . . . . . i 
 
 II. Criticism 50 
 
 HI. The Traveller 97 
 
 IV. The Story-teller 142 
 
 V. The Poet 177 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 "/ ^HE life of Thiophile Gautier is of peculiar 
 interest to men of letters, especially to that 
 large proportion of them who, like Theophile, are 
 ''' polygraphes'' Our ancestors more briefly termed 
 them "hacks" and, since Dr. fohnson, or, at 
 least, since Southey, there has been no hack so- 
 distinguished as ThJophile. His Pegasus was^ 
 early broken into harness, and his biographer,. 
 M. Maxinie du Camp, like himself, is constantly 
 regretting this bondage. Perhaps too many- 
 laments are uttered over this misfortune ; like 
 other men, Theophile Gautier did what he could^ 
 and what it was in him to do. He was a poet, 
 indeed, and we are asked to believe that, had tlie 
 State aided him with an adequate pension, his 
 place as a poet would have been higher, his poetic 
 work greater in bulk, and nobler in quality. But 
 this may well be doubted. The man of letters in 
 Gautier was stronger than the poet ; had it not 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 been so, probably he would have given himself 
 more freely and with a stricter loyalty to the 
 Muse. A writer in whom the poet is supreme, 
 a writer like Wordsworth, or Tennyson, will take 
 poverty for his bride, disdaining the seductions of 
 labour which is easier and better paid. To both 
 of these Englishmen fortune proved kind, after 
 years of self-denial. As a rule, at least in 
 England, the poet has been a man of leisure, or 
 if, like Burns, he lived by the labour of his hands, 
 he wrote poetry in his hours of freedom, without 
 hope of practical reward. The circumstances of 
 his life and his necessities made Gautier a jour- 
 nalist ; very probably {or rather, certainly) he did 
 not even possess the pittance on which Words- 
 worth and Tennyson cultivated verse with an 
 £xclusive devotion. But we feel a conviction that, 
 if Gautier had been tnore ardently and essentially 
 a poet, he, too, would have found or made a way 
 by which he might devote himself to this art. 
 
 The truth is that he was not a poet of the 
 highest, the creative order. His mind was not 
 inhabited and possessed by airy beings, who 
 insisted on being clothed in words and sent 
 forth to live with Hamlet and Esmeralda, with 
 Faust and d'Artagnan, Fantine and Di Vernon. 
 Still less had Gautier the moral enthusiasm of 
 Wordsworth, the natural magic of Keats, the 
 izrdent spirit of Bums, and his passionate interest 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 in life. Art was what Gautier loved — the beau- 
 tiful of human creation. He is thus, as Plato 
 says, distant by two degrees from the real, and his 
 poetry touches life only on one side. Such poetry 
 is neither the child of an absorbing and exclusive 
 inspiration, nor so dear and necessary to men that 
 a poet can live on bread thus earned alone. It 
 was therefore necessary for Gautier, especially as 
 his tastes were somewhat luxurious, to live other- 
 wise, by the gifts which he could make profitable, 
 really his more especial and singular gifts, his 
 unrivalled art as a man of letters. He could not 
 write an uninteresting line ; he had not the art of 
 being dull ; to lack that was the gift of the 
 fairies ; on not being dull he lived. Consequently 
 his genius is scattered widecast ; his "three 
 hundred volumes" are lost in a wilderness of old 
 newspapers, and, if we ask for a "great work" it 
 is not, or is represented only by two slim volumes 
 of exquisite verse ; a romance, not of the most 
 enthralling; a novel, which lies patent to the 
 censure of moralists ; and a few short stories. 
 
 In none of these is the human interest the 
 chief merit and attraction. There is style, there 
 is charm, there is m.usic ; but there is more of 
 life in a chapter of Dumas, or in a proverbe of 
 Alfred de Musset. Had Gautier, in addition to 
 his other qualities, possessed the vitality, the hu- 
 manity of Hugo, of Dumas, of Musset, his name 
 
X Preface. 
 
 would indeed be among the greatest of the great 
 in the wide and glorious domain of French lite- 
 rature. But this vitality, this large and eager 
 sympathy with what is universal, Gautier lacked. 
 No pension, no sinecure, no leisure could have 
 given him zuhat Nature withheld, and he is 
 neither to be blamed nor pitied, but rather 
 applauded, for his industrious work in his own 
 field, the common field of letters. Here he laboured 
 after his kind, giving in abundant measure such 
 enjoyment as he had it in his po;wer to give. His 
 reputation suffers from the common and irritating 
 theory of the " Great ■ Work',' the magnum opus. 
 There, was no magnum opus in him to give. We 
 might as well ask an orfevre like BenveHuto 
 Cellini to build St. Peter's or the Parthenon ; 
 though the Perseus of the gold-worker is a greater 
 triumph than was possible, in his own province, to 
 Gautier. He himself was probably unaware of 
 his limitations, and, loving poetry well, regretted 
 that the lyre was often hung out of reach. But, 
 to us who survive him, it may seem that he did 
 what it was in him to do, that he did it to per- 
 fection, and with unwearied diligence. " He is 
 known of his own',' to quote the inscription on a 
 miniature of fames VHI. If they are feinl, they 
 are loyal. 
 
 Gautier' s biography and his confessions prove 
 that he was a born , student. He had the love 
 
Preface. xi 
 
 of printed matter, he had a memory — as proved 
 by his recital of a long poem of Hugo's only 
 once read, which rivalled that of Scott. Sir 
 Walter repeated, by tJte banks of the Tweed, a 
 long ballad of Hogg's which had been read to 
 him once, a ballad zvhich the Shepherd had 
 lost. Gautier might Jtave rivalled this feat. With 
 such a love of reading, with such natural scholar- 
 ship as M. Maxime du Camp vouches for, with 
 such a memory, Gautier had the complete equip- 
 ment of a man of letters, combined with the 
 temperament of an artist. Like Thackeray, of 
 whom his melancholy and his gaiety both remind 
 us, Gautier began life as a painter, but the current 
 of 1830, of Romanticism, carried him into litera- 
 ture. He very soon began to laugh at the boyish 
 medievalism of the Petruses and Jehans, but his 
 life was inspired to its close by the memories of 
 that gallant boyishness, and death found him as 
 he was wi'iting an article on the well-worn theme 
 of Hernani. For Mort aux Perruques he substi- 
 tuted Mort aux bourgeois, and, to tell the truth, 
 his bitter insistence on this hatred of the commx)n- 
 place becomes tedious, becomes melancholy, as we 
 read his harangues in the memoirs of the Gon- 
 courts. We cannot' imagine Shakespeare, or Scott, 
 or Dumas thus declaiming against the ordinary, 
 tlte staple of human existence, the life that all the 
 poets' fathers lived. That life, of course, is in- 
 
xii Preface. 
 
 different to the finer things of art, but man was 
 by no means born to live for art alone, and tJie 
 majority of men welcome art only when it reflects 
 the very everyday passions and experiences which 
 Gautier scouted. The young lady of the familiar 
 anecdote spoke of him as im cerebral, and, in spite 
 of his muscles, un cdr^bral Gautier essentially was. 
 Endowed with a noble physical equipment, he lived 
 by the brain rather than the heart. He could not 
 forgive people who lived otherwise, and they, con- 
 sequently, did not welcome him and his work as 
 they welcomed Dumas, and Musset, and Balzac. 
 In brief, he "' lived in a vale" the vale of art and 
 letters, and he and his fame '' must accept the 
 consequences of such a situation" For this 
 Hollow Land is remote from the actual interests 
 of mortal men ; this realm t/tey do not inhabit, and 
 they hold but lightly the natives of the place. For 
 them the wiser policy is " to take this for a her- 
 mitage" and be content among their dreams, 
 indifferent to what is really so indifferent, the 
 most sweet voices of the multitude. Unluckily 
 Gautier did not attain to this philosophy. To 
 despise the general and yet to be eager for its 
 plaudits is the paradox of the artist. Thus does he 
 disquiet himself in vain, conscious of greater powers, 
 conscious that they are not fully recognised, because, 
 in fact, the light in him is not completely focussedy 
 does not concentrate and burn to a single point. 
 
Preface. xiii 
 
 It is possible to be too Puritanic in an estimate of 
 Gautier's wrongs and grievances . The perpetual 
 task of criticising trash, in pictures, in books, in 
 plays, to write " sur la valeur litteraire de pieces 
 qui, le plus souvent n'en avaient aucune," is, in- 
 deed, a burden almost not to be borne. M. 
 Maxime du Camp thinks that Gautier might 
 have written an admirable history of French 
 literature. No doubt he might, but did anything 
 external prevent hhn from doing it ? To take 
 a similar case, M. Paul de St. Victor produced 
 exquisite essays, combined in Hommes et Dieux. 
 But he also found time and energy for a vast 
 book on the Drama, Les Deux Masques ; and it 
 must be confessed that, in his long flight, the 
 qualities which mark his short essays do not 
 adequately sustain him ; he lives by his collected 
 articles. Gautier might probably, like St. Victory 
 have attempted his Great Work, in the way of 
 literary history. But it does not seem probable 
 that he would have sought for serious renown^ 
 except in works of imagination. His common 
 task, as M. Maxime du Camp informs us, and as 
 every one will naturally believe, he executed with 
 honesty. The critic of those days, it appears, 
 might have sold his pen to the managers of 
 theatres. This was not a tempting crime in the 
 eyes of Theophile Gautier. 
 
 To him the suave scelus, dulce flagitium, in 
 
xiv Preface. 
 
 the indulgent words of an ecclesiastical writer, 
 took the form of Mademoiselle de Maupin. 
 Concerning that work, the remarks of M. Maxime 
 ■du Camp may suffice. It was a pech6 de jeunesse ; 
 we are told that Gautier^s mother used to lock 
 Aim up in his room till he had finished a due 
 Portion and set task of his book ; his book which 
 must have astonished the excellent lady if she tried 
 to read it. Mademoiselle de Maupin has been most 
 read for its least essential qualities, its sensuous 
 descriptions. What is essential, the style, and a 
 peculiar form of the melancholy of Rene, and of 
 the other youths who were as sad as night for the 
 reason Shakespeare gives, are not attractive to 
 the students who delight in the accidents of the 
 romance. The story was always a stumbling-block 
 in Gautier's path : it is a novel without heart, and 
 with more than its share of the pride of the eyes 
 and the lust of the flesh. All his stories are 
 really poems and dreams, which he had not the 
 leisure to write in verse, or which, in verse, would, 
 ■of course, have been hopelessly unpopular. He is 
 haunted by ghosts of the beauties of dead empires, 
 by the gold and purple of Cleopatra, of Gyges, 
 of Rome. In all this he is not without resem- 
 blance to Edgar Poe, but he had none of Poe's 
 unrivalled art in the composition of plots which 
 excite curiosity. At this he never aimed ; he was 
 a painter of visions, impossihiVmm cupitor. The 
 
Preface. xv 
 
 chief exception is Le Capitaine Fracasse, a story 
 of cloak and sword, ii'hich contains an excellent 
 duel, but ivhich never rivalled the popularity of 
 The Three Musketeers. In thinking of Gautiers 
 tales, one remembers the pleasure of the manner 
 of telling, more than the matter told ; the art, 
 rather than the narrative. Thtis they bear 
 reading again and again, by those to whom the 
 art of letters is dear. 
 
 In spite of his labours as a critic, a literary 
 voyager, and a story-teller, Gautier remained, at 
 heart, true to his first love. He was a poet, and 
 a true poet, but purely a poet in the school of art. 
 His Emaux et Camdes remain an enduring 
 treasure, but a treasure for the few. The pieces 
 on the Flight of the Swallows, on the Obelisks, on 
 Art, on the Chateau de Souvenir, remain among 
 the dearest possessions of literature. To call them 
 " exquisite" " chiselled" " impeccable" and so 
 forth, is to say what is true, though it be so very 
 far from new. Mr. Matthew Arnold has com- 
 pared Gautier to a man who passes his life in an 
 inn ; we are not at home, it seems, in his verse. 
 If it be so, his is an inn where we can take our 
 ease with enjoyment. No one maintains that 
 Gautier is to be a man's only poet ; of course he is 
 not a Shakespeare, or a Homer, but he has en- 
 riched the wandering world with happy and 
 charmed resting-places, hung zvith rich old arras, 
 
xvi Preface. 
 
 musical with viol or lute. We are not always 
 in search of moral counsel and comfort ; there 
 are moments when we are content to be pleased 
 with a magic pleasure, and to pass an hour in a 
 haunted chamber of romance. 
 
 After his poems, what we value most in Gautier 
 is his reminiscences, his delightful tales of old days 
 and old comrades, published in the volume called 
 Histoire du romantisme. His attachment to 
 friends and memories, a smack of his youth, a 
 certain undying boyishness in him, make us read 
 him with a kind of affection and liking. In the 
 correspondence of Scott, I find a letter from, some 
 unknown person, who praises him as " such a 
 friendly writer T Gautier is a friendly writer ; 
 perhaps this is not m.ade very conspicuous in M. 
 Maxime du Camp's brief biography ; in a volume 
 of M. Bergerats, but above all in the reminis- 
 cences of Theo himself, this amiable quality is now 
 conspicuous. 
 
 It was Flaubert, if I am not mistaken, who 
 spoke of Gautier as " the least known of authors.'' 
 Many years ago I wrote an essay on him, and 
 was entertained by the article of a reviewer who 
 took that opportunity of censuring my partiality 
 for " niedicBval Frenchmen'' This did not look 
 as if Th^ophile was a popular favourite in Eng- 
 land. Even in France he was immensely read 
 in feuilletons, and practically unknown. The 
 
Preface. xvii 
 
 reason, as it seems to me, is that he created no 
 characters, and gave no moral advice. He will 
 always be the delight hominum venustforum ; he 
 zvill always be unpopular. Yet why unpopular ? 
 That he is, I can hardly doubt. Take the test of 
 the bibliophile. One sees the first edition of 
 Emaux et Cam^es priced at a louis, in catalogues. 
 Take Mdnagerie Intime, that witty, touching, 
 ■humorous chronicle of cats and rats, dogs and 
 horses, Jane, Blanche, and Don Pierrot de Na- 
 varre. If it contained nothing but the story of 
 the poulet vert, it would still be a pearl. I send 
 for a copy, and I find it still in the first edition of 
 1869, as published by M. Lemerre. This does not 
 look like popularity, meanwhile the wise world is 
 purchasing trash in many editions. In Eng- 
 land Menagerie Intime needs only to be read to 
 be liked. Whoever wishes to know Gautier a 
 little more thoroughly, as a man, will read his 
 Histoire du romantisme, the Souvenirs Intimes 
 of Madame Judith Gautier, and his Tableaux de 
 Siege, where he keeps up his heart so bravely with 
 such admirable temper. If there is a want of 
 heart in his novels, there was abundance of it, we 
 feel as we read, in his character. He kept his 
 discouragement to himself, like a man, at least he 
 kept it out of his literature. He did not carry his 
 pessimism to m,arket. 
 
 " // fut le plus dhint^resse des homines" says 
 
xviii Preface. 
 
 M. Maxime du Camp, who knew him well. If 
 he were a Cyrenaic philosopher, he had also the 
 better part of stoicism, and he remains, like a 
 greater than he, " such a friendly writer" 
 
THfiOPHILE GAUTIER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 YOUTH. 
 
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER was a type of 
 what writers in library catalogues call a 
 polygrapher. He was a man of letters in the 
 large sense of the word ; he did not imitate 
 those writers who from barrenness of ideas, or 
 from taste, devote themselves to some special 
 subject, which becomes so much a habit that it 
 is impossible to them to do anything else, and 
 who find themselves out of their element at 
 once if they leave their ordinary domain. For 
 him the field, the vast field of literature, had no 
 unknown territory. He might to a greater 
 degree and better than Pic Mirandola have 
 offered battle to all comers to discuss de oinni re 
 sdbili et quibusdam aliis, for during the course 
 of his life, pen in hand, he discoursed without 
 ceasing. When We look at the mass of his; 
 
 2 
 
2 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 work, the product of forty years' labour, we are 
 filled with surprise and respect before such 
 remarkable industry, which embraced without 
 difficulty subjects whose diversity is prodigious, 
 and which he always treated with originality, 
 often with the superiority of a master. 
 
 In the literary revival of which Chateaubriand 
 was the precursor, Theophile Gautier stands in 
 the front rank, brandishing his trusty Toledo 
 pen, as they said in the days of the romanticist 
 battles, giving way to no one, throwing himself 
 into the thickest of the fight, facing to all sides, 
 and redoubling in audacity under the invectives 
 of which the new school was the object. He 
 remained faithful to the beliefs of his youth ; 
 during the last years of his life, years that were 
 heavy and at times painful, his heart would beat 
 quicker and his face light up as he spoke of the 
 first representation of Hernani and of the blows 
 exchanged while Ligier declaimed the tirades of 
 Triboulet in the Roi s'amuse. His faith, I mean 
 his literary faith, was so profound, so buoyant, 
 that the lengthened exercise of his calling did 
 not in the least weaken it. He was full of 
 fervour to the last, and if before closing his eyes 
 for ever he turned them towards the monument 
 that the writers of his generation, poets and prose- 
 writers, have raised to the renaissance of Art, he 
 must have felt reassured as to the future of his 
 
Youth. 3 
 
 name, well knowing that he had inscribed it on 
 one of the crowning stones. 
 
 For posterity the pyramid rises of itself For- 
 gotten writers form the base, invisible, almost 
 lost sight of in the foundations ; then come the 
 mediocrities of imperfect grasp, those whose will 
 was stronger than their talent, the authors whom 
 fashion has sometimes upheld on its fragile 
 wings, novelists, historians, all the officers of the 
 army of literature ; and at last, quite at the top, 
 almost in the skies, the poet takes the place 
 which was due to him during his life, and which 
 is only yielded to him when he is dead. To how 
 many writers of the first flight might we not 
 apply the epitaph which Gombaud composed 
 for Malherbe : — 
 
 ■" L'ApoUon de nos jours, Malherbe, ici repose; 
 II a v^cu longtemps sans se louer du sort. 
 En quel sifecle ? — Passant, je n'en dis autre chose, 
 II est mort pauvre. . . . Et moi je vis comme il 
 est mort." ' 
 
 A thousand minor causes exercise an influ- 
 ence, which is often tyrannical, on public opinion, 
 
 ' " The Apollo of our days, Malherbe, here reposes ; 
 
 He lived long without being able to boast himself of his lot. 
 In what century ? — Stranger, I will say no more, 
 He died poor. . . . And I, I live as he died." 
 
4 Thdophile Gmttier. 
 
 and thrust aside living writers far below the rank 
 which superior merit assigns to them. The 
 future alone, freed from the pre-occupations of 
 the time in which they gave their works to the 
 world, is sufficiently independent to allot to 
 them their place in the pantheon of the glories 
 of the human understanding. Of praises and 
 disparagements, failures and successes, hisses 
 and bravos, the future takes no account ; sooner 
 or later the reputation, depreciated or exag- 
 gerated, finds by itself a definite level which 
 nothing can alter. That is the almost uncon- 
 scious, certainly disinterested work of posterity, 
 which lasts for a longer or shorter period, 
 according to the degree and the quality of the 
 talent. It seems to me that in the high-water 
 mark of celebrity the name of Thdophile Gautier 
 will always maintain a foremost place, the first 
 perhaps after that of Musset, of Lamartine, and 
 of Victor Hugo. In any case, Gautier's verses 
 share with those of Musset a quality of the 
 highest order — alone of their epoch they are 
 untainted with rhetoric. 
 
 If there has only been some tenderness in our 
 affections, we cherish deep down in our hearts a 
 sort of holy sepulchre, in which those still live 
 whom we have loved, and who are no more. 
 Embalmed in the perfume of remembrance, they 
 appear when we evoke them, reply when we 
 
Youth. 5 
 
 question them, and seem really once more to 
 take up their former existence, to share it with 
 us, so much do their thoughts mingle with ours, 
 so well do they succeed in resuscitating things 
 that have passed, and which we thought to be 
 dead. It is a vision ; if we close our eyes we 
 imagine that we see them with their familiar 
 gestures, their attitude, their gait ; and if we 
 listen we think we hear them. Amongst those 
 who inhabit the mausoleum of my heart — so 
 full, alas ! — and where sleep so many that were 
 dear to me, Thdophile Gautier is one of those 
 whom I call up most frequently to talk over 
 the times that are passed, and our common 
 friends, near whom he sleeps to-day. 
 
 Several of those whom I have known, and 
 who shared the affection that I dedicated to 
 him, were men and not demigods. I have lived 
 beside them and judged them as contemporaries, 
 for between them and myself the magnifying- 
 glass of posterity was not interposed. The 
 details of their personal existence have not yet 
 — for me at least — been eliminated by time ; I 
 perceive the work through the man ; the one 
 completes the other ; this explains that ; and it 
 would be giving the lie to truth to separate 
 them. It is impossible to judge one's com- 
 panion in life as one can judge some one who 
 has been dead for one or two centuries. It is 
 
6 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 with men as with landscapes, distance em- 
 bellishes but distorts them, for it floods them 
 with light, softens the outlines, and hides the 
 rough places. Those who have seen them, who 
 have been their daily associates, their confidants, 
 sometimes even their confessors, those who re- 
 member them, do not hear the hour of apotheosis 
 strike, but they owe it to themselves to be sincere 
 even out of respect for him of whom they speak, 
 and by so doing they often succeed in bringing 
 back to life the real man with qualities that even 
 his admirers did not suspect in him. To the 
 spectators of the existence of many writers what 
 is most extraordinary in their work is not the 
 work itself, but the difficulties through which 
 they have accomplished it ; it is that nothing, 
 neither narrow means, not to say poverty, nor 
 the sufferings that result from it, have been able 
 to check their soaring genius. That is what we 
 must explain, however, to make what was ex- 
 ceptional in them intelligible, and that is where 
 we must speak out in order to avenge them for 
 the disdainful flippancy with which the ignorant 
 public and even the enlightened few have treated 
 them. " A lad named La Fontaine, devoted to 
 polite literature, and who makes verses," said 
 that scandalmonger, Tallemant des Rdaux, 
 That is how they are spoken of while they are 
 still of this world : — 
 
Youth. 7 
 
 " Quitte, apres un long examen, 
 A leur dresser une statue 
 Pour I'honneur du genre humain." ' 
 
 Th^ophile Gautier saw at once that poetry 
 was looked upon as a sort of agreeable super- 
 fluity, useless in itself, good at most to amuse a 
 few idlers, finding sufficient recompense in the 
 applause which it called forth, unworthy on the 
 whole of a serious man, meriting at best a barren 
 encouragement. In this respect governments 
 are agreed, whatever may be the difference in 
 their origin and the divergence of their princi- 
 ples. Alfred de Vigny's Stello may not be 
 historically true ; it remains none the less 
 philosophically true. Theophile Gautier expe- 
 rienced it for nearly forty years, during which 
 he went through the mill of journalism in order 
 not to want for daily bread. It never occurred 
 to the Government of July, to the Second 
 Republic, or to the Second Empire, in which, 
 however, he counted some friends, that an 
 adequately paid post — a sinecure if they liked 
 — was due to a writer who only needed to be 
 relieved from sordid care to spread his wings to 
 their fullest extent. He had accepted his lot 
 
 ' " After long delay cry quits, 
 Raising to them a statue 
 For the honour of the human race." 
 
8 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 with a gentleness that often touched me, for 
 without being exacting, he had a right to think 
 that he deserved something better than the 
 existence forced upon him. 
 
 He was born at Tarbes, August 31, 181 1 ; he 
 tells us so himself, and we may believe him ; '^ 
 nevertheless, an official document which I have 
 before me makes him older by a day. In the 
 muster-roll of the conscription of the military 
 school in 1832 he is thus described : " Pierre, 
 Jules, Th^ophile Gautier, born at Tarbes the 
 30th of August, 181 1, a painter, living in Paris, 
 No, 8, Place Royale." It was by chance, owing 
 to an administrative post held by his father 
 there, that he happened to be born on the 
 banks of the Adour, in the native place of that 
 Bar^re, who, after being the " Anacreon of the 
 guillotine," became one of Napoleon the First's 
 secret correspondents. He only lived there three 
 years, and was brought to Paris towards 18 14, 
 where he suffered from home-sickness, an account 
 of which he gives in some autobiographic notes 
 that serve me as a guide in speaking of his 
 •childhood.2 
 
 ' On August 13, 1890, a bust of Theophile Gautier was 
 unveiled at Tarbes. 
 
 ° This autobiography was written in 1867, and forms a number 
 of the Sommitis contemporaines, a publication started by M. 
 Auguste Marc. 
 
Youth. 9 
 
 " Although I have passed a whole life in 
 Paris," he says, " I have always remained a 
 southerner at heart." Nothing could be truer. 
 Born at the foot of the Pyrenees on the frontier 
 of Spain, descendant of a family originally from 
 County Venaissin, son and grandson of subjects 
 of the Pope "in Avignon," there was always some- 
 thing exotic about him. Loving France, as he did 
 passionately, he yet seemed out of his element 
 there. There was nothing, even to his olive com- 
 plexion without a tinge of colour in it, that did 
 not look foreign, as though belonging to some 
 Abencerage who had strayed into our civiliza- 
 tion. His very appearance seemed to protest 
 against the environment in which he was forced 
 to live. Seeing him in his youth as well as in 
 his ripe age, one felt how he was drawn towards 
 the brightness and carelessness of the East. He 
 found our sky dull, and our climate detestable, 
 and he shivered at the least breath of wind. 
 Invocations to warmth and the sun are frequent 
 in his works. Under our often foggy sky, in 
 the cold semi-obscurity of our winter days, he 
 suffered from home-sickness, a longing for the 
 warmth and brightness of the south. 
 
 He never felt what Chateaubriand calls " the 
 delightful melancholy of the recollections of our 
 childhood," for the first years of his life were not 
 at all happy. He mourned for his native place 
 
lo Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 with a persistence and an intensity rare at that 
 age when impressions generally have but a 
 passing hold. He relates that, having heard 
 some soldiers speak in the Gascon patois, which 
 was the first language he had learnt to babble, 
 he wished to follow them, so that he might 
 accompany them on their way to the town 
 where he was born, the thought of which always 
 moved him. " The remembrance of the outlines 
 of the blue mountains that one saw at the end 
 of every little street, and of the streams which, 
 flowing through green banks, intersected the 
 town in all directions, has never left me, and 
 has often filled me with emotion in my dreamy 
 hours." He was fifty-six when he wrote the 
 lines I have just quoted. 
 
 His little brain, at once contemplative and 
 eager to learn, was beginning to expand when 
 they sent him away from the paternal home to 
 school. It was a grave mistake ; a child who 
 had suffered so keenly at being removed from 
 his first cradle could not bear the exile from the 
 hearth where the family took care of him, spoilt 
 him, and had nothing but indulgence for his 
 fancies. Theophile Gautier thought he was 
 eight years old when the doors of the university 
 barracks closed upon him ; on this point his 
 memory is at fault ; he was in his twelfth year, 
 as shown by a receipt of the steward of the 
 
Youth. 1 1 
 
 Louis-le-Grand college for the quarter of the 
 first term, 1822. The poor schoolboy did not 
 long remain a prisoner, long enough however, 
 to have received an impression which was never 
 effaced. He hated the discipline so fatal to the 
 gaiety of childhood, the regularity, tedious be- 
 cause monotonous, the life in common odious to 
 delicate natures, the comradeship without affec- 
 tion, the coarseness of the under-masters, the 
 bare playgrounds, the long corridors, the dor- 
 mitories, in which the beds were too numerous, 
 the refectories, the very smell from which stilled 
 hunger, the absurd punishments, the closed 
 doors, and the general look of the place, more 
 like a prison than an abode of learning. Small, 
 puny, sickly in health, a dreamer, with no taste 
 for noisy games, frightened, hopeless, he lan- 
 guished in that heavy atmosphere where he 
 found no food for his instincts, his mind, or his 
 heart. They taught him, it is true, that Cormi 
 is undeclinable, and that Tonitru makes Toni- 
 truuin in the genitive, but that was small com- 
 pensation for the sufferings he endured, and 
 about which he kept silence with the natural 
 timidity he could never completely throw off. 
 
 His father, thank Heaven, was a man of in- 
 telligence, who had not, like so many others, 
 handed him over to the boarding-school of a 
 college to save himself trouble. The child was 
 
12 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 released from his gaol and taken home, and it 
 was high time : silent, enfeebled, indifferent to 
 everything, he was fading away, depressed under 
 the moral regimen, by aid of which — I ask par- 
 don of the University — more characters have 
 been deteriorated than were ever developedt 
 Forty-five years after having abandoned the 
 blue stockings, pensioner's coat, and white cot- 
 ton cravat, which then constituted the school- 
 boy's uniform, Thiophile Gautier wrote : — 
 
 " I was seized with an unparalleled despair which 
 nothing could dispel. The brutality and turbulence 
 of my small fellow galley-slaves filled me with horror. 
 I was dying of cold, weariness, and isolation between 
 those great gloomy walls, where under pretext of 
 breaking me in to school life a cur of an usher had 
 ■constituted himself my tormentor. I conceived for 
 him a hatred which is not yet extinguished. ... All 
 the provisions brought to me by my mother were left 
 to become a mouldy heap in my pockets. As for the 
 food from the refectory, my stomach could not stand 
 it. I was like a caged swallow there, that refuses to 
 eat and dies. They were very contented with my 
 work however, and I promised to be a brilliant pupil 
 if I lived." 
 
 He did live, thank God, and, unlike so many 
 scholars held up as examples to their school- 
 fellows, he did not content himself with having 
 been a brilliant pupil. 
 
Youth. 1 3 
 
 He then became a day scholar at the Charle- 
 magne College, that is to say, he took part in 
 the classes for two hours in the morning and 
 two in the afternoon ; the rest of the time he 
 was free, and shared the home life indispensable 
 to every child, doing his school work, learning 
 his lessons, and preparing his translations and 
 exercises under the direction of his father, who 
 was a good classical scholar. Theophile Gautier 
 profited by this, and profited so well that in 1 860, 
 at my house, I saw him translate a fragment of 
 Tacitus at first sight, accompanied with a com- 
 mentary that would have filled with envy a 
 master of the Latin tongue and a history pro- 
 fessor rolled into one. In the paternal home he 
 regained not only the affection and liberty of 
 which he was in need, and the lessons of a 
 master understanding and developing the talents 
 of his pupil — a rare thing — but he found books 
 — history, poetry, novels, accounts of travels and 
 adventures — which he already loved passionately. 
 He tells us that by an effort of will and from 
 pride he learnt how to read at the age of five. 
 The first book which broke for him the myste- 
 rious seal of libraries, was Lydie de Gersin, then 
 he read Robinson Crusoe, over which he nearly 
 went mad, and, in his own words, " later Paul et 
 Virginie threw me into an unequalled intoxica- 
 tion, which, when I was grown up, neither 
 
14 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Shakespeare, Goethe, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, 
 Chateaubriand, Lamartine, nor even Victor Hugo, 
 whom every youth adored at that time, afforded 
 me." Having remarked at what a precocious 
 age he made himself master of the art of read- 
 ing, he adds : " And since that time I can say, 
 like Apelles, ' Nulla dies sine lined' " That is 
 absolutely true for I do not believe that there 
 ever existed a more indefatigable reader than 
 Gautier. 
 
 Everything served as food for this master 
 craving, which seemed sometimes almost to de- 
 generate into a mania ; nothing discouraged 
 him, and one might have said that his short- 
 sighted eyes penetrated to the very heart of 
 phrases, to discover in them riches which he 
 alone knew how to recognise. I have seen him 
 nearly bent double with excitement over the 
 Sanscrit text of Sakountala, endeavouring to 
 decipher, to guess at the signification of the 
 signs of a language unknown to him. He found 
 pleasure in the most indifferent novels, as he did 
 in books of the highest philosophical conceptions, 
 and in works of pure science. He was devoured 
 with the desire to learn, and said : " No con- 
 ception is so poor, no twaddle so detestable that 
 it cannot teach us something by which we may 
 profit." He read dictionaries, grammars, pro- 
 spectuses, cookery books, and almanacs ; he 
 
YotUh. 1 5 
 
 estimated Mathieu Laensberg as " a primitive " 
 remarkable for his simplicity, and thought 
 Careme had proved that a " master cook " can 
 possess grandeur of soul, because, he wrote : 
 " It was only in studying Vitruvius that I 
 understood the glory of my art.'' That was 
 his favourite joke for some time. To those 
 who discussed painting, sculpture, or poetry, he 
 would reply : " You must study Vitruvius if you 
 would understand the glory of your art." Most 
 of his interlocutors remained open-mouthed, for 
 few among them had read the works of him who 
 called himself " The pupil and admirer of the 
 illustrious La Guipi^re." 
 
 This thirst for knowledge which nothing ever 
 quenched had enviable consequences for Thdo- 
 phile Gautier. He was gifted with an extra- 
 ordinary memory — whatever he had heard or 
 seen remained engraved upon his mind ; when 
 a book came into his hands, he would open it 
 almost mechanically, and never put it down 
 until he had read it to the last page. One 
 would think that a medley so miscellaneous 
 and unmethodical would produce a certain con- 
 fusion in his mind ; not at all. He had one of 
 the most methodical minds I have ever met 
 everything in it became classified by a sort of 
 natural process, a kind of instinctive delibera- 
 tion, which sometimes contrasted with the 
 
1 6 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 licence of his conversational style ; it was a 
 governing faculty that in the course of his 
 forced literary work was of inestimable service 
 to him. All the ideas he acquired were arranged 
 and labelled in his memory like well catalogued 
 books in a library. He knew where to find the 
 information he required, the precise document 
 which he wished to verify, the rare word he 
 wished to employ, he only needed to consult 
 himself How many times his friends, doubtful 
 upon some point of history, language, geography, 
 anatomy, or art, have applied to him and received 
 immediate satisfaction ! They used to say then, 
 " We have only got to turn over the leaves of 
 Th^o." 
 
 I will cite an example of his memory. The 
 day on which the two first volumes of la Legende 
 des siecles were published, I dined in his company 
 at the house of another friend ; there were several 
 literary men amongst us, all allied more or less 
 closely to the tribe of romanticists, admirers of 
 Victor Hugo, and counting upon finding a feast 
 of good things in his new work. The only one 
 among us who knew the whole of it was Gautier ; 
 he had received the two volumes that very morn- 
 ing, and had read them through in the course of 
 the day. Need I say what was the subject of 
 the conversation ? We talked only of Hugo's 
 talent, which seemed to transfigure and give an 
 
Youth. 1 7 
 
 ever increasing beauty of form to his poetry, 
 making it more wonderful and full of strength, 
 as though seizing upon facts of history less real 
 than legendary, he had soared into a fairy-land 
 where his wings had never before carried him. 
 Gautier said to us : " Let us prove what we ad- 
 vance — I will recite les Lions to you." And in 
 his clear voice, without inflection, a monochord 
 so to speak, his eyes gazing steadfastly as though 
 he were reading from afar a book visible to him- 
 self alone, he recited the 158 verses of the piece, 
 not repeating himself once, never hesitating, and 
 not mistaking a single syllable. We were as- 
 tonished, and said to him : " You have learnt 
 that by heart, then ? " to which he replied, " No, 
 I read it this morning while I was breakfasting." 
 This memory, cleverly cultivated by the direc- 
 tion which his father gave to his studies, a sort 
 of passive diligence which made him attentive 
 to his school classes, and a certain amount of 
 vanity, made of Th^ophile Gautier a remarkable 
 pupil. Did he ever have his name inscribed on 
 the prize-list? Was he embraced and crowned 
 by his head-master to the sound of music, on 
 the solemn platform for the distribution of 
 prizes ? Of that I know nothing, he was most 
 discreet about this period of his existence, and 
 did not care to talk about it, for he only re- 
 tained disagreeable recollections of it ; when- 
 3 
 
1 8 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 ever the conversation turned upon his school- 
 days he hastened to change it. He has written : 
 " I would not live those years over again." If 
 he won success, that academic success which 
 brings so much hope to the paternal heart, and 
 which never foretells anything of the future, he 
 accepted it with indifference, and was none the 
 prouder. I doubt even if he ever quite finished 
 his humanities, and I believe he disdained to 
 take his B.A., which would have seemed but 
 a useless document to him ; a certificate of 
 studies, nothing more ; he did not care for it, 
 and was his own certificate, for he had already 
 acquired many more precious ideas than his 
 professors had taught him. While still a mere 
 schoolboy he had read the old French poets, 
 much neglected at that time when Malherbe 
 and Boileau reigned supreme, and he had suffi- 
 ciently studied Rabelais to be able to recite 
 whole chapters of him without making a 
 mistake. His curiosity, that of an intelligent 
 child and future great writer, had done him 
 better service than the pedantic lessons of the 
 University. 
 
 Thiophile Gautier was no longer the puny 
 child with an olive complexion whom confine- 
 ment had nearly killed, he was a strong, well- 
 developed young man, whose taste for physical 
 exercises had wonderfully increased his strength. 
 
Youth. 1 9 
 
 He excelled in swimming, boxing, and riding, 
 at single-stick, and even at the savate, it was 
 one of his small vanities, and he never refused 
 a round. One day, I do not remember in 
 which public garden, he dealt a blow with his 
 fist at the " Turk's head," which marked 
 520 lbs. on the dynometer. I have often 
 heard him boast of it and say : " It is the 
 action of my life of which I am most proud." 
 Up to the age at which one generally no longer 
 attempts the role oi Hercules, it did not dis- 
 please him to demonstrate that his muscular 
 power, always considerable, had not been 
 lessened by years. If his calm, and above 
 all benevolent character had not made him 
 pacific he would have been a formidable 
 person, but no man was less quarrelsome than 
 he, all violent discussion seemed to him an 
 outrage to human dignity, for he philosophi- 
 cally looked upon composure as a virtue. 
 
 It was by chance that Thdophile Gautier 
 devoted himself to letters, or to speak more 
 exactly, that literature took possession of him. 
 He was a born artist, of that there is no doubt 
 an artist in form and line and colour. What- 
 ever power he might have exerted over himself, 
 or had been exerted over him by others, he 
 would never have succeeded in repudiating the 
 gifts which nature had lavished upon him, 
 
20 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 would never have been able to put a con- 
 straint upon himself, or suppress the great 
 abilities which spoke within him. Art claimed 
 him for her own. In any official or commercial 
 career he would have died of misery, paralysed, 
 lost in the labyrinth of small details. Painting 
 attracted him ; it was like a first love to him, 
 the memory of which never grew cold ; during 
 his whole life he was pre-occupied with it, and 
 often in his hours of discouragerilent regretted 
 that he had not obeyed his first impulse. The 
 poet of the Com^die de la Mart, the £maux et 
 Cam^es, the writer of Tra-los-Montes, Italia, 
 Fortunio, and la Morte amoureuse, works, the 
 names of which are in every one's memory, 
 began life as an art student. He entered 
 Rioult's studio near the Charlemagne College, 
 which enabled him to go and paint anatomical 
 studies from the life after attending a lecture 
 on the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz, or 
 the plastic medium of Cudworth. 
 
 The mysterious tremour which precedes a 
 storm was already agitating the young heads 
 of that day ; the tempest of romanticism was 
 soon to blow from all points of the horizon ; 
 the arts, drowsing under a worn out tradition, 
 slept in the faith of a past which had no longer 
 any meaning, but they were soon to be waked 
 up without consideration or even common 
 
Youth. 2 1 
 
 courtesy. A spirit of rebellion was rife in the 
 studios, where the last disciples of the fossilized 
 school of David exercised but an indifferent 
 influence. While mixing their van dyck 
 browns and burnt siennas, they discussed 
 literature. Racine was not yet looked upon 
 as a "scamp," la Chute des feuilles by 
 Millevoye, and the Ossianic performances of 
 Baour-Lormian were forgotten, and were re- 
 placed, to the great joy of future knights of 
 the palette, by la Chasse du Burgrave : — 
 
 " Daigne prot^ger notre chasse, 
 Chasse 
 De monseigneur Saint-Godefroy 
 Froid ! " ' 
 
 or by le Pas d'armes du roi yean : — 
 
 " y&, qu'on sella, 
 Ecuyer, 
 Men fidfele 
 Destrier ! " == 
 
 " Deign to protect our sport 
 O Shrine 
 From Monseigneur Saint-Godefroy 
 Cold ! " 
 
 = " Let them saddle, 
 Equerry, 
 My ifaithful 
 Charger ! " 
 
22 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 It was not that they recited these verses, they 
 howled them. Some enthusiasts had adapted 
 an air to them, and sang them in chorus, which 
 seemed a sacrilege. A new gospel had been 
 given to the world of artists and writers ; the 
 preface to Cromwell had started a revolutionary 
 theory which they dreamed of putting into 
 practice. The time was not far distant when 
 one was proclaimed " a hypocrite and a poor 
 creature," if one did not shout with horror at, 
 the mere mention of the Institute. It was when 
 he was mixing in all this noisy, generous, and 
 audacious society that the literary vocation 
 called to Thdophile Gautier, " Leave there thy 
 brushes and follow me." His destiny, till then 
 ambiguous, on a sudden became clear, the 
 following incident threw a light upon it. At 
 the Charlemagne College Gautier formed a 
 friendship, which nothing ever disturbed, with 
 Gdrard Labrunie who became Gdrard de 
 Nerval. At that period — that is to say, at 
 the beginning of the year 1830 — Gerard, 
 almost unknown to the mass of the public, was 
 celebrated among a group of young men whom 
 Art had beguiled. He was illustrious among 
 his fellow-students, for at seventeen, while still 
 a pupil in rhetoric, he had published a volume of 
 poems entitled : ^Ugies nationales which did 
 not pass without notice. At eighteen he 
 
Youth, 23 
 
 brought out his translation of Faust, about 
 which Goethe wrote to him : " I have never 
 understood myself so well as in reading you/' 
 It was enough to turn a young head, but Gerard 
 was already endowed with that modesty which 
 sometimes verged on humility. His was a 
 charming nature, a little eccentric in spite of his 
 extreme gentleness. They promised him all 
 the laurels that renown throws at the feet of 
 great poets, he could only march to glory they 
 thought, his path must pass under triumphal 
 arches, and lead him to immortality. How it 
 came to lead him into one of the most poverty- 
 stricken streets of Paris, where he died an ill- 
 fated death, I have told elsewhere, and am not 
 going to repeat here.^ It was Gerard who, 
 fortunately, opened to Th^ophile Gautier the 
 doors of the temple — many said the cavern — 
 where the youthful statue of romanticism was 
 enthroned. 
 
 The reading committee of the Com^die 
 Frangaise had received a drama in verse from 
 Victor Hugo, Hernani ou I'honneur castillan. 
 The old classical school, rivetted to the three 
 unities, had shuddered to their very marrow at 
 it. In the night plaintive voices had been 
 heard proceeding from the urns in which the 
 
 • " Souvenirs litteraires," vol. ii. chap. XX ; " Les Illumines,'' 
 Paris, Hachette, 2 vols. 8vo., 1883. 
 
24 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 ashes of Marmontel and Campistron reposed, 
 but in spite of these fatal omens, in spite of the 
 predictions of the Calchas of tragedy, the piece 
 was put into rehearsal. A thousand extravagant 
 things were related of it ; it was said to be an 
 orgie of incoherent verses, and it was added 
 that Mile. Mars — the umpire of taste — was ill 
 from annoyance, that she wished to give up her 
 part, for she could not consent to profane her 
 talent with the enormities imposed upon her by 
 the author. The truth is it was quite the reverse 
 of this ; it was Victor Hugo who, justly in- 
 censed by the pretentions of the actress, told 
 her that he would replace her with another in- 
 terpreter if she again had the bad taste to 
 modify the expressions that did not meet with 
 her approval. Long before the day of the first 
 representation it was felt that a storm of opposi- 
 tion was brewing ; no trouble was taken to dis- 
 guise hostile intentions, and it was known with- 
 out any doubt that the cabal had decided to 
 give battle. On both sides they prepared for 
 the struggle ; one party began to whet the 
 sword of Orestes, the other to furbish up its 
 good Toledo blade. The daughters of Jupiter 
 and Mnemosyne were invoked ; they swore by 
 Saint John of Compostelle, and even by the 
 Virgin. Everything promised that the contest 
 would be a warm one ; simple spectators rubbed 
 
Youth. 25 
 
 their hands and hummed the finale to Comte 
 Ory : — 
 
 " J'entends d'ici le bruit des armes, 
 Et le clairon vient de retentir." ^ 
 
 In the romanticist camp they did not feel very 
 reassured, they suspected some stratagem, and 
 above all, feared a defection in the claque, ex- 
 posed as it was to disloyal manoeuvres and to 
 promises that had a metallic ring about them. 
 The adversaries of the young school counted in 
 this respect on the force of habit. Would not 
 these brave knights of the chandelier, accus- 
 tomed for so long to the pure doctrines of the 
 revered art, to the monotonous purr of tragic 
 verse, the invariable caesura, the hemistiches all 
 cast in the same mould, to the helmet, the sword, 
 the tunic and buskin, turn rebels in listening to 
 these verses stamped with a new effigy, these 
 astounding gymnastics of style, and words pro- 
 scribed by the " canons." And, too, in seeing 
 the plumed caps, the velvet doublets, shell-hilted 
 swords, embossed daggers, and yellow leather 
 boots, the whole paraphernalia, in a word, of 
 what was at that time called local colour, and 
 which was not long in degenerating into bric-a- 
 
 ' " I hear afar the clash of arms, 
 And the bugle sounds an alarm." 
 
26 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 brae. Well, then there was no depending upon, 
 the claque, upon those noisy functionaries whose 
 duty it is in all and every case to uphold the 
 plays of which the birth is difficult. It was- 
 I'esolved to do without the help — as being too. 
 uncertain — of these midwives, licensed by Thalia, 
 and Melpomene, for fear of a miscarriage, or 
 perhaps even an infanticide. But who was tO' 
 replace them .' Where find a group of young 
 men, enthusiasts, valiant even to imprudence,, 
 scorning all obstacles, tired of the past, having 
 faith in the future, understanding that their 
 entire fortunes might depend upon victory, and 
 endowed with good lungs and strong fists ? In 
 the studios. Painters and sculptors eagerly 
 obeyed the call ; the architects were languid 
 and tardy, they preferred the newly constructed 
 colonnade of the Bourse to the doorway of 
 Notre Dame. It was expedient to make use 
 of them, however, but they were mingled 
 amongst the other artists who were charged to 
 keep guard over them and guide them in the 
 right way, even with kicks if necessary. 
 
 Carefully chosen crimps were despatched tO' 
 the studios. As visitors of the great good 
 cousins, that is to say, the Carbonari, they had 
 to elect the chiefs of the squads, to whom they 
 would confide not the hazel wand which gave 
 access to the secret sales, but the red ticket 
 
Youth. 27 
 
 stamped with the Spanish word hierro (iron), 
 which would open to them the doors of the 
 Comddie Frangaise on the evening of the first 
 representation, the first battle of Hernani. 
 Gdrard de Nerval was one of the recruiting 
 sergeants charged with forming the sacred 
 battalion which was to conquer 6r die. At 
 Rioulfs studio he gave Th^ophile Gautier six 
 entrance tickets. 
 
 " You will answer for your men ? " 
 
 " I will answer for them by the skull out of 
 which Lord Byron drank at Newstead Abbey ! " 
 
 Then, turning to his comrades of the palette, 
 Gautier said : " Am I not right, boys ? " To 
 which, with one voice, they shouted, " Death to 
 the Fogies!"! 
 
 Proud of the confidential mission entrusted to 
 him, shirking none of the responsibility, and 
 desirous of giving to his appearance a solemnity 
 worthy of the high functions which had devolved 
 upon him, Theophile Gautier made himself a 
 waistcoat — a doublet — of crimson, " which he 
 had taken pleasure in composing himself." This 
 red waistcoat, which was in point of fact bright 
 pink, inaugurated to the sound of the horn in 
 
 ' I had this anecdote from Pradier, who related it to Victor 
 Hugo in my presence in the month of July, 1851. Theophile 
 Gautier was.present, and did not contradict it, contenting him- 
 self with sapng, "Ah ! those were good times." 
 
28 Th^opkile Gautier. 
 
 Hernani, was talked of in those days. They 
 talked much of it, they talked long, they talk 
 still. I said to Thdo one day, "You became 
 celebrated at a very early age ? " To which he 
 replied with that apparent indifference which at 
 times gave so much point to his jokes, " Yes, 
 very young, on account of my waistcoat." 
 
 Of this first representation of the first romantic 
 drama in verse,' at which Gautier paraded, his 
 long hair hanging to his shoulders, his chest 
 covered with gorgeous satin, I shall say nothing, 
 for he has told it all himself down to the smallest 
 details. It was, in short, a battle at which 
 neither insults nor blows were spared. The 
 inexact hearing of a word produced such a dis- 
 turbance that the curtain had to be lowered 
 and the combatants turned out. When Hernani 
 says to Ruy Gomez, who comes to deliver up 
 Dona Sol to the King Don Carlos : 
 
 Vieillard stupide ! il I'aime.'^ 
 
 ' Hernani (February 25, 1830) was the first romantic drama 
 in verse ; a year before (February 10, 1S29) Alexandre Dumas 
 had produced the first romantic drama in prose, Henri III. et sa 
 (our, which was brought out at the Com^die Fran^aise under 
 the singular title of a tragedy in five acts. During the course of 
 1829 Henri III. was played forty-six times, and during 1830 
 Hernani was played thirty-nine times. That was a considerable 
 success for those days, when no railways existed to bring to 
 Paris, as they do now, the mass of provincials and foreigners 
 who every night renew the audiences in our theatres. 
 
 ' Foolish greybeard ! he loves her. 
 
Youth. 29 
 
 Some of the spectators, instead of "vieillard 
 stupide ! " heard " vieil as de pique ! " (old ace of 
 spades !) The classicists, filled with indignation, 
 uttered cries of horror ; the romanticists roused 
 to admiration, and carried away by the novelty 
 of the expression, stamped their feet and shouted 
 with joy. The tumult was slow to calm down, 
 and I much doubt if anything at all was heard 
 of the third act. 
 
 This representation which, in spite of the Odes 
 et Ballades, Cromwell and its preface, les 
 Orientates, and te Dernier jour dun condamn^, 
 marks the real beginning of the romanticist 
 revolution, left an ineffaceable impression on 
 Thdophile Gautier's heart. It was the one 
 episode in his life to which from predilection 
 he liked to return, and in his works the allusions 
 to it are frequent. He liked to tell of the long 
 wait — a wait which lasted eight hours — in the 
 dark theatre, of their emotion, of the struggle in 
 which each of the rival camps claimed the 
 victory, of the discussion occasionally degene- 
 rating into violence that was continued after 
 the play, of the passion with which they were 
 animated, and the exasperation that carried both 
 parties out of all bounds, and produced quite 
 unexpectedly comic effects. A deputation of 
 classical authors, famous then, forgotten to-day, 
 presented themselves before the king, and begged 
 
30 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 him to use his royal authority to forbid the 
 representation of such a monstrosity. One 
 might have thought one was listening to the 
 admonitions of Maitre Pancrace in the Mariage 
 ford : " Everything in these days is turned up- 
 side down, and the world become generally 
 corrupt. Frightful licence reigns everywhere, 
 and the magistrates appointed to keep order in 
 this state ought to feel ready to die of shame for 
 suffering so intolerable a scandal." Charles X. 
 listened with his customary politeness to the 
 lamentations of these good folk, and replied to 
 them, not without wit, " In such a case I have 
 no other right except that of my place in the 
 audience." 
 
 I have, besides, heard it said by a former very 
 high functionary of the Restoration that there 
 was no great anger felt at the Tuileries over 
 the tumult roused by the new piece, as it diverted 
 public opinion from other already very disquiet- 
 ing matters. Th^ophile Gautier did not trouble 
 himself much about public opinion, he belonged 
 to Hernani, to Victor Hugo, he had yielded to 
 an irresistible impulse, given himself up entirely, 
 without thought of return, and he never drew 
 back, to his last hour he remained devoted to 
 the god of his youth. When death in such cruel 
 haste plucked the pen from his hand he left an 
 unfinished article entitled Hernani. The last 
 
Youth. 3 1 
 
 lines of it are devoted to Mme. de Girardin : 
 "' On that evening, that ever memorable evening, 
 she applauded the shocking beauties, the revolt- 
 ing strokes of genius, as though she had been 
 •one of us, who had entered at two o'clock with 
 the red ticket." . . . The phrase is broken off 
 by the Great Reaper, whose own work nothing 
 ever interrupts. 
 
 That " ever memorable evening " is an im- 
 portant epoch in Gautier's life ; it is an initial 
 stage whence he set out to walk along the 
 tedious road of labour which had no resting- 
 place, and upon which he sank down prema- 
 turely, harassed with fatigue and disillusioned, 
 as poor in the end as at the beginning. He had 
 no suspicion of the unpromising fate that awaited 
 him, and no hope was forbidden to him then. 
 How often in talking to me of that past time, 
 about which I liked to question him, has he 
 quoted the verse : — 
 
 " J'^tais g&nt alors at haul de cent couddes." ' 
 
 And he would add with a melancholy that 
 spoke of many abortive dreams, " All that I can 
 say to-day is that the poor old fellow still lives." 
 After that evening of the 25th of February, 1830, 
 understanding that we cannot serve two divinities 
 
 ' "I was a giant in those days a hundred cubits tall." 
 
32 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 at the same time, he left the Rioult studio, and 
 took up the pen of the poet in place of the 
 painter's brush. He was then nineteen, troubled 
 himself little about what the world might say, 
 and made verses, for he had it at heart to take 
 rank in the romanticist army, to be one of the 
 banner-bearers of the general-in-chief Ill-luck 
 sent him a forewarning which passed unnoticed. 
 His first book — a thinly bound volume, stitched 
 in pink, and entitled Poesies — was published on 
 the 28th of July, 1830, which portended — every 
 revolution will bring you harm — a fact he had to 
 acknowledge later, in 1848 and in 1870. Like 
 the Capets and the Valois, the Bourbons saw 
 their dynasty become extinct on the throne, by 
 the successive reign of three brothers. The 
 overthrow of France produced them, the July 
 revolution swept them away ; the elder branch 
 is dried up for ever, and will never flower again. 
 Those days of strife, so imprudently provoked, 
 not only without means of attack, but even with- 
 out means of defence, exercised a considerable 
 influence on the arts of the period. The tempest 
 of excitement that was raging set free the minds 
 of the day, helped to break down routine, and 
 brutally smashed in the door which romanticism, 
 in spite of those heated evenings of Hernani, had 
 only set ajar. A few lovers of the classic muse, 
 guided by leaders from whom youth turned 
 
Youth. 35 
 
 away, Brifaut, Arnault, Parseval de Grand- 
 maison, Baour-Lormian, De Jouy, and Viennet, 
 remained sturdily at their post, but they stopped 
 up their ears and closed their eyes, so as not to 
 hear or read, understanding nothing of the 
 strivings of the writers and artists, thinking all 
 was lost because new forms were being sought 
 after, different from those they admired. They 
 saw nothing in this great movement of intel- 
 lectual renovation but an invasion of barbarians, 
 by whom the whole civilisation was to be 
 crushed. The hour was propitious for Theophile 
 Gautier to cast in his lot with the Romantic 
 School. One would have said that the July 
 revolution had bathed the country in the fountain 
 of youth ; all the world was young at that time, 
 or imagined that it was ; nevertheless it was the 
 fashion to be fatal and accursed, and that they 
 were in all sincerity, and with a quiet conscience,, 
 and a conviction which did not, however, prevent 
 them from amusing themselves. 
 
 It was the hour of young France ; Thdophile 
 Gautier ridiculed them thoroughly, for in spite 
 of the sincerity of his Romanticism he was never 
 one of those who miss the ridiculous side of 
 things. I was quite a child then, but I remember 
 in passing along the Boulevards, in the garden 
 of the Tuileries, which was at that time the 
 favourite promenade of the Parisians, to have 
 4 
 
34 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 seen some young men with long hair and wear- 
 ing beards — quite contrary to the fashion of the 
 day — with pointed hats, in tight frock coats with 
 large lappels, their feet hidden beneath ele- 
 phantine trousers. I looked at them with sur- 
 prise and some fear, and asked, " Who are those 
 people ? " to which came the reply, with a shrug 
 of the shoulders, " Those are madmen." Thdo 
 often said to me, " It was our dream to turn the 
 world upside down." Poor world, it still turns 
 upon the same axis, and since those far-off days 
 it has seen many strange things ! 
 
 In the years which followed the July days life 
 amongst the youth of the time was full of extra- 
 ordinary violence ; it expanded all at once after 
 the compression under which it had suffered 
 during the Restoration. This effervescence 
 lasted some time. The sudden invasion of 
 cholera in 1832 and the scare caused by it 
 hardly served to calm it; in order to put it 
 down and quell it almost completely it needed 
 the Fieschi outrage, the horror that he inspired, 
 and the repressive laws which Thiers caused to 
 be passed in the month of September, 1835. 
 Until then they did not know how to control 
 themselves ; those were the gay days of the 
 Shrove Tuesday cavalcades, the balls at the 
 Vari^tds, and visits to suburban drinking 
 gardens ; they outrivalled each other in high 
 
Youth. 35 
 
 spirits, in vvildness, and, let us add, in folly. " It 
 was the thing," said Gautier, "to be violent, 
 high-spirited, mediaeval, and to beat the watch." I 
 remember an incident that proves what a degree 
 of licence they had reached in inventing follies 
 that were to "do for the bourgeois." At a masked 
 ball at the Vari^tes Theatre,d'Alton-Shfe — a peer 
 of France — very young, it is true, and Labattue, 
 who was always, and is still, confounded with 
 Lord Seymour, took with them a woman enve- 
 loped in a black domino. While taking part in a 
 quadrille, in which the dancers were chosen from 
 among the most illustrious supporters of Young 
 France, she all at once threw off her covering, 
 and appeared in the costume of Mother Eve 
 before the intervention of the fig-leaf The 
 creature was a success, and they cheered her. 
 The exhibition seeming excessive to the police 
 and the municipal guard they tried to arrest 
 the damsel, whose dancing was in itself an 
 outrage to public morality ; but they did not 
 succeed. Surrounded and defended by a band 
 of young men, who shouted, " Praise to the 
 ladies ! " the officers were obliged to recede 
 before the blows and kicks of the learned in 
 boxing and the savate. During the hubbub the 
 dancer was covered up in her domino again, was 
 able to slip away and lose herself in the crowd, 
 and the law was rendered powerless. I knew 
 
36 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 the names of most of these protectors of the 
 weaker sex, but have half forgotten them now. 
 Besides those I have mentioned I can only 
 remember with certainty that of the painter 
 Jadin, " who alone was worth a whole company 
 of Scotch archers." Most of these unbridled 
 desperadoes have become personages now, and 
 have got on in life. The riotousness of twenty 
 implies nothing unfavourable for the future. 
 Age undertakes the responsibility of everything, 
 even too often to the effacing from our memories 
 former peccadilloes. Mme. de Lafayette wrote 
 to Manage : " It costs dear to become reason- 
 able, it costs us our youth." Th^ophile Gautier 
 was young — he was very young, and deserves to 
 be praised for it. 
 
 " The habit of chastity hardens the heart," said 
 Saint Clement of Alexandria. Thdophile Gau- 
 tier had not at all a hard heart, and was not 
 wanting in eclecticism. In his "bantering" 
 nove\, Jeune-France, written when he was twenty- 
 two, there is a chapter called Celle-ci et Celle-lUy 
 which might really be a fragment of confession. 
 " Keep this," he says, " and shut it up in one of 
 the drawers of your judgment for use on occa- 
 sion, ' every woman is as good as another pro- 
 vided she is as pretty.'" That sounds like a 
 profession of faith. We may conclude from it 
 that love of form predominated in him, and that 
 
Youth. 3 7 
 
 the mingling of souls so much in fashion in the 
 romances of the day seemed to him but of 
 secondary importance. Judging by the large 
 number of letters addressed to him, and which 
 I have turned over, he would appear to have 
 little resembled that Abb6 Dangeau of the 
 French Academy, who used to return to the 
 ladies whom he loved their epistles if the 
 spelling was defective, and break with them 
 altogether at the third show of want of respect 
 for French grammar. Some excuse may be 
 made for these correspondents of Gautier's, for 
 he always showed a certain tendency to choose 
 them from among foreigners. 
 
 Boisterous pleasures such as belonged to the 
 time, and fleeting love-affairs, were nothing but 
 amusements without bad consequences, inter- 
 ludes in the intellectual life which followed its 
 course, and to which Gautier brought the ency- 
 clopaedic curiosity with which he was endowed. 
 Artists and painters mixed together completed 
 each other, and plastic art and thought were 
 strengthened one by the other. There was no 
 question in art, philosophy, history, and poetry 
 which was not discussed in the Cenacle, that is 
 to say, in the group of young men, partisans of 
 the new ideas, whose hardihood broke down the 
 accepted rules to which they refused to submit. 
 Their discussions were carried on at random, 
 
38 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 o 
 
 set going by a chance word spoken, an unex- 
 pected controversy started. I said to Th^o, 
 " with what did they occupy themselves in the 
 Cenacle ? " and he replied, " with everything, 
 but I don't very well know what they said, 
 because they all spoke at once." The violence 
 of their language was unparalleled, and highly 
 seasoned stories never seemed out of place ; was 
 not Rabelais their excuse and example ? They 
 dreamed of setting fire to the Institute, and of 
 hanging a few of the tragic poets, who, for the 
 most part, only asked to be allowed to die in 
 peace. Age was held up to ridicule in the 
 sittings of these future captains of literature, 
 who seemed to forget that they themselves 
 would grow old, and that decay is one for 
 Classicism and Romanticism. Youth runs to 
 extremes, which is natural, for its whole being 
 is in a state of effervescence, and stirred by a 
 thousand confused aspirations ; it is intolerant 
 because it is without experience, and because 
 it is wanting in material for comparison ; it is 
 without balance because it has not yet come in 
 contact with the difficulties of life ; it does not 
 believe in time and in the modifications brought 
 with it — insensibly and yet how rapidly — because 
 it has not yet felt its permanent effect. In 
 youth, courage and folly are much the same 
 thing, and we must not disparage it, for it is 
 
Youth. 39 
 
 almost always a promise of power in the years 
 of maturity. 
 
 Are we to conclude from all this that the 
 young men who composed the Cinacle were 
 every one of them to become great? No in- 
 deed ; there were amongst them dreamers, 
 deluded about themselves, barren dupes of 
 the comedy in which they were playing, failures, 
 whose brilliant promise faded quite naturally into 
 obscurity. To more than one might have been 
 applied the words of Rivarol, " It is a terrible 
 advantage, never to have done anything, but we 
 must not abuse it." On the whole, only one 
 amongst them made a name for himself which 
 will never perish, that was Thdophile Gautier. 
 Gdrard de Nerval, by whom he had been out- 
 stripped at the beginning of life, never got 
 beyond a somewhat limited mediocrity, did not 
 make his mark in the crowd, and foundered 
 early. On the other hand, more of them were 
 celebrated in the group, or rather coterie, to 
 which they belonged ; but their reputations did 
 not penetrate much beyond the circle in which 
 they lived. That was the common fate then, it 
 remains the same to-day. 
 
 It would seem that the search after an un- 
 usual pseudonym, or the discovery of an ex- 
 travagant title for a work, was a glorious and 
 enviable action. Jules Wabre — who remembers 
 
40 Thdophile GatUier. 
 
 Tiim ? — almost became illustrious by announcing 
 — nothing more — a book entitled de I'lncom- 
 moditi des commodes. Auguste Maquet, who 
 had not yet had the good fortune to meet 
 Alexandre Dumas, called himself Augustus 
 MacKaet ; Th^ophile Dondey because Philothee 
 O'Neddy. Gautier called to mind this idle non- 
 sense when he wrote les Jeune-France. "For 
 six months Daniel Jovard was in quest of a 
 pseudonym, and by dint of searching and 
 puzzling his brain he found one. The pre- 
 nomen was in us, the name crammed with 
 as many k's, w's and other like romantic 
 consonants as it was possible to get into eight 
 syllables." This mania lasted some time, and if 
 we made a careful investigation we should per- 
 haps find that it has not yet disappeared. 
 
 The great man in the Cdnacle, he for whom 
 was predicted all the glory to come — Ui Mar- 
 £ellus eris ! — was neither Jehan du Seigneur, nor 
 Bouchardy, who was the Shakespeare of the 
 boulevard du Crime, nor Gautier, who was a 
 great poet, it was Pierre — pardon — Petrus Borel. 
 They said without smiling : " Father Hugo had 
 better look to himself, for he will be reduced to 
 powder as soon as Petrus makes his debut ! " 
 Petrus made his d/dui, but with the exception 
 of his friends, no one remarked it. In the 
 Romanticist School they were so impressed by a 
 
Youth. 4 1 
 
 man's exterior, that Petrus Borel owed his future 
 greatness to his dark complexion, black hair, 
 aquiline nose, and spare and nervous body, 
 which made him resemble the type created by 
 Victor Hugo for the character of Hernani. 
 To resemble John of Aragon, Grand Master of 
 Avis, Duke of Segorbia, Marquis of Monroy, 
 and not to be a great man, what do I say, the 
 greatest of men was a heresy, that no member 
 of the C^nacle could conceive. Thirty years 
 after the C^nacle had disappeared, dead, anni- 
 hilated, except in the memory of a few of the 
 faithful, Gautier said to me, raising his hands to 
 heaven : " And to think that I believed in 
 Petrus ! " He was not the only one, and what 
 a discomfiture it was when the Rhapsodies, 
 Champavert, and at last Madame Putiphar 
 appeared. He had been an architect to start 
 with, and had no business to give up the square 
 and Indian ink for the pen and ink of little use 
 to him. His first efforts not having fulfilled the 
 promises which they had never held out, he 
 managed to get a post in Algiers as under- 
 prefect or something of that kind. 
 
 In the Cenacle they despised the School of 
 Fine Arts, pupils and professors were unani- 
 mously looked down upon. To be admitted 
 to the " salon '' was not very estimable, and to 
 obtain the grand prix de Rome was to be 
 
42 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 marked with an indelible stain. The pictures 
 of Paul Delaroche were hardly worthy to appear 
 as fire-screens, and Cortot had never known 
 how to make a man stand upon his feet. In 
 sculpture they extolled Auguste Prdault, who 
 they said " modelled ideas ; " in two words, he 
 was a very good fellow, and very witty, to whom 
 nothing was wanting but the knowledge of his 
 art. In painting Eugene Devdria had revived 
 and eclipsed Paul Veronese, as was proved in 
 those days, though not in ours, by his Naissance 
 de Henri IV. As for Louis Boulanger, who 
 was a particular friend of Victor Hugo's, it 
 would have required more than a Tintoretto or 
 a Titian to prepare his palette. Those were 
 the gods of the new art ; ephemeral gods who 
 had never wetted their lips with the nectar that 
 confers immortality. 
 
 Amongst the neophites, whose idols they 
 were, I must mention Celestin Nanteuil, with 
 whom I associated at that time, when age had 
 already touched him, and who was one of the 
 most charming souls I have ever met. Some- 
 where about 1 830, when the Romanticist conflict 
 was in full force, he was a tall, fair young man, of 
 exquisite gentleness, in spite of the energy of his 
 convictions, dreaming, he too of reviving paint- 
 ing, and so entirely " mediaeval " that he served 
 Theophile Gautier as a type for the character of 
 
Youth. 43 
 
 Elias Wildmanstadius in les Jeime-France. He 
 should have been a painter, he was not one. 
 The " detail one must live " obtruded itself upon 
 him, and he was obliged to disperse — to waste 
 — the talent, which poverty, always at his heels, 
 never allowed him the leisure to concentrate. 
 He would gladly have painted historical pieces, 
 such as the assassination of the Duke of Orleans, 
 near the Barbette house, the murder on the 
 Montereau bridge, the combat of the Thirty, 
 and with delight he would have represented the 
 alley where Valentine falls cursing Marguerite,, 
 and the Cour des Miracles that Pierre Gringoire 
 amused with his awkwardness. Instead of the 
 pictures which he conjured up in his mind, and 
 which would under his brush have acquired a 
 respectable sincerity, he squandered his energies 
 on all kinds of illustrations, done from day to 
 day at the command of his editors, and to 
 provide for his material necessities. 
 
 As soon as he had got together a little money 
 he would sit down at once before his easel, and 
 paint one of his rare pictures, which were ex- 
 hibited at the salon with some success. It was 
 but a false hope however ; as soon as the small 
 saving was exhausted he had to leave the un- 
 finished canvas, upon which, perhaps, many 
 hopes had been built, and take up again the 
 etching needle, the lithographer's pencil, or the 
 
44 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 blacklead pencil of the designer on wood, to 
 make frontispieces, tail-pieces, ornamental letters 
 and vignettes for novels. In this sort of work 
 he wore himself out. 
 
 Towards the end of his life he was appointed 
 director of the school of design at Dijon, which 
 meant assured ease, and he set to work and 
 took up his paint-brush ; but it was too late, and 
 he perceived that he had changed his gold piece 
 for copper. With all due deference, as the 
 rustics say, I would certainly compare Cdestin 
 Nanteuil to Thdophile Gautier. The same 
 fatality hung over their existence, the one being 
 a painter, the other a poet. Both had to devote 
 the best part of their time to pursuits — illustra- 
 tions, journalism — which prevented them from 
 giving to their works the breadth of which their 
 talent was capable. In spite of the allurements 
 •of their vocations, time and leisure were wanting 
 to both of them : to C^lestin Nanteuil to devote 
 entirely to painting, to Thdophile Gautier to 
 devote to poetry. Art would have gained by 
 it, and France too ; but hunger could not wait. 
 In the intimate circle of the Chiacle Celestin 
 Nanteuil was called captain, not that he had 
 ever worn the double epaulette of gold, or the 
 'Ordonnance sabre. No, indeed ! the initiated 
 had souls above everything but authentic Toledo 
 blades, Milanese coats-of-mail, poignards chased 
 
Youth. 45 
 
 by Benvenuto Cellini, and they would have pre- 
 ferred to all other arms : — 
 
 " Notre dague de famille ; 
 Una agate an pommeau brille 
 Et la lame est sans 6tui." ' 
 
 Well then, C^lestin Nanteuil had seen na 
 actual military service, nevertheless his nickname 
 was well merited, and confirmed the valour dis- 
 played on the Romanticist field of battle, when 
 at the first representations of Victor Hugo's 
 play, the stalwarts, the long-haired, and the die- 
 hards were brought up, and their intervention^ 
 as opportune as it was fierce, often turned the 
 scale of victory. These champions, whose en- 
 thusiasm nothing could moderate, were in the 
 Romanticist army what the Old Guard was in 
 the armies of Napoleon I., they never retreated. 
 This sacred battalion was commanded by 
 C^lestin Nanteuil. In the month of March, 
 1843, when les Burgraves was to be played at 
 the Comddie Frangaise, Victor Hugo called to 
 mind the vigorous leader, who had not spared 
 himself at the representations of Hemani, le Rot 
 s'amuse, Lucrkce Borgia and Marie Ttidor, and 
 
 ' " Our family dagger 
 
 On the pommel of which an agate shines, 
 And the blade is without a sheath ." 
 
46 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 he despatched two of his disciples to him, to ask 
 for three hundred young men, to whom would 
 be entrusted the mission of helping on the 
 success of the next drama. Cdestin Nanteuil 
 listened to the messengers and replied : " There 
 are no more young men." They insisted, and 
 shaking his head sadly, as though he had 
 witnessed the defeat of a once victorious army, 
 he repeated : " Tell the master there are no 
 more young men." Not another word could 
 they get out of him. Les Burgraves was 
 played — it was not a battle, it was a rout. 
 
 From the C^nacle, that centre at once turbu- 
 lent from the inflexibility of its opinions, and 
 tender from the affection which united all its 
 members, intoxicated with the love of art, im- 
 moderate as becomes the springtide of youth, 
 worthy of having for a motto the word excelsior, 
 above all disinterested, without any thought of 
 gain, despising ease, believing that one could 
 live on poetry, breakfasting on an ode, and 
 supping on a ballad ; from all this Thdophile 
 Gautier received an indelible impression. All 
 his life he remained the mystical companion of 
 the first disciples, and the worshipper of Victor 
 Hugo, revealer, apostle, and prophet. The 
 eccentricities of which he had been the witness 
 and often the hero, foolish as they were, were 
 not without their use to him. They would seem 
 
Youth. 47 
 
 to have been crystallized and purified in him 
 into that originality which is one of the pri- 
 mordial qualities of his talent, and which gives 
 him an individuality recognizable from amongst 
 all others. 
 
 How he regretted those hours at the Cinacle, 
 the remembrance of which charmed him to the 
 threshold of old age which he was never to 
 cross ! He could not speak of them without 
 being moved, and with his emotion was mingled 
 a touch of pride as he recalled " those charming 
 days of poverty when we fed upon glory and 
 love," and he would exclaim, " Did any one ever 
 liave better fare ? " One day he came upon a 
 letter written to him in 1857, by Bouchardy, he 
 whom the C^nacle called the Maharajah of 
 Lahore ; his whole heart was in a tumult over 
 it, for his old companion in idealism wrote : " We 
 dreamt the most beautiful of all dreams, with 
 open eyes and hearts full of faith, enthusiasm, 
 and love." At these words Gautier started like 
 a veteran captain at the sound of the bugle, and 
 wrote : — 
 
 " Already twenty-seven years separate us from 
 1830, and the memory of it is as fresh as a memory 
 of yesterday — the feeling of enchantment still lives. 
 From the land of exile where we are journeying, gain- 
 ing glory in the sweat of our brow, through the briars, 
 
48 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 and over the stones and paths full of pitfalls, we turn 
 with deep regret and sad eyes towards our lost para- 
 dise. Such joy doubtless cannot last. To be young, 
 intelligent, to love one another, to sympathize and 
 commune upon all kinds of art ; it is impossible to 
 imagine a more delightful manner of living, and all 
 those who have experienced it have preserved from 
 the memory of it a charm that will never die." ' 
 
 Another time, referring to the same period, he 
 writes to Sainte-Beuve : " Yes, we believed, we 
 loved, we admired ; we were intoxicated with 
 the beautiful, and we experienced the sublime 
 madness of art." 
 
 No, " such joy could not last," and the Cinacle 
 was dispersed, its members left the high-road 
 where they had marched in company, and each 
 took the path that his powers or necessities 
 opened out to him. They remained united by 
 the invisible bond of a common faith, but they 
 were scattered. The company was not actually 
 disbanded, but each soldier went his own way, 
 well knowing that at the first call to arms they 
 would all meet again around the flag. 
 
 About this time, i.e., in 1833, Theophile 
 Gautier installed himself in the cul-de-sac 
 Doyenn^, in an old house inhabited by Camille 
 Rogier, Arsene Houssaye, and Gerard de 
 
 " Histoire du romantisme, pp. 86, 87. 
 
Youth. 49 
 
 Nerval. It was the Thebaid in the midst of 
 Paris. The completion of the Louvre, and the 
 plantation of the Square, have done away with 
 all the old buildings that existed then, the 
 remembrance of which can only be recalled with 
 difficulty in our day. Gerard de Nerval has 
 written a history of the life which the four 
 friends led there, and he christened it la 
 Bohime galanfe. 
 
 In 1836 Thdophile Gautier went on to la 
 Presse newspaper, which was just being started ; 
 he was at first entrusted with the art criticisms, 
 and a short time after with the dramatic criticisms. 
 " There," he says in his Autobiographic, " ended 
 my happy, independent, careless life." Journal- 
 ism seized upon him, and was never to let go 
 again. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 CRITICISM. 
 
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER was twenty-five 
 in 1836. He was no longer unknown to a 
 certain select set of readers, and he was cele- 
 brated in the artistic world, in the world of 
 letters, and in the Romanticist school, which saw 
 in him one of its most illustrious adepts. He 
 had not been idle, and his literary baggage was 
 already considerable. The non-success of his 
 volume of poems, offered to the public at so 
 inauspicious a moment, while Paris was erect- 
 ing barricades and shouting, " Long live the 
 Charter ! " had not discouraged him, for he 
 published successively, Albertus, 1832 ; les 
 J eune- France, 1833 ; the first part of the Gro- 
 tesques, 1834; and Mademoiselle de Maupin in 
 1835, besides an appreciable number of articles 
 on every subject which appeared in different 
 periodicals. 
 
 These articles, with their nomenclature, an 
 indication of their source, date, quotation, and 
 estimation, will be found in the book consecrated 
 
Criticism. 5 1 
 
 by the Viscount Spoelberch de Lovenjoul to the 
 works of Th^ophile Gautier. With the patience 
 of a Benedictine, and a perseverance that calls 
 forth admiration, the author has collected every 
 volume, every article, every scattered leaf of 
 Gautier's enormous labours ; he has omitted 
 nothing, not even different readings, not even 
 the errata. It is the act — and a worthy one — 
 of a devotee towards his idol. The whole of 
 the work of that careless genius, one of the most 
 formidable labourers in the field of French lite- 
 rature, the whole of the vast toil which filled his 
 life, is unrolled and unveiled day by day, hour 
 by hour, so to speak, from the moment when on 
 leaving college Theophile Gautier took up his 
 pen for the first time, to the hour when it fell 
 from his cold hand. No more glorious monu- 
 ment, built up of unexceptionable materials, 
 could have been raised to the memory of the 
 poet and prose-writer. To those who are 
 tempted to repeat the calumny of the idle 
 commonplace " Gautier is indolent," we can 
 henceforth offer a contradiction impossible to 
 rebut, by pointing to the two enormous volumes 
 into which M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul has 
 condensed the result of his researches, and which 
 will often serve us as a guide.' 
 
 ' Histoire des auvres de Thlophile Gmitier, by the Viscount 
 Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Paris, Charpentier, 1887, two vols, in 
 
52 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 The first article that Gautier wrote for la 
 Presse is dated August 22, 1836 ; the printers 
 signed it Gauthier, with that parasitical h that 
 pursued the poet during his whole life, and 
 sometimes drew a smile from him, which was 
 not without bitterness. For nineteen consecu- 
 tive years he was the ordinary purveyor of 
 articles on art and dramatic criticism, in what 
 was then called Emile de Girardin's Journal. 
 He left it in April, 1855, to join the Moniteur 
 universel. 
 
 When the Journal officiel was started to re- 
 place the Moniteur universel, Th^ophile Gautier 
 passed over to it, and continued till his last hour 
 the enervating task which for so long had 
 become insupportable to him. He saw himself 
 
 8vo, 495 and 602 pages, 2,370 numbers. In Vol. I., from page 
 I to 94, I have restored the titles of the different journals and 
 keepsakes in which Theophile Gautier wrote before he went on 
 to the Presse. It seemed to me that it might be interesting to 
 reproduce that nomenclature which can only awaken very few 
 memories in our day. I.e Gastronome, le Mercure de France 
 du XIX^ sihle, le Cabinet de lecture, F Almanack des MuseSy 
 la France littiraire, les Annales romantiques, le Voleur, le 
 Diamant, le Silam, T Amulette, le Journal des gens du monde, 
 la France indusirielle, la Vieille Pologite, VEglantine, le 
 Monde dramatique, PAbeille, le Rameau d'or, la Chronigue de 
 Paris, T Ariel. According to a family tradition Th&phile- 
 Gautier made his d^but in prose-writing, in the Gastronome, 
 March 24, 1831, by unRepas azi dhert d'Egypte, an anonymous 
 article that M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul reproduces without 
 guaranteeing its authenticity. 
 
Criticism. 53 
 
 condemned for thirty-six years to give an 
 account of the pieces played in the Paris 
 theatres, and to write dissertations on the 
 pictures and statues that filled the public exhi- 
 bitions. Death alone set him free ; it was 
 indeed too much. 
 
 In Alfred de Vigny's Stello, the Lord Mayor 
 says to Chatterton : " I remember this phrase of 
 Ben Jonson, and I give it you for truth, ' Know 
 that the finest muse in the world will not keep a 
 man, and that these ladies may be our mis- 
 tresses, never our wives.' " Poor Gautier knew 
 it ; his legitimate wife was criticism — a prudent 
 match — which brought him for a marriage por- 
 tion dramatic articles. He lived upon it, at 
 least he managed to subsist, but we can affirm 
 that more than one poem thereby perished, not 
 having time to be born. He never consoled 
 himself for this, and usually compared himself to 
 a racehorse harnessed to a rubble cart. The 
 cart was the daily drudgery, full of vaudevilles, 
 buffooneries, bad singers, and heavy dramas, 
 which he had to go through at stated hours 
 under pain of fasting, and compelling his family 
 to fast too. One day he said to me, with the 
 melancholy smile which was habitual to him, 
 " I believe I am the legitimate heir of ' Gautier 
 the penniless.' He has left me his poverty and 
 his ill-luck. Like him, I have neither fief nor a 
 
54 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 full pocket ; like him, I have conducted the 
 crusade towards the Holy Land of literature; and 
 like him, I shall die by the way without even 
 seeing from afar the Jerusalem of my dreams." 
 
 His first article was devoted to the decorative 
 paintings that Eugene Delacroix was just com- 
 pleting in the Chamber of Deputies. He thus 
 continued the art criticisms, in which he became 
 a master, and in which he had already made a 
 trial of his powers in some of the literary journals 
 of the day. He rapidly acquired considerable 
 notoriety, and in the artistic world exercised an 
 authority that it often had to submit to. In the 
 salon of 1837, with a spirit that showed the 
 sincerity of his convictions, he attacked bourgeois 
 art, " the pot-boiling art " as they said then, in 
 which Drolling with his well-polished kettles, 
 Mallebranche with his snow effects, and Louis 
 Ducis with his troubadours, had gained some re- 
 nown. Wishing to strike at the root of things, he 
 attacked Paul Delaroche, already celebrated and 
 much admired for his Enfants d&douard, 1831 ; 
 Richelieu sur le Rhdne ; Mazarin mourant ; 
 Cromwell, 1832 ; Jane Grey, 1834. With regard 
 to Charles /"''• insulte par des soldats dans un corps 
 de garde he treated it with a severity that was 
 excessive. While recognising that the judicious 
 choice of his subjects determined Paul Dela- 
 roche's success much more than the art with 
 
Criticism. 55 
 
 which they were treated ; admitting that his 
 aspirations did not rise above the earth, that the 
 simple reproduction of some fact in history does 
 not constitute historical painting, we may yet 
 acknowledge that the artist's talents, often cold 
 it is true, and sometimes a little dull, merited 
 less severe treatment. The heat of the battle 
 was not yet extinguished, that is their excuse ; 
 they wrangled still in the name of the Roman- 
 ticist school, thrust aside without reserve by the 
 Academy of Fine Arts, and which only with the 
 greatest difficulty forced a way into the annual 
 salons in face of the determined resolution to 
 close it against them. If Thdophile Gautier's 
 criticism in this case overstepped the bounds, it 
 is only just to remember that he was the 
 champion of a cause that was being fought to 
 the death, that his adversaries were not only 
 numerous but in a powerful position, and that in 
 spite of his agility, his valour, and his strength, 
 he was unable to return blow for blow. Besides, 
 might he not have said with the poet Feuchters- 
 leben : " I have always detested mediocrity, that 
 is why during my youth I was often seized with 
 a hatred of moderation." At that time Paul 
 Delaroche was often compared to Casimir Dela- 
 vigne. Without being disrespectful towards 
 their memory we may admit that they were 
 wanting, both of them, in that originality and 
 
56 Thdephile Gautier. 
 
 the requisite exaggeration that Romanticism 
 demanded from its disciples. Later, in 1858, 
 two years after the death of the painter, Gautier 
 made the amende honorable : " In former times," 
 he said, " we maltreated Paul Delaroche rather 
 roughly. That was at a period when art disputes 
 were fought with sharp weapons and to the bitter 
 end." I 
 
 The Fine Art Exhibitions were only opened 
 once in the year, so that it was dramatic 
 criticisms, continually fed by the incessant pro- 
 ductions at the theatres, that was to be Thdophile 
 Gautier's most exacting occupation. Before 
 confiding it to him la Presse had made several 
 trials which did not seem to be successful. 
 Wishing to make a new departure from the 
 pedantic school of criticism, encumbered with 
 canons and systems which Geoffroy, Hoffmann, 
 and Duviquet had established, they had succes- 
 sively appealed to Alexandre Dumas, Frdd^ric 
 Souli^, Granier de Cassagnac, and at last to 
 Gerard de Nerval in collaboration with Thdophile 
 Gautier. They signed themselves G. G. to 
 parody the J. J. of Jules Janin, who remained in 
 sole charge of the feuilleton on the Journal des 
 Dibats, which at one time he had shared with 
 Lceve Veimars, after the retirement of Duviquet. 
 
 ' See Theophile Gautier's Portraits conteinporains, 1 volume 
 in l6mo, 1886, Charpentier, page 291 and the following. 
 
Criticism: 57 
 
 Gerard de Nerval was of a nomadic temperament 
 with vagrant instincts, he could not tie himself 
 down to any labour which required a certain 
 amount of regularity. Th^ophile Gautier, more 
 sedentary, remained alone on the ground floor of 
 the offices of the Presse journal to instruct the 
 public upon the literary value of pieces which 
 Triost often had none. 
 
 At this trade — for it was a trade to him and 
 nothing more — he displayed powers of the first 
 order, and several of his articles, which are 
 veritable master-pieces, remain hidden away and 
 as though lost in the midst of the daily " copy " 
 which he was obliged to produce. On this point 
 he did not deceive himself in the least, and said : 
 
 " A book alone has importance and lasts, the news- 
 paper disappears and is forgotten. Etienne Bequet 
 wrote the criticisms for the Journal des Dibats for 
 fifteen years, and who knows anything about them to- 
 day ? But all the world has read and will continue to 
 read le Mouchoir bleu, a thin little book of not more 
 than twenty pages. The newspaper article is a shrub 
 that loses its leaves every evening and never bears any 
 fruit." 
 
 Without exaggeration we may say that during 
 his whole existence as dramatic critic he wrote 
 his articles in discouragement if not with disgust. 
 
58 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 This is easy to understand, he was like a nightin- 
 gale in a cage ; every time that he wished to 
 soar and to sing under the free heaven, his work 
 held him back and forced him to drone through 
 the ballad in the fifth act, or the marriage song 
 of the leading gentleman espousing the leading 
 lady. More than once— and I cannot blame 
 him for it — he got some sympathizing friend to 
 undertake this task for him, who gladly took up 
 his chains to relieve him of their weight. If he 
 had been less tied down, if he could have chosen 
 his subjects instead of being obliged to take those 
 that were given to him, he might have added 
 something of value to the work he did. He had 
 already given a proof of what his historical 
 knowledge, his taste for our old literature, his 
 discerning mind would have allowed him to do. 
 If instead of hurrying over two thousand news- 
 paper articles Thdophile Gautier, while lending 
 an ear to the muse whom he adored, had had 
 leisure to write a history of French literature, 
 what a pleasure it would have been for men of 
 taste, what a treasure for scholars, what good 
 luck for all the world ! Judging by what he had 
 accomplished since the age of twenty-three, we 
 can estimate what he would have done in the 
 maturity of his knowledge and intelligence. 
 
 On the 1st of December, 1833, Th^ophile 
 Gautier signed a treaty with Charles Malo, 
 
Criticism. 59 
 
 director of la France littiraire, by which he en- 
 gaged " to compose a series of articles under 
 the title of Exhumations littiraires. This series 
 is to form a complete study of the old French 
 poets . . . and to consist of a dozen articles. . . . 
 M. Charles Malo promises to pay for these 
 twelve articles, as they are delivered to him by M. 
 Gautier, at the rate of 50 francs \£2\ an article." 
 These twelve articles, collected in two volumes 
 8vo, forming altogether 6tj pages, were published 
 in 1844, under the title les Grotesques. We 
 perceive that at that period of art and revival, 
 literature was not remunerative as the economists 
 say. Eleven of these articles appeared succes- 
 sively in la France litt&aire during the years 
 1834-35. The twelfth and last — Paul Scarron 
 — was inserted in the Revue des Deux Mondes 
 on July 15, 1 844.1 Les Grotesques represent 
 Th^ophile Gautier's ddbict in serious criticism, 
 and on this account possess an importance which 
 must not be overlooked. I said serious criticism, 
 and I do not retract it, for serious does not mean 
 tiresome, knowledge does not imply pedantry ; 
 we can be clever with humour and serious with 
 originality. I consider it to be an excellent 
 book, and have just re-read it for perhaps the 
 tenth time, with as much pleasure and interest 
 as though I did not know it. 
 
 ' Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, No. 93 to 711. 
 
6o Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Unless he intended to hide an irony under it, 
 the title is irritating, not easily understood, and 
 does not apply to the work it indicates. It 
 betrays too many of the literary opinions 
 that " authorized " critics still upheld in Gautier's 
 youth, when it was bad form not to treat 
 as rubbish the poets anterior to Malherbe, 
 whom Boileau's VArt poitique had condemned. 
 Gautier without doubt came under the influence 
 of surrounding ideas, which, however, were not 
 his own. If in spite of their spirit, Georges de 
 Scud^ry and Cyrano de Bergerac are unpleasing 
 from their attitude of bullies of the pen and 
 sword, if Chapelain is heavy and rugged, if 
 Guillaume Colletet is insipid, if Saint-Amant's 
 comedy is too forced ; Fran5ois Villon and 
 Th^ophile de Viau are poets with whom literary 
 history must reckon, and Scarron occasionally 
 pushes scurrility to a point of burlesque vigour 
 unknown before him. I can only see Scalion 
 de Virbluneau and Pierre de Saint-Louis who 
 are absolutely grotesque, and worthy of the 
 epithet, which should have been spared to the 
 others. The choice of this title astonishes us on 
 the part of Gautier, who has said more than 
 once : " It needs a good bit of talent even to 
 write a mediocre book, or paint a bad picture." 
 
 At the beginning of the study on Francois 
 Villon he nevertheless does not conceal his 
 
Criticism. 6 1 
 
 preferences while seeming to excuse himself 
 for following them. 
 
 " It is only," he says, " on the dungheap that pearls 
 are found, witness Ennius. For my part I would 
 rather have the old Roman's pearls than all the 
 gold of Virgil ; it needs a pretty big pile of gold to 
 be worth a small handful of pearls. I find a singular 
 pleasure in unearthing a fine verse in an unknown 
 poet ; it seems to me that his poor shade must be 
 comforted, and rejoice to see his thought understood 
 at last J it is a rehabilitation that I undertake, it is an 
 act of justice that I render. And if at times my 
 praises for some obscure poets may seem to certain 
 of my readers exaggerated, let them remember that I 
 praise them for all those who have abused them 
 beyond measure, and that unmerited contempt pro- 
 vokes and justifies excessive panegyric." 
 
 The praises that Gautier distributes in the 
 course of his studies on les Grotesques have 
 nothing in them to offend us, which proves 
 perhaps, that the poets studied by him are 
 better known in our day than they were about 
 1 834, when the murmur of the applause lavished 
 upon Mme. Dufresnoy and Luce de Lancival 
 was still echoing, and B^ranger — the modern 
 Tyrteus, as they said — was looked upon as the 
 greatest poet that had ever honoured a nation. 
 
62 Thdophile Gautier, 
 
 What strikes us in this book is its modera- 
 tion, which appears almost extraordinary when 
 we recall those years of strife in which the 
 Romanticists and the Classicists used to hurl 
 at each other whatever insults came handy, and 
 turned controversy into a scratching match. 
 We might say that Gautier was already in 
 possession of a sort of superior serenity, which 
 allowed him to abstract himself from transitory 
 passions, in order the better to understand and 
 point out the beautiful wherever it came from 
 and wherever he found it. The style is clear, 
 of irreproachable accuracy, with nothing strained 
 about it, like that in which Sainte-Beuve de- 
 lighted later, without any of those mental re- 
 servations, those half-expressed thoughts, in 
 which writers whose habitual work is criticism 
 love to envelop and often to obscure their 
 meaning. Not for a moment is his candour 
 at fault. He deceives no one, neither himself 
 nor others ; he is absolutely sincere, as well when 
 he laughs at the stupidities of Sieur de Virblu- 
 neau as when he brings to light the high 
 attainments of Th^ophile de Viau, or is sur- 
 prised, apropos of Chapelain's Pucelle, that 
 such a subject, so complete, so wonderful, 
 should only have produced works of deplorable 
 inferiority, and a degradation unworthy of an 
 author and a respectable language. 
 
Criticism. 63 
 
 " What marvels there were,'' he says, " in that life, 
 so short and so full, we seem rather to be reading a 
 legend than a chronicle. There is in it material 
 for a romancero. Well, with so magnificent a sub- 
 ject, and a real heroine, who leaves far behind her the 
 Camilla of Virgil, the Bradamantes, the Marphises, 
 the Clorindas, and all the beautiful amazons of the 
 Italian epics, Chapelain could only make a dull 
 article in verse, as wearisome as life, and Voltaire but 
 an infamous obscenity, abominable in intention and 
 singularly mediocre even of its wretched kind. Poor 
 Joan of Arc ! The English only burnt thee, they did 
 not outrage thee." 
 
 One phrase should be remembered in the 
 passage which I have just quoted, for it contains 
 some advice — precious advice — that the future 
 poets of Joan of Arc would do well to meditate 
 upon : " There is in it material for a romancero" 
 
 This study of poets, scorned and too long left 
 in oblivion, presents the peculiarity of being 
 done in an impersonal manner, and with a very 
 clear historical intelligence. Certainly Th^o- 
 phile Gautier is of his day, he has neither cut 
 his hair nor laid aside the famous red waistcoat. 
 From certain allusions and sarcasms we re- 
 cognize the adept convicted of new theories ; 
 but it is not by virtue of these theories that he 
 judges the authors of whom he speaks, for they 
 did not exist in the day of their celebrity. He 
 
64 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 did not see in Moliere a predecessor of the 
 French Revolution, and Malherbe did not appear 
 to him at all as a defender of " the throne and 
 altar." He appreciated their works according 
 to the ideas — errors or truths — in vogue in their 
 time. He is sparing in comment, mocks at 
 stupidity, makes much of talent, and does not 
 as so many critics do, strive to discover in what 
 the poet has said what the poet did not mean 
 to say. In a word, he never falls into the 
 absurdity of judging ancestors according to 
 the tendencies and aptitudes of their great- 
 grand-nephews. To make up for it he took 
 much account of social surroundings, history, 
 and even stories. He knew that the writer and 
 the public react upon one another, and did not 
 deny the often tyrannical power of fashion. 
 With his usual sagacity, too, he recognised the 
 influence exercised by foreign literature over 
 French literature, which became Spanish or 
 Italian according to the day, before entering 
 into the false Greek and Latin traditions, from 
 which Romanticism has at last delivered it. 
 
 He not only made a rapid though complete 
 analysis of the principal works of his poets, but 
 drew them themselves from head to foot with 
 so clear a stroke that we might think it was 
 done from nature. Francois Villon, with his 
 manners of a vagabond "of the lesser light," 
 
Criticism. 65 
 
 without a care provided his glass was full, and 
 thinking at times with melancholy of the rope 
 that will know his weight ; Cyrano, his mous- 
 tache turned up under his enormous nose, and 
 his sword drawn ; Chapelain, showing "his austere 
 grave face with a few scientific wrinkles full of 
 Greek and Latin, wrinkles which resemble the 
 leaves of a book ; " Scarron doubled up, laugh- 
 ing when his sufferings did not draw groans 
 from him, nursed by his wife, the beautiful 
 Frangoise d'Aubignd, who will be Queen of 
 France, and will regret her '' squalor " in the 
 midst of the splendours of Versailles. There 
 they all are spouting their poems, reciting their 
 sonnets to Chloris, declaiming their tirades, 
 mouthing their parodies, and as they pass be- 
 fore the reader he is astonished at their re- 
 semblance although he has never seen them,, 
 so alive are they under the pen whose art 
 resuscitated them. 
 
 His literary integrity was equal to his ac- 
 curacy. In spite of his deference towards the 
 great masters, even those whose genius has 
 commanded the admiration of centuries, he 
 never hesitated to strip them of certain thefts 
 into which they had allowed themselves to be 
 drawn, and which he restored to those who had 
 been the victims of them. On this subject he 
 made a kind of profession of faith which it is 
 6 
 
66 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 well to remember. As though wishing to give 
 it more force, he addresses himself directly to 
 his readers : — 
 
 " You have doubtless heard it said that the galley 
 scene in the Fourberies de Scapin was imitated from 
 Cyrano de Bergerac, but it is less probable that you 
 have unearthed it where it is in le Pedant joue ; read 
 that, and in spite of all the respect we owe to the 
 great Molifere, say if it is not the most impudent 
 plagiarism that could be imagined ; it is, besides, not 
 the only plagiarism that Moliere had to reproach 
 himself with, for if we consulted ancient tapestries 
 and Italian novelists, such for example as the Nuits 
 fadtieuses of Signor Straparole, there would remain to 
 the master of the French language very little on the 
 side of invention, nor would there be any more in 
 Shakespeare's works. It is a very singular thing, 
 which becomes, through the investigations of science, 
 more notorious from day to day, that the men whom 
 we agree in calling geniuses have really invented 
 nothing, strictly speaking, and that all their imagina- 
 tion and their gifts are to be found often in writers 
 who are either mediocre, obscure, or detestable. 
 Wherein, then, lies the difference ? In the style and 
 charactej:,_whi£h_.^after all are the onl^jthingsthat 
 cojistiti)j£,Jhejgreat^ artist, for all the. Korld is able to 
 find an -incident- or a poetical idea, but Yejy_4iBw_a,re^ 
 cagablg. of -realising it, and rendering it in a manner 
 to be understood by others." ' -~-™- ,™-_. 
 
Criticism. 67 
 
 Having said this he quotes the scene from 
 the Pidant joiid, which it cannot be denied 
 inspired Moliere to write his scene in the 
 Fourberies de Scapin. In comparing one with 
 the other we see what an amusing idea, in- 
 vented by a clever man, becomes under the pen 
 of a man of genius. Thdophile Gautier is right, 
 the scene is immortal, not because it was in- 
 vented by Cyrano de Bergerac, but because it 
 was arranged, developed, and put in its right 
 place by Moliere. The idea is the same, the 
 essential phrase, so often repeated, " Qu^ allait- 
 il faire dans cette galere" is the same, but in 
 truth the two scenes do not resemble each other 
 any more than the PMant j'oit^ resembles the 
 Fourberies de Scapin. 
 
 Moliere picked up an idea in Cyrano de 
 Bergerac's medley, and made a masterpiece of 
 it. Scarron took a legend which had passed 
 into a fable and made a farce of it. The vague 
 memory of a sort of prehistoric Jacquerie, trans- 
 mitted from generation to generation, remains 
 simply an oral tradition, until one day Hesiod 
 takes it up and bestows immortality upon it 
 in his Theogony, which must have made Eu- 
 hemerus smile. Later, when the Latin tongue 
 is already in its decadence, Claudian is tempted 
 by this subject, and dedicates his poem the 
 Gigantomachia to it, of which only a few frag- 
 
68 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 merits remain to us. In his turn Paul Scarron 
 takes possession of the war of giants, and with 
 his mind, which was as crooked as his body, 
 under the title of Typhon, turns it into a harle- 
 quinade worthy of the booth of a mountebank 
 at a fair, to which level it sank never to rise 
 again. Th^ophile Gautier made an analysis of 
 this harlequinade, which is a model of straight- 
 forwardness, spirit and liveliness. It may well 
 surprise us that Scarron, whose sufferings were 
 such, 
 
 " That he wept like a calf, very often like two. 
 Sometimes like four," 
 
 could forget himself sufficiently to overflow 
 thus " in pleasant verses, an original manner 
 of saying things, and in idioms savouring of 
 the soil ;" but while sufficiently in love with his 
 poem he would have envied the spirited prose, 
 the good humour, the charming gaiety with 
 which Gautier has treated the " sons of earth " 
 whom his verses have turned into ridicule. 
 The chapters of les Grotesques are besides 
 full of keen insight, light touches, and little 
 historical pictures painted by the hand of 
 a master. There is a touch of raillery in the 
 good-humour at times, but it is full of the 
 natural courtesy due to lofty efforts of the 
 mind. More than one of " these placards," as 
 
Criticism. 69 
 
 Estienne Pasquier would have said, ought to 
 be given in a literature course, as an example 
 of intelligent criticism, written with a thorough 
 knowledge of the matter, courteous in form, just 
 without being arrogant, and learned without 
 being pedantic. 
 
 Some years after publishing les Grotesques he 
 had the intention of making a sequel to it, by 
 writing a series of detached articles on the pre- 
 decessors of Corneille — on Desmazures, Gr^vin, 
 Jean de la Taille, and Robert Gamier, of whom 
 he liked to recite a verse borrowed from the 
 Bradamante, 
 
 " Roulant mes libres jours en libre pauvrete," ' 
 
 and chiefly on Montchrdtien, whom he admired 
 while pitying him for the unmerited oblivion in 
 which his works are shrouded. The man's life 
 stimulated him ; he wished to write it, for he 
 would have found matter in it for the recon- 
 stitution of that valiant life of the sixteenth 
 century, which pleased him above all others. 
 
 He appreciated him as a tragic poet ; the 
 verses of the L^cenes did not leave him in- 
 different ; I'Ecossaise astonished him by the bold- 
 ness of its author, who, eighteen years after the 
 execution on February 18, 1587, dared to put 
 
 ' Roving my free days in free poverty. 
 
70 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 upon the stage the death of Mary Stuart ; Avian 
 interested him, perhaps because of what Racine, 
 with little taste, borrowed from it for his Esthery 
 going so far as to copy one verse word for word ; 
 
 " L'insolent devant moi ne se courba jamais." ' 
 
 However, what attracted him most strongly 
 towards Montchrdtien was the adventurer, the 
 assassin, the fugitive, the renegade, the leader, 
 who was to die at the market-town of Tourailles 
 at the ag6 of forty-six, killed with halberds and 
 musket shots, by the seigneur Claude Turgot, 
 one of the ancestors of the too ephemeral 
 minister of Louis XVI. Gautier promised him- 
 self some pleasure, and felt some pride in point- 
 ing out, document in hand, that the Sieur 
 Antoine Montchr^tien de Vatteville was the 
 first author who wrote a Traict^ de I'aconomie 
 politique, thus creating that word which was to 
 be so much abused later. It was a starting- 
 point that would have allowed of making in- 
 cursions amongst the new social theories, and 
 Gautier would not have failed in it, for, out of 
 curiosity, he had not studied, but glanced through 
 the works of those who had been called modern 
 gods. We very often conversed together about 
 this series of subjects, which, treated by him, 
 
 ■ The insolent wretch will never bow down before me. 
 
Criticism. 7 1 
 
 would have been of great interest, and was to 
 have formed a set of articles intended for the 
 new Revue de Paris (185 1). This project was 
 never carried out. In 1852 Th^ophile Gautier 
 started for Constantinople, and the predecessors 
 of Corneille went to rejoin the many other 
 dreams which were never realised. 
 
 It would have been a masterly work, written 
 with special care, as though to console him for 
 the worries of his daily work on the paper. The 
 more he felt himself enervated, lowered, by this 
 labour, which the mediocrity of the subjects that 
 he, was forced to embroider upon rendered 
 insipid, so much the more soothing would it 
 have been to take an entire literary period, to 
 explain it as a whole, as well as in detail, and to 
 make of it one of those vigorous studies in which 
 he excelled. The task would have been worthy 
 of his talent, like that offered to him in i867> 
 and which he accepted with joy, though it was 
 more limited than he desired. It was at the 
 opening of the Universal Exhibition, each section 
 of which it was composed — a dazzling array of 
 works of art and industry — was to address to the 
 proper minister a report on the progress made 
 during a certain number of years. It was 
 thought only just not to leave literature without 
 anything to show its vitality, and Thdophile 
 Gautier was charged by the minister of Public 
 
72 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Instruction to draw up a memorandum on 
 poetry in France since 1848.=' 
 
 In two words, the Government wished to have 
 a report on French poetry since the election 
 of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to the first 
 magistracy of the French Republic. They 
 would not have been sorry to be able to demon- 
 strate that French literature had developed 
 gloriously under the presidency of Louis Bona- 
 parte, and during the fifteen first years of the 
 reign of Napoleon III. If such was the hope 
 of the chiefs of the day that hope was dis- 
 appointed, for Thdophile Gautier, while not 
 forgetting his usual courtesy, was quite frank 
 iind outspoken. He made no compromise with 
 his literary convictions, either to attack estab- 
 lished reputations, or to serve his own interests. 
 Perhaps this was not without danger for him. 
 He had in a way a situation as licensed critic to 
 the Journal officiel, and that situation might be 
 taken from him by caprice or ill-will ; but he 
 did not take this into account, and spoke with 
 as much sincerity as though his report were not 
 intended to appear until after his death. 
 
 This memorandum, which was added to the 
 
 ' This memorandum is entitled les Progris de la poisie 
 fr(ln(dise depuis 1830, but it only determines the part played by 
 poetry in French literature since the revolution of 1848. It 
 consists of 106 pages of print which were added to the Histoin 
 du romaniisme, 1 vol. l6mo. Charpentier, Paris, 1854. 
 
Criticism. 73 
 
 collection of reports on the Universal Exhibition 
 of 1 867, is a r^siimd of the poetical experiments 
 made in France since the throne of Louis 
 Philippe had been declared vacant by the second 
 republic. First comes a list of authors and 
 their works, then a succint analysis, a short 
 criticism, and here and there some excellent 
 advice. Courtesy is never wanting to it, is 
 unremitting, and there is something paternal 
 about it, as is fitting when a master speaks. We 
 must not be misled by this, however, and see in 
 it a proof of dulness, or indifference. Under its 
 always courteous form, willingly toned down for 
 fear of wounding, his opinion remains unshaken ; 
 it appears between the lines, and shows itself 
 sufficiently to be recognized and leave intact 
 the impartiality of the critic, who never hesitates 
 to blame where he thinks it right to do so, but 
 who does it with so much delicacy, such skilful 
 prudence, and touching precautions, that his 
 restrictions are only the more eloquent. He 
 knew from long experience the genus irritabile 
 vatum, and treated it, from sympathy as much 
 as from good nature, as one would do a sick 
 person to whom any shock is painful. 
 
 1867 ! it seems to me as though it were only 
 yesterday, and that once again I see that im- 
 perial procession pass along which now has 
 vanished into the kingdom of shadows ! In 
 
74 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 reading Theophile Gautier's report I seemed to 
 be present at a funeral review, to the roll-call of 
 names, the echoes answered so many times — dead! 
 King Death has not rested from his labour since 
 that time, he has made a select choice, has re- 
 spected no one, not those that had glory, nor 
 those that had hope, no one, not even the poet, 
 who undertook to speak of the poets of his day. 
 Let us pass on, without forgetting, without 
 challenging regret ; but pass on we must, for 
 it is not a De Profundis that it becomes us to 
 chant here. 
 
 To appreciate the merit of works which ap- 
 peared during fifteen years, sprung from diverse 
 tendencies, and often from opposite tempera- 
 ments, Thdophile Gautier makes appeal to no 
 £esthetics, to no theory ; he leaves on one side 
 every preconceived idea, rejects whatever would 
 be d priori, and remain abstract, that is to say, 
 free from all influence of the school. He is 
 always a Romanticist, but he judges of the poetry 
 by the poet, steeps himself in it, explains it, and 
 assigns to it its own particular character. In a 
 word, to use a slang expression of the green- 
 room, il entre dans la peau du bonhoinme.^ He 
 does for his contemporaries what he did for his 
 grotesques ; he is careful not to overshadow 
 them with his ideas, and respects them even in 
 
 ' He gets inside his man. 
 
Criticism. 75 
 
 what appears to him their errors. If sometimes 
 he sins a little on the side of indulgence, it is 
 in favour of some companion of his youth, a 
 combatant in those forgotten struggles, to whom 
 he accords an eulogium which is but a remem- 
 brance of the "good times." Sainte-Beuve, whose 
 inferiority, considered as a poet, is incontestible, 
 has profited by this tenderness, so natural to- 
 wards old friends who come together again 
 after a long absence. If Thdophile Gautier has 
 strewn a few too many flowers on the grave 
 where sleep the Poesies de Joseph Delorme, the 
 Consolations, the Pensies d'aoilt, we must not 
 blame him for it, for they were due to the author 
 of the Portraits litt^raires, the Causeries dii 
 Lundi,a.x\d to the historian of Port-Royal. 
 
 It is to Andrd Chdnierthat Th^ophile Gautier 
 traces the starting-point of modern poetry in 
 France. Without discussing this opinion, which 
 might lead to controversy, it is certain that the 
 the posthumous works of him who has said : 
 
 "Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques."'^ 
 
 were a good deal talked about when they 
 were published by H. de la Touche in 1819. 
 
 "All the worthless sham poetry lost colour and 
 fell into dust. A shadow was cast rapidly upon 
 
 ' Let us write on new thoughts in old measures. 
 
76 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 names which had been brilliant a short time before, 
 and all eyes were turned towards the new dawn. De 
 Vigny brought out his Poimes antiques et modernes ; 
 Lamartine, his Meditations ; Victor Hugo, his Odes 
 et Ballades, and soon Sainte-Beuve came to join 
 the group with the Potsies de Joseph Delorme, and 
 Alfred de Musset with the Contes dEspagne etdltalie." 
 
 I have quoted this passage because it is ex- 
 plicit, and contains Gautier's whole method in 
 dealing with the revival of French poetry. 
 Nevertheless, I will allow myself to make one 
 observation : Lamartine wrote le Lac in 1 8 17, at 
 Aix-les-Bains, two years before the appearance 
 of Andr6 Chdnier's volume of verses, conse- 
 quently outside any influence which they might 
 have exercised upon his inspiration and his 
 talent. 
 
 After a rapid glance at the sources of the 
 poetry which flourished after the convulsion of 
 February, 1848, Th^ophile Gautier enters upon 
 the special epoch to which he was to limit himself, 
 and he quotes with just appreciation the authors 
 who honoured it. While acknowledging their 
 individual merit, he traces back their source to 
 the great streams with which their Romanticist 
 forefathers fertilised the exhausted soil, where 
 French poetry found nothing to reap but fruits 
 without flavour, and flowers without perfume. 
 He is not reproaching them, for he says : 
 
Criticism. "jy 
 
 " Originality is only the pe rsonal note addedto 
 the common foundation j)repared" By our con- 
 te mporarie s or immediate predecessors." These 
 poets, almost all of the generation to which I 
 belonged, and who were still in their first youth 
 at the moment of the downfall of the July 
 monarchy ; these late comers of the school of 
 1830, already held in check by the so-called 
 school of common-sense ; these worshippei's of 
 the modern Muse, who swore only by Hugo, 
 Byron, Goethe, and Alfred de Musset, I knew 
 them for the most part, loved, admired, when 
 they started in life, full of illusions and brilliant 
 hopes which have not always been realised. More 
 than one has gone without giving forth what he 
 promised ; others hide themselves behind the folds 
 of a veil which resembles a shroud ; above some 
 of them I still see the aureole that surrounded 
 them in the first days of their renown. The 
 stroke with which Gautier draws them makes 
 their figures stand out, and with rare insight sets 
 forth the particular characteristics of their talent. 
 I recognise them, they are just as I saw them in 
 the old days. There is Theodore de Banville, 
 whose " ideas like fairy princesses wander about 
 the emerald fields in robes the colour of the 
 weather, of the sun, and of the moon ; " there 
 is the Marquis de Belloy, elegant of figure but 
 rather indistinct, as though his thoughts grew 
 
78 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 thin under the tissue of his carefully-chosen 
 words, and his brother in letters, the Comte de 
 Gramont, who in his Chants du passi combines 
 the correct bearing of a gentleman with the 
 haughtiness of unshaken convictions, and Pierre 
 Dupont, whose couplets were celebrated when 
 he sang les Baeiifs, and whose refrains were 
 insupportable, when drunken voices yelled forth, 
 Les peuples sont pour nous des freres. He was 
 applauded ; he was illustrious ; he could be- 
 lieve himself to be as they told him he was, 
 " the Beranger of his time " — Alas ! 
 
 "Je n'ai fait que passer, il n'etait d^ja plus." ' 
 
 "A shadow," said Theophile Gautier, " descended 
 upon the brow on which popularity seemed to 
 have placed an eternal laurel wreath." 
 
 In speaking of Leconte de Lisle and, as was 
 just, praising his verses, which were cast in the 
 purest metal, regarding him " as one of the 
 strongest poetical individualities produced in 
 this last period," he approves of those who 
 attempt to imitate him, " for," he says, " he 
 who has not been a disciple will never be a 
 master, and whatever may be said poetry is an 
 art to be learnt, which has its own methods, 
 its formulas, its arcanums, its counter-point, 
 and its harmonies." This is, in other words, 
 ' I only passed by, he was no more. 
 
Criticism. 79 
 
 the opinion that Gautier often expressed in 
 my presence : " 5^^__one_who_^ has not begun 
 by imitatin g.^ will evej:_.Jae-, original." This 
 opinion, absolutely sincere, uttered by a man 
 whose originality was unquestionable, always 
 astonished me. 
 
 The Pohmes antiques of Leconte de Lisle call 
 up, by a natural transition, Thtophile Gautier's 
 opinion on Melmnis, a poem, the subject of which 
 is borrowed from the Rome of the Caesars, and 
 which is worthy of the praises he bestows 
 upon it. Louis Bouilhet was a poet indeed, a 
 poet in the strong acceptation of the word, so 
 much so that prose was repugnant to him, and 
 verse a kind of compulsion, which he could not 
 escape from. All his life he was drawn different 
 ways between two inclinations that contradicted 
 each other in him, and which he never succeeded 
 in making agree. His taste, I may say his 
 passion, drew him towards the Romanticist 
 school and kept him there, while his training 
 was essentially classical. I was intimately con- 
 nected with him, and was often a witness of the 
 struggle that went on in his mind between the 
 two adverse muses. He was the best classical 
 scholar I have known, I do not even except those 
 who learn in order to teach Greek and Latin. 
 Classics had hidden none of their grandeur 
 from him ; he understood them with an intel- 
 
8o Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 ligence that I have never seen equalled. His 
 tendency was always towards Homer, Aristo- 
 phanes, Plautus and Horace, but when he set 
 to work — poetry, detached poems, plays — it 
 was always towards an imitation of Hugo 
 that he felt himself attracted. There resulted 
 sometimes a certan dissonance which the beauty 
 of the verses, and the fulness of the imagery, 
 quickly make us forget. He has given us a 
 master-piece — Melcenis, which dates from his 
 twenty-sixth year, and which alone will suffice 
 to glorify his memory. Unfortunately the poem 
 is written "in those stanzas of six verses and 
 triple rhymes which the author of Namouna 
 often made use of, a;nd we regret it," says 
 Gautier, " as this purely metrical resemblance 
 has led to the belief of an imitation, voluntary 
 or involuntary, of Alfred de Musset, and never 
 were two poets less alike. Bouilhet's style is 
 robust and ornate, picturesque, full of local 
 colour ; it abounds in verses, full, vigorous, 
 expansive, dashed off on the instant." Louis 
 Bouilhet died at the age of forty-seven, at the 
 moment when the maturity of his talent and 
 the repose of his existence prompted him to new 
 work. He departed like a star that disappears 
 before having expended its full brightness. 
 
 Thus all the poets defile before us one after 
 the other, more at the fancy of the writer than 
 
Criticism. 8i 
 
 according to any chronological order, all in- 
 dicated by their chief works, and distinguished 
 by a just word which has the value of a descrip- 
 tion. Satirists like Amed^e Pommier, who was 
 a singularly vigorous versifier ; ghoulish stirrers- 
 up of the unclean, like Baudelaire, who antici- 
 pated the pessimism of our day, and made 
 admirable verses to celebrate the moral de- 
 formities of humanity ; fastidious creatures like 
 Josephin Soulary, who cuts his sonnets upon 
 the transparence of a sardonyx ; nostalgists like 
 Lacaussade, who regrets the creole country where 
 his infancy was passed, and many others who tried 
 to forget the things of earth in listening to and 
 repeating voices from above. He forgets no 
 one, not even the author of the Chants modernesy 
 to whom, in his good-nature and friendship he 
 gives, not without gentleness, a well-deserved 
 lesson. 
 
 In the course of this rapid history of modern 
 poetry, the justness of his mind redoubled in 
 perspicacity, and he became a prophet. Let us 
 not forget that the following was written in 
 1867, that is to say, twenty-six years ago. 
 
 " Although," he writes, " Sully Prudhomme habit- 
 ually confines his subjects within narrow frames, his 
 brush is large enough to allow him to undertake big 
 frescoes. The Atables d'Augias which we can read 
 
 7 
 
82 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 in the Parnasse contemporain, is traced with the 
 certainty of touch, the simplicity of tone, and breadth 
 of style of a mural painting. This poem might be 
 added to the other labours o Hercules on the cella 
 or pronaos of a Greek temple. If he perseveres for 
 some years longer, and does not abandon for prose, 
 or any other profitable occupation, an art forsaken 
 by public attention, Sully Prudhomme seems to us 
 to be destined to take front rank among the poets of 
 latest years, and he will reap his reward as though he 
 had been at work since the dawn." ' 
 
 Arrived almost at the end of the Rapport siir 
 les progres de la po^sie frangaise, the reader is 
 filled with anxiety ; he asks himself whether 
 certain works which have appeared since 1848 
 are to be deliberately passed over in silence, 
 and whether one of the greatest of modern 
 names is not to be mentioned at all. The 
 suspense is legitimate, we have arrived at the 
 year 1867. The empire it is true has already 
 become somewhat modified by the wear and 
 tear of its own machinery, and in default of 
 liberty we have tolerance ; the administration 
 is less brutal, justice more indulgent ; but 
 Napoleon III. is on the throne, and those about 
 him have not forgotten les Chdtinients, and they 
 also remember NapoUon le Petit. In the official 
 
 ' Histoirc du romatitisme, pp. 336, 337. 
 
Criticism. 83 
 
 world they smile disdainfully in speaking of 
 Victor Hugo, and say of him that he is only a 
 poet of the decadence, and in the world of " the 
 court" they drop their eyes with shame when 
 they hear his name mentioned. To quote him 
 is bad form, to praise him may appear perilous, 
 at least unseemly. Now Theophile Gautier, 
 commissioned with a work by the Minister of 
 Public Instruction, was, in a way, a delegate of 
 the Government, bound to deal gently with 
 certain susceptibilities, and to espouse court 
 quarrels. Will he from prudence, or, perhaps, 
 merely from expediency, forget his old master 
 in literature, and sacrifice the exiled poet to the 
 Throne ? Let us reassure ourselves, Theophile 
 Gautier was incapable of such a crime, every- 
 thing in him would have revolted against it, his 
 Romanticist faith, his loyalty, his nature, even if 
 the perspective of an official post was to be the 
 prize — the thirty pieces of his abjuration. 
 
 "We have in this study," he says, "devoted ourselves 
 to new faces, and given them an important place, for 
 after all it was they whom it was a question of making 
 known. But during that space of time the masters did 
 not keep silence. Victor Hugo brought out his Con- 
 templations^ the Legends des siecles, and the Chansons 
 des rues et des bois, three works of the highest signifi- 
 cance." 
 
84 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 This is only the beginning of things, and 
 Gautier goes on to speak of the poet, as 
 never courtier spoke of a potentate with the 
 crown on his head and ermine mantle on 
 his shoulders. There is no servility about it 
 however, only the expression of an admiration 
 that could not be contained. The L^gende des 
 siecles draws from him cries of enthusiasm, and 
 never was homage rendered to genius more 
 justified. These two volumes have stirred to 
 the profoundest depths the hearts of those who 
 love poetry. 
 
 In Victor Hugo's work they are the examples 
 of a supreme effort, in which even the faults 
 become perfections, and the imperfect metre 
 gives to the whole a tremendous force ; words 
 seem all at once to acquire more precise 
 meaning, more lofty, more grandiose, with 
 such art are they employed, and such power. 
 This book is without a precedent, nevertheless 
 the embryo of it is to be found in les Burgraves, 
 which would have been an admirable poem, if it 
 had not been an ill-composed drama in which 
 the action is lost sight of in the speeches. For 
 my part I know nothing more beautiful in 
 French poetry than these " little epic poems, 
 concentrated, rapid, generalizing in a small space 
 the colour and the character of a century or a 
 country." 
 
Criticism. 85 
 
 In this work Victor Hugo inaugurated a new 
 manner, larger, more human, than that of the 
 Orientates, and the Feuittes d'autonine. He did 
 not, hke Dante, visit the infernal regions, but he 
 ran through the catacombs of religions and 
 history, where he discovered hidden treasures, 
 brought them to the light of day, and presented 
 to literary France the most beautiful gift she 
 ever received. Gautier tells all this in excel- 
 lent style. However eulogistic it may be the 
 account is just ; for praise could hardly rise to 
 the height of the work which he is describing. 
 I am not surprised either that after having 
 briefly explained the subject of la Troinpette 
 du jugement dernier, Gautier should have 
 written : " It seems that the poet in that 
 region where there is neither form, nor colour, 
 nor light, nor shade, nor limit, must have heard 
 and noted the mysterious whisperings of the 
 Infinite."! 
 
 ' In this same report Theophile Gautier has written : " It has 
 been remarked that Victor Hugo, the great craftsman of metres, 
 the man to whom all forms, all shapes, all rhythms are familiar, 
 has never made any sonnets ; Goethe also abstained for a long 
 time from this form of verse, these two eagles not wishing 
 doubtless, to imprison themselves in so narrow a cage. How- 
 ever, Goethe gave in and tardily composed a sonnet which was 
 an event in German literature." Since then Victor Hugo has 
 imitated Goethe, he also has made a sonnet — a single one — -and 
 has dedicated it to Judith Gautier, who is, as every one knows, 
 Th^o's daughter. 
 
86 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Th^ophile Gautier ends his report by saying : 
 " What conclusion is to be drawn from this long 
 work on poetry? It is an embarrassing question. 
 Among all these poets whose works we have 
 analyzed, which of them will write his name on 
 the glorious and holy page of fame — Lamartine, 
 Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset? Time alone 
 can answer." But why make a choice 1 If their 
 qualities are different, their genius is akin. 
 Lamartine's natural gift equals the magnificence 
 of Hugo, which does not yield to the humane 
 sympathy of Musset ; I repeat. Why should we 
 choose .'' The door that opens upon posterity 
 is wide enough to allow three contemporary 
 poets to pass through abreast. 
 
 Les Grotesques and the Rapport sur les progres 
 de la poisie, are, as criticisms, Gautier's two chief 
 works, those which he was able to write in peace, 
 without being harassed by the flight of time, by 
 the printer's devil clamouring for copy, and by 
 the necessities of the " making-up." This 
 sisyphus-like labour that cut up and empoisoned 
 his life produced an enormous number of articles 
 which M. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul has repro- 
 duced in his work with religious care. It is not 
 without sadness that we see upon how many 
 subjects that were unworthy of him Thdophile 
 Gautier was obliged to waste his talent. Cer- 
 tainly at the theatre, and at the Fine Art 
 
Criticism. 87 
 
 exhibitions, he met with more than one bit of 
 good luck, by which his intelligence profited ; 
 but on the other hand what mean things, what 
 stupidities, what dulness, were imposed upon 
 him, stealing from him the hours that poetry- 
 demanded ! And he ended, too, by hating his 
 work, never setting about it till the last moment, 
 like a sick person who recoils before the moment 
 of the operation. 
 
 He never, however, in his articles, wrung with 
 so sad an effort from his weariness, showed him- 
 self sullen or irritated. He accomplished his 
 task with good will, like a good workman, a 
 master in literature, as he was. His criticism 
 was always courteous, and his respect for the 
 public irreproachable, respect for the public and 
 for himself, for the language he was speaking, 
 for the good breeding from which, pen in hand, 
 he never swerved. 
 
 He did not escape any of the unpleasantness, 
 not to put it more strongly, which assail the 
 critic, the unfortunate man always under fire, 
 always in a state of siege, the distributor of 
 reputations, who has his pass into all the theatres, 
 and can by his praise make a market for a work 
 of art, and who for all this has only to give a 
 stroke of his pen — a simple stroke of his pen. 
 If I could only lay before the eyes of the public 
 the files of letters that I have had in my hands. 
 
88 TMophile Gautier. 
 
 they would see that no queen's favourite, or all- 
 powerful minister, was ever more harassed with 
 importunities than the unhappy Gautier. There 
 wasn't a painter, a sculptor, an actor, a ballad 
 writer, an acrobat, a trainer of circus horses, who 
 did not write to ask him for his support. They 
 address him as " Dear and Illustrious Master," 
 or simply as "Dear Monsieur Gauthier," with 
 the irritating " h " added to his celebrated name. 
 They ask him to come to the studio to see the 
 picture or statue destined for the next salon, and 
 those who receive a refusal call upon gods and 
 men to witness the injustice of which they are 
 the victims. The haughtiest of them, those who 
 profess independence, and who later will trample 
 on the trophies of our history, bow as low, lower 
 even than the others. Courbet writes to him : 
 " If I devote myself to art, it is in the first place 
 to try to live by it, and in the second to merit 
 the criticisms of a few men like yourself who 
 can the better appreciate my progress for having 
 taken some pains to cure me of my faults." He 
 complains of being badly placed at the salon, 
 and desires that his picture should "' fall more 
 within range of the naked eye!' He would be 
 happy if Gautier would receive him, and honour 
 him with some advice. Every one with any sort 
 of a name, and under whatever pretext, begs 
 him not to refuse them " two or three lines, not 
 
Criticism. 89 
 
 more " ; and all the people who wish to go 
 to the theatre without having to open their 
 purses — which is a mania among the rich — beg 
 theatre tickets from him : " it is so easy for 
 you." 
 
 And the actor, he whom he has described in 
 his study on Scuddry in the Grotesques : " the 
 man who only expresses thoughts foreign to his 
 own, who lives upon the love and the passion 
 that are made for him, who breathes not a sigh 
 that is not arranged beforehand, makes not a 
 movement that is not artificial," is no less eager 
 for the puff — ^there is no other name for it. Can 
 praise, however exaggerated it may be, satisfy 
 and correspond to the opinion which he has of 
 himself? Never, we fear. On this subject I 
 found in the fragments of correspondence that 
 Gautier left behind him a valuable proof which 
 shows how far the unreasonableness of certain 
 illusions can go. After a revival of Robert 
 Macaire Thdophile Gautier wrote a succinct 
 review of it in which he mentioned Fr^dMck 
 Lemaitre with praise, without, however, com- 
 paring him to Plutarch's heroes, whereupon a 
 writer, younger than himself, but who treated 
 him a little too much as a comrade, without 
 taking into account the difference in their age 
 and talent, wrote him a letter, certain parts of 
 which must be given word for word : 
 
90 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 " My dear Friend, — I saw Frederick Lemaitre 
 yesterday, who is very much perturbed by the manner 
 in which the critics have taken Robert Macaire. Your 
 article, in particular, hit him hard, for you have only 
 said a few passing words about him. I am so sincerely 
 your friend that I cannot but resent this. When an 
 actor of genius creates a role as Frdddrick created that 
 one, prodigal in one evening of more mirth than you 
 will find in Callot, more fancy than there is in Hoff- 
 mann, more irony than all Byron can boast, when he 
 is worth Molibre himself, and sums up, in a tremen- 
 dous burst of laughter, all the humour and pathos of a 
 century, he deserves something more than five or six 
 cold lines. Dullards may be indifferent, but not such 
 as you, who represent art, and are at once its champion 
 and laureate. It is for us who are poets to uphold 
 greatness, and to console genius, drenched with the 
 outpourings of envy. I tell you in all sincerity that 
 you have failed in this duty." 
 
 What, Callot, Hoffmann, Byron, Moliere 
 apropos of Robert Macaire played by Frederick 
 Lemaitre ! Why not Homer, Eschylus, Aristo- 
 phanes ? No good nature, however indulgent 
 it may be, can rise to the height of such preten- 
 sions. I do not know whether Gautier sent any 
 reply to this, I doubt it, for on such matters he 
 had long ago got beyond being astonished, but 
 I think it tnust have tickled his sense of humour. 
 
 Was this ungrateful labour at least properly 
 
Criticism. 91 
 
 remunerated, and did it afford him an existence 
 free from care ? To this question, thanks to M. 
 Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, we can reply precisely. 
 From 1836 to 1851, that is to say during a term 
 of fifteen years, the statement of the sums re- 
 ceived from the paper la Presse by Th^ophile 
 Gautier show a total of 100,336 francs and a few 
 centimes (about ;£'4,Oi3), being an average of 
 6,500 francs (;^26o) a year,i which is certainly a 
 very modest sum. We might imagine that to 
 make up for it he was treated with much con- 
 sideration, that it was understood how advan- 
 tageous it was to have such a name signed to 
 the Monday issue of the paper, and that they 
 were grateful to the poet for forsaking poetry in 
 order to write criticisms — but it was not so. An 
 incident that was very painful to Gautier, will 
 prove how much he, whom, with some little 
 irony, he called his " master," Emile de Girardin, 
 understood of the respect due to independence, 
 and to the talent of the writers to whom the 
 paper which he conducted owed its success. 
 On the first of February, 1847, Gautier, after 
 having given an account of pieces played at 
 the Com6die Frangaise, the Vaudeville, Cirque 
 Olympique, and the Vari6t6s, ended his daily 
 article by saying : 
 
 ' See Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Introduction xxviii. and 
 following. 
 
92 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 " This year has begun badly, we have nothing but 
 melancholy news on all sides. There is Chaude- 
 saigues, a poet become critic like all of us to gain his 
 daily bread, who the other day fell dead on the first 
 page of his paper, and over there, under the beautiful 
 Algerian sky, Benjamin Roubaud has died in the hos- 
 pital of the Dey, a painter with whom we went through 
 the Kabyle war, and who followed us throughout our 
 journey, already shivering with the malady which has 
 carried him off." 
 
 This phrase, perfectly innocent in itself, and 
 which signiiied simply that if Chaudesaigues 
 had only had the price which the editors would 
 have paid for his verses, to live upon, he would 
 have run a chance of dying of hunger, this phrase 
 did not please the editor of la Presse. In the 
 very Chamber of Deputies, of which he was a 
 member, during the sitting, " in all haste, 
 between two speeches, one from M. Roger, the 
 other from M. Billault " he took up his pen, 
 which was none the gentler for being inde- 
 fatigable, and proceeded to rate Gautier. There 
 was no mistaking the tone in which the publicist 
 replied to the poet, it was without discretion or 
 courtesy, like him who wrote it, and any one 
 may read it in la Presse of February 2, 1847. 
 After expressing astonishment that Th^ophile 
 Gautier had not "been preserved from the 
 
Criticism. 93 
 
 danger of the commonplace by the tendency 
 to paradox which is natural to him," Emile de 
 Girardin proclaims this truth : " He who looks 
 at the goal without seeing the starting point, 
 takes no count of the length of the course ; it is 
 the error of envious minds." If ever there was 
 a man in the world who never knew envy it was 
 Gautier — the good generous Thdo. I mention it 
 by the way, and Girardin could not have been 
 ignorant of it. 
 
 The latter continues his lecture ; he mentions 
 the soldier, Jean de Dieu Soult, raised to the 
 dignity of Marshal of France and Duke of Dal- 
 matia, and he points out the workman Cunin- 
 Gridaine, who became a minister, without reflect- 
 ing that these two persons had but followed their 
 bent, while Th^ophile Gautier complained of not 
 being able to follow his. The proprietor of la 
 Presse argues in his own way, and to show that 
 a poet can live by poetry he enumerates the 
 prose works which have helped to make the 
 fortune of their writers. Does not Gautier's 
 own work on the paper itself bring in the chief 
 part of his revenue ? Certainly it does, and poor 
 Gautier never denied it ; but if every Monday 
 he had replaced the prose of his dramatic critic- 
 ism by a piece of poetry, Emile de Girardin 
 would without hesitation have got rid of a 
 coadjutor so prompt at rhyming, thus proving 
 
94 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 that the opinion expressed, apropos of Chaude- 
 saigues, was less paradoxical than he had wished 
 to think it. In any case this lesson — not to say 
 this reprimand — publicly administered to a man 
 of Th^ophile Gautier's reputation was a cruel 
 wrong which he ought to have been spared. 
 
 He felt it deeply, and spoke to me of Girardin 
 with extreme bitterness, qualifying his conduct 
 by a word which I will not repeat. He said to 
 me : 
 
 " My only reply should have been to send in my 
 resignation as writer on la Presse, but I could not do 
 it ; I submitted to the outrage, which of itself proves 
 that I was right in saying that for want of daily bread 
 the poet is reduced to do work antipathetic to him ; 
 no, I could not throw my work on the paper in 
 Girardin's face, for that was all I had to live upon, 
 and others belonging to me had to live upon it too." 
 
 There was nothing exaggerated in this ; he 
 might have said, like Scarron, but with more 
 truth : " I have always lived at the Inn of Im- 
 pecuniosity." He was not alone in life, and 
 family cares weighed upon him. He supported 
 burdens that were both heavy and painful, which 
 many others would have repudiated, but which 
 he accepted without shrinking, and never shirked, 
 let this be said to his everlasting honour. Duty 
 
Criticism. 95 
 
 consists in submitting to the consequences of 
 our own lives, and not in fleeing from them. On 
 this head Gautier, whose immorality has often 
 been jeered at — I mean that of too hasty speech 
 and too daring comparisons — has given proof of 
 superior morality, for he remained faithful to his 
 responsibility, and never abandoned those who 
 possessed any right to count upon him. 
 
 A long time after Girardin had committed 
 this act of bad taste, towards 1862 or 1863, I 
 met him at a watering-place, and one evening 
 when we were sitting beside one another, and 
 talking without listeners, I asked him why he 
 had shown himself so aggressive and so hard on 
 that occasion. He looked at me with that im- 
 pertinent and bantering air which was familiar 
 to him : 
 
 " Gautier," he said, " is a fool, who understands 
 nothing about journalism ; I put a fortune into his 
 hands, his work on the paper ought to have brought 
 him in 30,000 or 40,000 francs a year (_;^i,2oo or 
 ;^i,6oo"), he never knew how to turn a penny by it. 
 There is not a theatre manager who would not have 
 given him an income for the purpose of having him as 
 a speaking tube. He is at present, and since he left 
 la Fresse, on the Moniteur universel, that is to say 
 the official organ of the Empire, he makes nothing out 
 of it, and I repeat he is a fool who has never profited 
 by his opportunities." 
 
96 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Knowing by experience that we readily judge 
 of others by ourselves, I was not surprised at 
 Girardin's opinion, but I changed the conversa- 
 tion. From what the man who was — I speak 
 advisedly — the grand master of the journalism 
 of his day, said to me, it is as well to remember 
 this, that Thdophile Gautier had in his hand a 
 pen that was worth gold, and that he always 
 remained poor. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE TRAVELLER. 
 
 TIED to his work on the paper, hardly able 
 to leave Paris, where he was kept by 
 the necessity of having to be present at the 
 dramatic representations which he had to write 
 about, Thfephile Gautier, like a prisoner con- 
 templating the country through the bars of his 
 window, looked longingly across the frontier, 
 and dreamt of flying away to unknown coun- 
 tries. He had never travelled, for I do not count 
 an excursion in Belgium, made in company of 
 Gerard de Nerval. In the works of his first 
 youth he is not sparing in allusions to his seden- 
 tary life, from which we may conclude that it 
 weighed upon him, and that he would seize with 
 eagerness the white staff of the pilgrim poets. 
 He felt, perhaps instinctively, that impressions 
 gathered under foreign skies would be a fruitful 
 complement to his literary education, already so 
 rich ; he had, so to speak, exhausted the civili- 
 sations in the midst of which he moved, and his 
 mind craved for others, above all those upon 
 
 8 97 
 
98 Thdophile Gautier, 
 
 which the past seemed to have set an indelible 
 stamp. He wished to travel through those 
 countries in which the traces of their history 
 remained apparent in their manners. Like all 
 those who are tormented with the migratory 
 instinct, he imagined the countries he sighed to 
 visit, as more beautiful, more wonderful than they 
 are. He saw them through the dreams evoked 
 by poetry. Like Alfred de Musset, he thought 
 of Madrid, Princess of all Spain ; pretty verses set 
 to music by Hippolyte Monpou promised him 
 fair ladies, " pale as a beautiful autumn evening," 
 and les Orientates, inspired by the Romancero, 
 spoke to him : — 
 
 " Du ills de la rendgate 
 Qui commande une fregate 
 Du roi maure AHatar." ' 
 
 Spain and Italy having furnished the framework 
 of almost all the romantic dramas recently 
 brought out, it was towards Italy and Spain 
 that all eyes were turned. Literary fervour 
 took the place of faith ; history was rearranged, 
 heaven knows how, but they believed in this 
 history, however unnatural it might be, from the 
 moment that it wore mediaeval dress, and recited 
 
 ' " Of the son of the renegade 
 Who commands a frigate 
 Of the Moorish Icing Aliatar." 
 
. The Traveller. 99 
 
 some tirades on the boards of a theatre " of the 
 school." They had no doubts either of Ruy 
 Gomez's gallery of portraits, of Thisbe's nar- 
 cotics, of the murders and incests, of the bom- 
 bast, the anachronisms, or of the discords ; they 
 doubted nothing, not even Lucretia Borgia's 
 little suppers. The most extraordinary ideas of 
 the dramatists, justified by the tradition of the 
 tolerance accorded to works destined for the 
 stage, were accepted without remonstrance by 
 the public, who regarded it as quite a simple 
 matter that the wife of Alphonse d'Este should 
 kill a husband every evening, and a few lovers 
 every morning. I need not say that Theophile 
 Gautier laughed in his sleeve at these frantic 
 exaggerations, but he felt none the less an irre- 
 sistible attraction towards the countries that 
 served as a stage for all this machinery, made up 
 of improbabilities, tinsel, and false sentiment, 
 of which very soon not even the memory will 
 remain — if it remains at all. 
 
 An accident at last permitted Gautier to 
 make that journey to Spain, the desire of 
 which possessed him. He had been asso- 
 ciated for some years already with Eugene 
 Piot who, in all matters concerning " objects 
 of art, and curios," possessed, as sale catalogues 
 have it, a precise knowledge, the trustworthi- 
 ness of which was never at fault. He might be 
 
lOo Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 ignorant of the fact that Pandolfo Malatesta 
 assassinated Count Ghiazzolo at the castle of 
 Roncofreddo, but he would know to a certainty 
 the name of his armourer, the form of his 
 sword, and the motto engraved on the blade. 
 He had in several instances given proof of 
 special knowledge which surprised people. A 
 great lover of " curios," buying them to advan- 
 tage, selling them even better, Eugene Piot 
 told himself that in Spain, impoverished and 
 ravaged by a recent civil war, there must be 
 hidden away many objects of great taste — arms, 
 tapestry, pictures — which it would be easy to 
 acquire cheaply. Although he was sure of him- 
 self in everything concerning armour, furniture, 
 rare pottery, ivories, and precious jewels, he — 
 at that time at least— distrusted himself some- 
 what before a picture of the Spanish school, 
 poorly represented in France then by second- 
 rate masters, notwithstanding the galleries of 
 Marshall Soult and the Marquis of las Maris- 
 mas. He thought it might be useful to him to- 
 have a fellow-traveller trained in the tech- 
 nique of painting, capable of discerning the 
 method of Zurbaran and that of Fra Diego de 
 Leyva, and he proposed to Th^ophile Gautier 
 to accompany him to the country of Murillo, 
 Velasquez, and Ribeira. Gautier accepted, got 
 some one to take his place on la Presse, and set 
 
The Traveller, loi 
 
 out with the joyous eagerness of a schoolboy 
 leaving school for the holidays. 
 
 I may say at once that the chief object Eugene 
 Plot had in view was not attained. " The pictures 
 that we might buy are horrible rubbish, the best 
 of which would not fetch fifteen francs at a bric- 
 a-brac shop." At Toledo, where they counted on 
 " finding some old arms, daggers, poignards, 
 Konigsmark swords, espadons, rapiers . . . there 
 were no more .swords to be found than leather 
 at Cordova." In this respect their disappoint- 
 ment was complete. Spain luckily had some 
 compensations in reserve for them which but 
 ill-consoled Eugene Piot for the defeat of his 
 hopes, but left in Gautier's mind never-to-be- 
 forgotten memories. Notwithstanding his later 
 travels, the journey that made the most pro- 
 found impression upon him, that was dearest 
 .to him, and of which he always spoke with predi- 
 lection, was the one begun in the month of 
 May and ended in the month of October, 1840, 
 when he was twenty-nine years of age, that is 
 to say, with all the eagerness, all the vigour of 
 youth, tempered by coming maturity. Twenty- 
 seven years later, when, according to Mon- 
 taigne's expression, he was already "old and 
 dried up," he said : 
 
 " I cannot describe the enchantment into which 
 
I02 TMophile Gautier. 
 
 that poetical and wild country threw me, the coun- 
 try dreamed of through Alfred de Mussel's Contes 
 d'Espagne et d' Italic, and tlugo's Orientaks ; I felt 
 that I was on my native soil, and as though I had re- 
 turned to my own country. After that my only idea 
 was to save up a sum of money and set out again ; 
 the passion, or longing, for travel had developed in 
 me." 
 
 This journey, the account of which is con- 
 tained in one of Charpentier's volumes, 375 
 pages long, is perhaps Thdophile Gautier's 
 most interesting work, because in it he reveals 
 himself as he was, without reserve, with the 
 sincerity of an honest man, the simplicity of 
 a poet, who does not take much account of 
 received opinions, and who says what he thinks 
 simply because he thinks it, just as a child lays 
 bare its thoughts in relating its impressions. 
 There is no paradox in it, its note is always 
 true ; if it shocks it is because it is misunder- 
 stood. He has a vision of Spain which he 
 reproduces as best he can, that is to say very 
 well. Those who look at the country from a 
 different standpoint will be surprised, but can 
 never accuse him of being inexact, at most 
 they will have to acknowledge that their atten- 
 tion was not drawn to what excited his admira- 
 tion. To make my meaning quite clear I will 
 
The Traveller. 103 
 
 relate an incident that liappened to me. Not 
 long ago I was chatting with a man who lives in 
 one of our southern departments, a man of im- 
 portance and rich, director of great and flourish- 
 ing enterprises. I spoke to him about Aries arid 
 Avignon, of the gateway and cloister of Saint 
 Trophime, of the arenas, of the castle of the 
 Popes. He replied : " That region is a good 
 deal changed since the chemical discovery of 
 the red used in dyeing military cloth. Red 
 madder is no longer cultivated between Avig- 
 non and Aries ; you would not recognise the 
 country." The readers belonging to this cate- 
 gory of person, who are, however, the most 
 honest people in the world, will not have been 
 able to understand anything of the Voyage en 
 Espagne. Thdophile Gautier does not speak their 
 language. 
 
 He is, so to speak, a pre-occupied traveller, 
 and as he never contradicts himself once in the 
 course of his narrative, we may take it that this 
 " pre-occupation " is natural to him. He remains 
 indifferent to everything which is not the 
 journey properly speaking, free of all pre-occupa- 
 tion other than that of looking well to see well, 
 and be able to reproduce what he sees. With 
 him the " eye of the painter " had great power, the 
 eye which knows what to fix upon, which takes 
 in at once the whole effect and the details, the 
 
I04 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 line and colour, that stores up the contemplated 
 picture and never forgets it. At times, by the 
 very intensity of the sensation experienced, he 
 arrives at a transposition of art, ut pictura poesis 
 was true for him, more perhaps than for any one 
 else. For the rest he proclaims it himself. He 
 excuses himself for having given some historical 
 details about the cathedral of Toledo, as though it 
 were a fault, at the very least an involuntary im- 
 pulse, and he adds : " We are not old offenders, 
 and will return at once to our humble mission 
 of tourist guide, and literary daguerreotypist." 
 
 Although his erudition was profound, he never 
 allowed it to appear ; v/e might think that he 
 was afraid of being thought a pedant, and that 
 the task he had set himself was simply to relate 
 what he saw. If on his road he meets with 
 some beautiful beetles, he does not trouble him- 
 self as to whether they have three, or four, or 
 iive articulations in the tarsus, but he will 
 declare that their sheaths seem to be cut out of 
 an emerald ; if he plucks a flower it matters 
 little to him whether it is monogynous or 
 pologynous, he will say, like Alfred de Musset's 
 Perdican : " I find that it smells good, that is 
 enough." He carefully leaves out everything 
 which might seem like technical expressions, 
 and he is right, for the generality of readers do 
 not understand them, that is why he is very 
 
. The Traveller. 105 
 
 sparing of archeology, which is worthy of praise 
 in an apostle of the Romanticist school, among 
 whom gargoyles, machicolations, and watch 
 towers, were quite the rage since the publication 
 of Notre Dame de Paris. A word suffices him 
 to indicate a style and an epoch ; he passes on 
 and does not lose time with descriptions of over- 
 arches composed of a cluster of toruses separated 
 by gorges (cavettos), as a novice with a 
 dictionary of architecture at hand would not 
 have failed to do. 
 
 Everything that might distract his attention 
 and turn it from the panorama that is unrolled 
 before his eyes annoys him. He has come to 
 see the Spain of the age of chivalry, the Spain 
 of Count Julian, of Don Gayferos, of the Cid 
 Campeador, and of that poor Abou-Abdallah- 
 ibn-Mulei- Hasan whom we call Boabadil, that 
 was his aim, in truth he seeks none other. 
 Although it was a good opportunity to speak of 
 Prince Godoy, of King Joseph, of Ferdinand 
 Vn., he never even mentions their names. In 
 going from Madrid to Grenada he scarcely ever 
 makes an illusion to the capitulation of Baylen. 
 As to politics, from which Spain was still 
 trembling, or the civil war which laid waste the 
 Peninsula, disturbed Europe and held diplomacy 
 at bay, not a word — and yet Th^ophile Gautier 
 was one of the first travellers who dared to go 
 
io6 TMophile Gautier. 
 
 through that country, where all along the roads 
 the recently disbanded brigands lay in wait to 
 plunder. When I say that he did not say a 
 word about it, I am mistaken. He does 
 mention it, describing a bull-fight at Malaga he 
 says : " In times of political dissensions it often 
 happens that the Christian Toreros do not go to 
 the help of the Carlist Toreros and vice-versi," 
 — that is all. 
 
 To lay aside the archeological technology 
 which " the devotees of the Middle Ages " en- 
 deavoured to speak, and to disdain the historico- 
 political theories inspired by a journey into a 
 foreign country, was at that period to perform 
 an act of independence. Let us not deceive 
 ourselves about this, Gautier broke away 
 suddenly from the school and once more left the 
 sanctuary. He repudiated the spirit of imita- 
 tion, and fell back upon his own originality, 
 without borrowing from others, undominated by 
 the memory of the models which he admired. 
 It was usual at that time to climb up the 
 Romanticist mountain, and to pause on the 
 summit and cast upon the nations a comprehen- 
 sive look, the result of which would be a new 
 discourse on universal history. Edgar Quinet, 
 in his Ahasuerus — which is perhaps the most 
 lyrical and the strongest of the Romanticist 
 works — recalls the parabasis of Eschylus and 
 
The Traveller. 107 
 
 Aristophanes, and then through a choir of old 
 men, at the end of the Seconde Journ^e he traces 
 out for France the rdle which she must play, 
 not only in Europe and the East, but in 
 America as well ; he calls upon the men of Lodi, 
 of Castiglione, of Marengo, " and to-morrow and 
 for ever make the nations move around you 
 under the harmony of your sky." Victor Hugo 
 ends the Rhin by a conclusion which is a book 
 apart ; nothing escapes him, neither the things 
 of yesterday nor those of to-morrow ; he recon- 
 structs history a little after his own fashion by 
 wide ilights ; he draws tremendous inferences 
 from imperceptible causes, reprimands the 
 peoples and points with his finger to the route 
 which they must follow. Every poet they say 
 is half a prophet, he tears away the veil which 
 covers the secrets of the future, he prophecies, 
 and, alas 1 the Fates do not listen to his words. 
 
 I believe that it was the very intensity of his 
 impression that kept Gautier within the narrow 
 but fruitful path which he never forsook. That 
 impression was only so profound and absorbing 
 for him, because he had felt it but very imper- 
 fectly before crossing the first spur of the 
 Pyrenees. I think there is nothing exaggerated 
 in this and I will explain myself Confined to 
 a manner of living, relatively speaking restricted, 
 limited to the boulevards, the theatres, friendly 
 
io8 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 reunions, literary discussions, and dinners, merry 
 or dull, Gautier never, so to speak, got away 
 from Paris. The elms that at that time shaded 
 the public promenades, the chestnut-trees in the 
 Tuileries gardens, the sparse underwood of the 
 Bois de Boulogne and the Bois Vincennes, the 
 down - trodden grass of the Champs Elys^es, 
 represented a townified and ugly nature, dis- 
 pleasing to the eyes, aged, faded, without any 
 renewing of spring, quite in keeping for the rest 
 with the town which in the reign of Louis 
 Philippe was one of the dirtiest, crookedest, and 
 most unhealthy in this world of ours. Parisians 
 of to-day who enjoy the admirable works that 
 we owe to Baron Haussman, and Ferdinand 
 Duval, can have no conception of it, but to be 
 convinced of it they have only to read the suc- 
 cinct description of the Paris of those days, 
 written by Th^ophile Gautier himself, in the 
 obituary notice which he wrote of Paul de 
 Kock,i the most popular novelist of that time. 
 
 Emprisoned within this conventional exist- 
 ence, in which the scenes of the Opera, lighted 
 by the footlights, took the place of the peace- 
 fulness of shining landscapes, having never seen 
 real forests, real mountains, real sea shores, real 
 seas, Gautier, deluded by the duration of his 
 
 ' Portraits Contemporains, by Theophile Gaiitier, I vol. 
 Charpentier, Paris, 1886 ; page 127 and following. 
 
The Traveller. 109 
 
 reverie, had created for himself a sort of imagin- 
 ary nature, in which his mind delighted all the 
 more, the more improbable it was ; at the 
 pleasure of his will he made the characters of 
 Watteau or of Boucher live and move there. I 
 believe he went further back than the regency 
 and the Rococo period (Louis XV.). Guided by 
 Honore d'Urfd he must gladly have followed 
 the beautiful Diana de Chateaumorand who, 
 disguised under the name of Astrea, delighted 
 the country watered by the Lignon. 
 
 " It is a charming country that, and one that for 
 my part I regret infinitely. The foliage of the trees 
 there is of apple-green chenille, the grass of enamel, 
 and the flowers of porcelain ; banks of cloud-like 
 cotton-wool float softly upon the blue taffeta of 
 the sky.'' 
 
 What was extravagant and far-fetched did not 
 displease him ; artificiality attracted him, for he 
 saw in it the result of an ingenious effort ; he 
 esteemed affectation and did not hide from him- 
 self that he did so. 
 
 "Affectation, that beautiful French flower, which 
 flourishes so well in the flower-beds in compartments, 
 of gardens of the old school, and which Molibre has so 
 wickedly trampled under foot in some immortal little 
 wicked piece that I have forgotten." ^ 
 
 ' Les Grotesques — Georges de Scudery. 
 
no Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 These landscapes of tender lilacs and mauves 
 which he saw in his dream, which he loved for 
 want of something better, and which, perhaps, he 
 would not have imagined but for his aversion 
 from the muddy lanes always before his eyes, 
 these landscapes, pretty and unnatural to the 
 point of being ridiculous, disappeared like a 
 ghost at cockcrow, as soon as Gautier, having 
 entered Spain, found himself face to face with 
 nature as she is, and not as men have spoilt her. 
 The aged Cybele showed herself to him in all 
 her serene nudity, her primitive splendour, and 
 her sacred beauty, and he was dazzled by her. 
 
 He was discovering the unknown a little, as 
 La Fontaine discovered Baruch ; but for him 
 his discovery was no less precious, for — above all 
 in a literary life — every time that we acquire an 
 idea or get rid of a misconception, we make a 
 new discovery. Even the change of existence 
 was not without giving to his sensation an 
 acuteness which he had not foreseen. Instead of 
 the heavy, drowsy atmosphere of theatres, 
 charged with doubtful smells, the work in one's 
 own narrow room, the lounging about the boule- 
 vards where one is elbowed by every passer-by, 
 the meals in the close caf6s where one's appetite 
 is taken away on entering with the smell of cook- 
 ing ; instead of all the disgusting and sickening 
 things which are natural to all great towns — life 
 
The Traveller. 1 1 1 
 
 in the open air, the steep mountains, the deep 
 gorges, the ahnost empty torrent-beds, where 
 the wild grass grows green, the gallop of the 
 mules with their tinkling bells, the dark rustic 
 beauty passing by carrying a copper pot on her 
 head, the wide horizon, the sunsets gilding the 
 snowy summits of the serrated peaks, now and 
 then a palm rising before us like an evocation 
 from the dreamed-of East, and the memories 
 which are whispered in legendary names, the 
 mosques which Catholicism has baptized after 
 having torn them from Islam, and youth to 
 enjoy the first delirium of all these delights. 
 
 It is true the beds at the inns are hard, the 
 wine tastes of the goat-skin bottle in which it 
 has been kept, the beggars are insolent, the 
 pavements are tiring to the feet, the mosquitoes 
 sound the charge, and attack with spirit, brigands 
 are perhaps lying in ambush at the corner of the 
 road, the jolting is intolerable on the moun- 
 tainous roads in the carriages without springs ; 
 but what matters ! We are happy, we are free, 
 better than free, liberated, and gladly cry out, 
 like Goethe : " Hurrah, hurrah ! I have put my 
 money into travels and migrations 1 Hurrah, 
 hurrah!" 
 
 Those who are not real travellers, that is to 
 say, who do not travel for travelling's sake, 
 without any other interest but that of their in- 
 
1 1 2 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 tellectual culture, without passion but the desire 
 to see, will not understand me ; but, after forty- 
 six years, I cannot yet recall without a beating 
 heart my first day's march in Asia Minor, when 
 I went from Smyrna to Ephesus, pausing at 
 every step to contemplate the caravans, the 
 flight of the storks, the tortoises floating on the 
 Mdles, and the woods of umbrella pines. These 
 emotions, which our memory guards and em- 
 bellishes, were felt by Thdophile Gautier ; at 
 certain hours of his journey in Spain he ex- 
 perienced sensations and emotions which he has 
 noted down. In spite of the calm which he 
 forced himself to preserve on every occasion, he 
 could scarcely restrain himself, he could not 
 master his exaltation, and exclaims : 
 
 " I was absolutely intoxicated with that keen, pure 
 air ; I felt myself so light, so joyous and full of en- 
 thusiasm that I cried aloud and skipped about like a 
 young kid ; I felt a longing to Hing myself headlong 
 into those charming precipices, so blue, so vaporous, 
 so velvety ; I should have liked to let myself be 
 tumbled in the cascades, to bathe my feet in all the 
 streams, to pluck a leaf from every pine, to roll in the 
 sparkling snow, to take a part in all that nature, and 
 be dissolved like an atom in that immensity.'' 
 
 How well we know it — that extraordinary 
 joy of life which takes hold of us sometimes in 
 
The Traveller. 1 1 j 
 
 our travels ; there are sights before which we 
 stand confounded, elevated as it were above 
 our mortal nature, by the irresistible craving to 
 be absorbed into the universal soul. I have 
 sung at the top of my voice on the other side 
 of Koseyr on seeing the waves of the Red Sea 
 bathe the feet of my dromedary, and later I had 
 tears in my eyes when in the evening a bend in 
 the road of Mar-Sabah hid from me, beyond Lake 
 Asphaltite, the mountains that I had been gazing 
 at since the morning. In the month of January,. 
 1870, 1 met Gautier, sad and doleful, and he said 
 to me with a discouraged air, as though he felt 
 his last dream escaping him, " Alas, we shall 
 travel no more ! " 
 
 The intensity of his feeling increased still 
 more Gautier's power of sight : his short-sighted 
 eyes searched into everything, neglecting na 
 detail, and engraving on his memory for ever 
 the images they had collected, and this gave 
 him an extraordinary power of description when 
 he wrote the account of his travels. There is 
 with him no longer a question of that descriptive 
 phraseology which describes nothing, and which 
 Romanticism, too much occupied in dressing up 
 from top to toe the legends of the Middle Ages,, 
 had not yet destroyed. The groves, the bowers, 
 the landscapes, " made to please the eye," still 
 flourished here and there. Jean Jacques Rous- 
 9 
 
114 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 seau, who called himself the lover of nature, but 
 who was not a painter of it, had not yet closed 
 his school of landscape painting ; his influence 
 is still great in George Sand's first novels. 
 Rousseau loved to " let his eyes hover upon 
 the horizon of that beautiful lake whose borders 
 and the mountains around it enchanted his 
 view." He could not rid himself of a certain 
 grumbling and " posing " philosophy, which 
 ended by becoming insupportable, for it is put 
 on, and makes part of the equipment of that 
 sensibility which he brought into fashion. " I 
 had made it a habit to go in the evenings to sit 
 beside the lake, especially when it was agitated. 
 I felt a singular pleasure in watching the waves 
 break at my feet, it seemed to represent to me 
 the tumult of the world and the peace of my 
 dwelling." There is nothing of that kind of 
 thing with Thtephile Gautier ; he is much too 
 sincere not to reject such a medley of rhetoric, 
 in which neither the author nor his readers be- 
 lieve. All declamation is unknown to him, and 
 we do not find a trace of it in his books ; he 
 does not weep over ruins, a tree shattered by 
 the storm does not remind him of the instability 
 of human life, and he can watch a river flowing 
 without comparing it to the flight of time. We 
 understand that what was commonplace was 
 odious to him, and that platitudes exasperated 
 
The Traveller. 1 1 5 
 
 him ; to some readers he will doubtless seem 
 paradoxical, but never pedantic. 
 
 " I feel sure that those who have not travelled as 
 much as I have, and who do not know all the rare 
 beauties of nature from having seen them nearly all as 
 I have done, will not be sorry if I tell them a few 
 particulars about them. The description of the 
 smallest details is my special forte ; it is upon that 
 that I most frequently employ my small skill." 
 
 It was Saint Amant, the poet of Rome ridicule 
 and Mo'ise sauve, Saint Amant, the gentleman 
 glass manufacturer and boon companion, who 
 wrote that phrase, but it applies exactly to 
 Gautier. Would one not say that it was written 
 by him for himself? His "small skill" was by 
 no means of slight value, for it endowed French 
 literature with a method of description unknown, 
 or at least very little practised until then. 
 Gautier brings to the art of description a really 
 extraordinary precision. His expression never 
 wanders, is neither vague, confused, nor peculiar, 
 and does not strive to be learned ; it is just 
 right, absolutely simple, which is the height of 
 talent. The word he employs is so exactly 
 where it ought to be, is chosen with so much 
 sagacity, that no other could replace it. This 
 result seems to be obtained without effort, 
 
1 1 6 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 naturally, so to speak, which is the achieve- 
 ment of great writers. 
 
 This clearness of description, which gives to 
 the reader the impression received by the 
 traveller, was for the first time brought to 
 perfection by Thdophile Gautier. This note 
 is personal to him, for no one before him had 
 given it so fully, I will say so persuasively ; 
 they imitated him, but could not equal him, in 
 this respect he is unrivalled. That alone, with- 
 out counting his other qualities, makes him a 
 master, for by the unique flight of his individual 
 talent he has replaced a barren style by a fruitful 
 one, which was his own creation. Whatever may 
 be the talent of those who came after him, and 
 are still to come, he will remain the pioneer. If 
 I were not afraid of appearing pretentious, I 
 would say, that in disdaining approximates and 
 doubtful equivalents, in seizing upon the object 
 itself, and putting it in relief, in placing it with 
 exactness according to the position proper to it 
 under the reader's eyes, he invented descriptive 
 honesty. Whatever may be the admiration with 
 which he is filled, and which he allows to over- 
 flow with a sort of secret joy, he never over- 
 shoots the mark, for with him — and I insist on 
 this point — the spirit of justice is strongly de- 
 veloped, the result being that justice always 
 dominates him, forbids him those flights to 
 
The Traveller^ 117 
 
 which artists are only too much inclined, and 
 preserves him from all exaggeration. I have 
 no hesitation either in saying that Th^ophile 
 Gautier's accounts of his travels seem to me 
 superior to those of Victor Hugo. We might 
 say that the latter sees everything through a 
 magnifying glass — his vision is aggrandized ; in 
 his eyes everything becomes enormous, and the 
 landscapes and monuments are so distorted that 
 they are hardly recognisable. To go up or down 
 the Rhine after reading Victor Hugo's book is 
 to expose oneself to certain disappointment, 
 the extent of the pictures in it, the magnificence 
 of the style have altered the landscape and 
 diminished the river, the ruins, and cathedrals, 
 in the very endeavour to make them larger. 
 Such is not the case with Th^ophile Gautier, 
 the agreement between the description and the 
 object described is absolute, which in a book of 
 travels should be the dominant quality. And I 
 can quite understand how in the Rayons et les 
 Ombres Hugo exclaimed : — 
 
 " . . Oh ! si Gautier me prStait son crayon ! " ' 
 
 His preconceived ideas, born of his romantic 
 dreams about Spain, did not weaken his judg- 
 ment, and were very often dispersed by the 
 reality ; his enthusiasm was serious, but his 
 
 ' " . . . Ah ! if Gautier would only lend me his pencil ! " 
 
1 1 8 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 good faith was more serious still, and nothing 
 disturbed it. Just as he explains without 
 scruple his admiration, so without false shame 
 he notes his disappointments, and they were 
 numerous. Amongst the women he fails to 
 discover the Spanish type ; the Manola of 
 Madrid " no longer wears her costume so bold 
 and so picturesque, and a humble cotton petti- 
 coat has replaced the gay-coloured skirts em- 
 broidered with enormous flower patterns." 
 Jealousy no longer exists in love, whatever 
 may have been sung in romances or said on 
 the stage. " The Musde d'artillerie in Paris is 
 incomparably richer and more complete than 
 the Armeria of Madrid." It is not until they 
 reach Granada that the " general aspect entirely 
 surpasses any ideas one may have formed." In 
 the course of his narrative he makes everything 
 clear, and by the truth of his statements destroys 
 more than one legend which had been accepted 
 on the faith of poets, dramatists, and untrust- 
 worthy travellers. 
 
 Never, perhaps, as in this Voyage en Espagne 
 did he let it be seen how much the civilisation 
 into which he had chanced to be born weighed 
 upon him, this civilisation in which everything 
 is foreseen, where every man is labelled, and in- 
 dividual initiative is often thwarted by the exe- 
 gencies of the whole, where we are born, live. 
 
The Traveller. 1 1 9 
 
 and die according to rule, where even a certain 
 manner of dressing is compulsory, where love is 
 only legitimate with the help of the notary, where 
 pushing crowds force sensitive minds to retire 
 within themselves, and where newspaper editors 
 bully poets, and threaten to put them on dry 
 bread — he had suffered from all of these things. 
 He asks himself whether, instead of being 
 civilised as we boast ourselves, we are not 
 worn-out barbarians. To politicians, whose 
 frenzy of ambition has dragged them into civil 
 wars, he says : " In the future it will not be 
 known that you have been a great people ex- 
 cept by a few marvellous remains discovered in 
 excavations." He regrets the departure of the 
 Moors. " Spain is not made for European 
 manners. The spirit of the East is seen in all 
 its forms, and it is perhaps a pity that it did not 
 remain Moorish or Mahomedan." At Cordova, 
 in the mosque which is beautiful in spite of the 
 mutilations it has undergone, he is more positive. 
 " I have always greatly regretted for my part, 
 that the Moors did not remain masters of Spain, 
 which certainly was only a loser by their ex- 
 pulsion." 
 
 Then follow the lamentations of an artist 
 who loves colour, beautiful trappings, knightly 
 prowess, and who sometimes surveys history 
 too much through the distorting prism of 
 
I20 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 poetry. If Spain had remained under Arab 
 dominion she would never have known the 
 glories of Charles V. As Mahomet was the 
 last of the prophets, and the Koran is the last 
 revelation that God deigned to make to man- 
 kind, the people who turn towards Mecca when 
 praying to Allah are condemned to immobility, 
 that is to say, to decadence, to defeat, and sub- 
 mission. If Charles Martel, Jean Hunyade, and 
 Sobieski had not conquered the Musulmans on 
 the fields of Poitiers, Cassovia, Choczim, and 
 Vienna, Europe would perhaps to-day be gover- 
 ned by the law of the Koran, or, more properly 
 speaking, she would be lying dormant, fatalistic, 
 enfeebled, without memory of the past, without 
 ■care for the morrow, and would think her whole 
 duty fulfilled, when she had told her beads enu- 
 merating the ninety-nine attributes of God. It 
 is well to admire Arab architecture, but it must 
 be admitted that nations do not live only by 
 pilasters, sculptured stalactites, and fretted pen- 
 datives. 
 
 Theophile Gautier, who had not then been to 
 Algeria or Cairo, imagined Arab life to be quite 
 different from what it is, above all from what it 
 was. Failing the reality, he tried to imagine 
 it for himself, and he obtained permission 
 to inhabit the Alhambra, to sleep there, and 
 wander about as though he were in his own 
 
The Traveller. 121 
 
 palace. His imagination without doubt did not 
 fail to people it in his own way, and to give 
 fites there in which Oriental dancers danced the 
 "Bee" to the sound of the derbouka and the 
 double flute, for he wrote : " We remained there 
 four days and four nights, which were the most 
 delightful hours of my life." I am persuaded 
 that the love of art alone made those moments 
 as delightful as he says, however I recall this 
 verse from Emaux et Cainees : — 
 
 " Au sou des guitars d'Espagne 
 Ma voix longtemps la celebra ; 
 Ella vint, un jour, sans campagne, 
 Et ma chambre fut I'Alhambra." ' 
 
 Is he only drawn by a kind of retrospective love 
 towards the epoch of the Moorish dominion, 
 which he imagined more epic, more grandiose 
 than it was ? It seems to me that if he returns 
 to the past, it is in a spirit of opposition, with 
 a feeling of anger against the habits of civilisa- 
 tion, Parisian habits, which he escaped from 
 with eagerness, and which pursued him on all 
 sides in the towns, on the roads, even into the 
 villages buried in the depths of their valleys. 
 
 ■ " To the sound of Spanish guitars 
 My voice long time extolled her ; 
 She came one day alone, 
 And my home was the Alhambra." 
 
122 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 To seek local colour, brilliant costumes, som- 
 breros, and only to find frock coats, trousers, 
 opera hats, long dresses, and leg-of-mutton 
 sleeves is hard, it makes him suffer, and he 
 cannot be silent about it. In 1840 "Paris 
 fashions" had already begun to be general, 
 and to take the place of the costume of the 
 country, the originality of which was a delight 
 to the eyes of the artist. What is it then that 
 in our day the great outfitting establishments 
 " for men and women," with the help of rail- 
 ways, have done with their uniformity of colour, 
 of cut, and stuff, the principal object of their 
 exportation? The whole of Europe dresses in 
 the same manner, is that why their dress is so 
 ugly ? " It is a sad sight," says Thdophile 
 Gautier, " for the poet, the artist, and the philo- 
 sopher to see forms and colours disappearing 
 from the world, lines distorted, colours confused, 
 and the most hopeless uniformity invading the 
 universe, under I know not what pretence of 
 progress." And further on : " It will become 
 impossible to distinguish a Russian from a 
 Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, a 
 Frenchman from an American. We shall not 
 even be able to distinguish ourselves from one 
 another for all the world will be alike. Then 
 the universe will be filled with great weariness, 
 and suicide will decimate the population of the 
 
The Traveller. \ 2 5 
 
 globe, for the moving spirit of life will be ex- 
 tinguished — curiosity." We have not arrived at 
 suicide yet, only at pessimism, which is the 
 yawning of the mind ; but with all due defer- 
 ence to Gautier's shade, I do not think that 
 costume has anything to do with it. 
 
 If as being more convenient in everyday life, 
 for economy perhaps, certainly from a spirit of 
 imitation, Spain has little by little severed her- 
 self from the manners of her ancestors, she has 
 returned to those manners again entirely, and 
 resuscitated them in a barbarous, glittering,. 
 Oriental way in her bull- fights, which seem to 
 be a necessity of the people and a glory of 
 the nation. In assisting at them Gautier could 
 hardly contain himself for joy ; he is " pos- 
 sessed" as we should say to-day; neither the 
 long wait nor the torrid heat could lessen his 
 curiosity, he associated himself with the emo- 
 tions of the crowd, and like it he was intoxicated 
 with the carnage. This man, whose gentleness 
 was proverbial, this poet, whose intelligent 
 courtesy respected every form of life even in 
 the flowers which he disliked to pluck from 
 their stems, this philosopher, whom violence in- 
 spired with horror, is filled with admiration for 
 the sanguinary spectacle, he exults in it, claps 
 his hands, and he also is breathless, and ac- 
 cording to the fortunes of the struggle cries 
 
124 Tk^ophile Gautier. 
 
 out, Bravo Toro ! or Bravo Torero ! Strange 
 contradiction, only to be explained by the ex- 
 treme development of his artistic sense, by the 
 attraction of a drama in which nothing is ficti- 
 tious, by the enthusiasm which courage inspires, 
 even when it is useless and cruel. 
 
 Whenever during his journey he could be 
 present at a bull-fight, Th^ophile Gautier never 
 missed it, and he is always ready to laugh at the 
 timid sentimental moralists — of whom I am one 
 — who blame the taste for this barbarous enter- 
 tainment ; he has taken care to underline these 
 two last words in order to prove in what con- 
 tempt he held the " bourgeois " who did not 
 shrink from using such pitiful commonplaces to 
 express the stupidity of their thoughts. He 
 travels night and day, and doubles the stages 
 of his journey so as to arrive at an opportune 
 time at Malaga, where bull-fights are being 
 arranged which promise to be full of interest. 
 The interest was not lacking, for in the space of 
 three days twenty- four bulls were brought 
 low, and ninety-six horses disembowelled. The 
 most celebrated spada (swordsman) of that time 
 in Spain, Montes de Chiclana, was applauded 
 like an emperor on the day of his triumph, and 
 also hissed like a run-away dog. It would seem 
 that for such persons no less than for Mirabeau, 
 the Tarpeian rock is not far from the Capitol. 
 
The Traveller. 125 
 
 Montes, finding himself battling against a dan^ 
 gerous animal, killed it in some irregular manner. 
 
 " When they understood the blow," says Gautier, 
 " a storm of abuse and hisses burst forth in an extra- 
 ordinary din and uproar : ' Butcher, assassin, brigand, 
 thief, galley-slave, hangman ! ' were the gentlest terms 
 used. 'To the galleys with Months, burn him, set the 
 dogs upon him ! ' I never saw such fury, and I own 
 with shame that I shared in it. Vociferations did not 
 long suffice, they began to pelt the poor devil with 
 fans, hats, sticks, jars full of water, and fragments of 
 torn up benches." 
 
 After the fight Months left, " swearing by all his 
 gods that he would never set foot in Malaga 
 again." Just punishment, noble pride ! Would 
 one not say Coriolanus leaving Rome, or Scipio 
 composing his epitaph: Nee ossa qjcidem habebis! 
 That the vanity of these slayers of beasts 
 should be excessive, and consequently slightly 
 comical is not surprising. Their glory, that is 
 to say, the uproar that arises about them, is all 
 the more resounding that it lasts so short a 
 time. The enthusiasm of the multitude is like 
 a thunderstorm, which makes much noise, and 
 when it calms down often leaves only ruins 
 behind it. Montes was the king of the day, 
 and the idol of Spain, it was felt to be an 
 honour to wear his colours, and the women 
 
126 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 whom destiny reserved for thrones, made him 
 take his seat beside them in their carriages after 
 the fight. From Santandar to Tarifa, from 
 Salamanca to Tortosa there was not a heart 
 that did not beat for him ; he enjoyed every 
 sort of delight, and might imagine himself the 
 national hero, and compare himself to Bernard 
 de Carpio. Gautier, rather blase in the matter of 
 successes in the theatre or the arena, of which 
 he had so often been a spectator, is profoundly 
 touched by the ovations made to the Torero, and 
 he says with his usual good faith : " For such 
 Tiomage I can understand that one would risk 
 his life every minute, and that it would not be 
 paying too high a price." So be it, I will not 
 cavil at it, though I have no such longing for 
 my part ; but I think that Gautier went too far, 
 and exceeded his own thought, when in speaking 
 of the moment in which the Torero is face to face 
 with the bull, he writes : " It is difficult to ex- 
 press in words the curiosity full of agony, the 
 frenzied attention, which this situation excites, 
 and which is worth all Shakespeare's dramas." 
 Is that all .'' No, the impression must have been 
 of singular violence to allow him, the poet, the 
 man of delicate feeling, the lover of beautiful 
 pictures, and charming verse, to make the 
 following avowal when coming out of the 
 Malaga Theatre : 
 
77/1? Traveller. 127 
 
 " I reflected upon the striking contrast between the 
 crowd of the circus, and the solitude of the theatre, 
 of the eagerness of the multitude for the brutal deed, 
 and its indifference to the speculations of the mind. 
 A poet myself, I began to envy the gladiator, and to 
 regret having quitted a life of action for one of 
 dreaming. The evening before a piece of Lopes de 
 Vega's had been played, which did not draw at all ; 
 thus antique genius, and modern talent, are not worth 
 a thrust of the sword of Months ! " 
 
 Horace never regretted not being an auda- 
 bate,i a bestiarius,^ or mirmillon,3 and has 
 w^ritten Odi profaniim vulgiis et arceo. Is it 
 then nothing to outlive oneself, and Gautier 
 talking in that manner, does he not see that 
 he is forsaking the substance for the shadow .'' 
 The Torrero's sword-thrust, the " soul " of the 
 singer, the chest-note of the tenor, the grimace 
 of the clown, the gesture of the tragedian, the 
 undulating movements of the dancer, the intona- 
 tions of a beautiful voice, the walk of a Phedre, 
 the fury of a Camilles, the smile of a C^limenes, 
 rouse the admiration of the public, who are eager 
 to carry in triumph those to whom they owe 
 a few minutes of emotion. Gladiators and 
 virtuosi, clowns and reciters, have had their day, 
 
 ' Gladiator who fought blindfold. 
 
 ° Gladiator who had to fight with wild beasts. 
 
 3 Gladiator who fought with the retiarius. 
 
128 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 that day passed all is at an end for them. 
 Death puts the sword in its scabbard, ex- 
 tinguishes the voice, stops the gesture, inter- 
 rupts the dance, and nothing remains, not even 
 a positive remembrance, for words are powerless 
 to make us understand the motive for these 
 ovations, and ephemeral celebrities. A quatrain, 
 a page of prose, a picture, a statuette, suffice to 
 immortalise a man. Real glory is that which 
 consists in holding one's proofs in hand. It is 
 worth more to have written a drinking song, 
 than to have killed all the bulls in Spain. 
 
 Ah 1 Gautier, my old friend, if Montes is not 
 yet completely forgotten, it is perhaps because 
 you .spoke of him. Alfred de Vigny was certainly 
 inspired, and nobly claimed his due, when, after 
 having considered his ancestors, gone over their 
 papers, and visited their tombs, he exclaimed : 
 
 " C'est en vain que d'eux tous le sang m'a fait 
 descendre ; 
 Si j'ecris leur histoire, ils descendront de 
 moi." ' 
 
 Let us give to Months what belongs to 
 Montes — courage, and a cheer — and to the poet 
 his due — inspiration, grandeur of thought, and 
 lasting renown. 
 
 " " In vain my blood descends from them ; 
 
 If I write their history, they will descend from me." 
 
The Traveller. 129 
 
 During the six months that Th^ophile Gautier 
 passed in Spain he was happy, or at least con- 
 tented, although our modern civilisation was in 
 some respects more advanced there than was 
 to his liking. In this respect he seems to be 
 a little unjust, for it took him no less than 
 four and a half days to accomplish the thirty 
 leagues that separate Malaga from Cordova, so 
 that in this particular at least Spanish civilisa- 
 tion, or whatever took its place at that time, 
 took pains to play the coquette with him. He 
 always loved that country after he had travelled 
 through it, firstly because it was the first foreign 
 country he visited, secondly because he there 
 experienced new emotions which charmed him, 
 and lastly because he was young, vigorous, full 
 of eager curiosity, without any heavy burdens 
 in life, with no regrets for the past, without 
 anxiety for the future, and because his talent 
 seemed ripe and full of hope. And so he loved 
 Spain, and often between two feuilletons he 
 would escape, cross the Pyrenees, breathe the 
 air of the Sierras, go and see a bull-fight, and 
 revived by this runaway visit to the friendly 
 country of his dream, take up with less weari- 
 ness his evening task at the theatre, his weekly 
 work on the paper. 
 
 When he disembarked at Port Vendres in the 
 month of October, 1840, he felt that he was 
 10 
 
130 Tkdophile Gautier. 
 
 leaving behind him something which he would 
 never find again. 
 
 " Shall I confess to you ? In putting foot on my 
 native soil I felt the tears, not of joy but of regret, 
 rise to my eyes. The red towers and silver sum- 
 mits of the Sierra Nevada, the oleanders of the 
 Generalife Palace at Grenada, the ardent gaze of 
 velvet eyes, the lips of carnation, the little feet and 
 hands, all that came back to me so vividly, that this 
 France of ours seemed to me a land of exile. My 
 dream was ended." 
 
 This is the regret of the poet, who wished to 
 see again the scenes and vestiges of bygone 
 worlds which he had admired. In noting this 
 impression of sadness, well-known to travellers, 
 Gautier forgets how, fifteen days before, in an 
 inn at Carmona, he had been moved at the 
 sight of coloured lithographs representing some 
 scenes of the July Revolution. " It was a little 
 bit of France framed and hung on the wall." 
 Here again the note is true ; in a strange 
 country, wherever it may be, everything that 
 recalls one's native land stirs the heart, and 
 brings tears to the eyes. 
 
 Gautier did not deceive himself ; the love of 
 travel had taken possession of him, a tyrannical 
 longing which is a sort of reversed home-sick- 
 
The IVaveller. 131 
 
 ness, and which becomes acute suffering when 
 not satisfied. Therefore as soon as he " had 
 saved a small sum" he departed. In 1845 he 
 travelled through Algeria, and this journey was 
 to result in a book written and " illustrated " by 
 himself. He was at work upon it when the 
 February Revolution, making of his editor a 
 bankrupt and politician, interrupted the work 
 which was never taken up again, and only a 
 few fragments of which ever appeared. If, as 
 Gautier wrote, his entrance on la Presse in 1836 
 put an end to the independence of his life, we 
 might say that the 1848 Revolution destroyed 
 the peace of his existence. It is from that date, 
 in fact, that his difficulties increased about him, 
 and pressed upon him so heavily, that more than 
 once he was on the point of succumbing to 
 them. By dint of patience, and by assiduous 
 labour, he conquered his ill-luck ; he extricated 
 himself from the morass in which he had so 
 long struggled, and got clear of it, when the 
 Revolution of September 4, 1870, plunged him 
 intoit anew. Painful irony of fate, to strike at 
 a man through politics, who had always been so 
 indifferent on the subject, that he probably did 
 not know the names of the Ministers of his 
 time. A few months before his end, when he 
 was worn out under the weight of his own ruin, 
 he exclaimed : " I am a victim of Revolutions." 
 
132 Thdophile Gatdier. 
 
 They smiled at him, but they were wrong : he 
 only spoke the truth. 
 
 In 1850, accompanied by Louis de Cormenin, 
 whom he loved dearly, he started for Italy, and 
 travelled through it from the Duomo d'Ossola 
 to Naples. He prolonged his stay by about two 
 months at Venice, which had just again been 
 taken possession of by the Austrian eagle. It 
 was then certainly the sad and touching city 
 of which Edgar Quinet spoke : " Venice dead,, 
 upon her cushion of silk, and rowed by her 
 gondolier through the tempest to the Valley of 
 Jehoshaphat." Thank heaven, she has revived 
 before the last judgment ! Gautier was carried 
 away by the ancient city of the Doges, the 
 Council of Ten, the gondolas, and the Piazza 
 of St. Mark. The book which he dedicated to it 
 — Italia — is known to every one. The large 
 amount of talent which it is agreed is contained 
 in every page of the Voyage d'Espagne, is con- 
 firmed and concentrated in this volume. Reality 
 — I do not say realism — has never been carried 
 so far. Later Gautier did as well ; he never did 
 better, neither in describing the Golden Horn, 
 nor when from the top of the Kremlin he takes 
 a comprehensive view of Moscow. A phrase, 
 sometimes even a word, is sufficient to call up 
 a spell the power of which is astonishing. What 
 traveller, having been to Venice, does not feel 
 
The Traveller. 133 
 
 as though he had penetrated into St. Mark's 
 on reading the following : " The first impression 
 is that of a cavern of gold, encrusted with 
 precious stones, magnificent and sombre, at 
 once brilliant and mysterious " ? The whole of 
 Venice thus reviewed, palpitates and revives, 
 and even should she disappear in an inundation 
 caused by the Adriatic breaking through the 
 barriers of the Murazzi, we shall find her again 
 under Gautier's pen. What he did for Venice, 
 he wished to do for Florence, Rome, Naples, 
 and Pompeii, from which he would a second 
 time have cleared away the cinders of Vesuvius. 
 This was only a project which he never realised, 
 not for want of the will, but for want of time. 
 
 It is difficult to understand that not one 
 of the Governments under which Thdophile 
 Gautier lived, had the intelligence to turn to 
 account the exceptional gifts of this poet- 
 traveller, whose truth was so unimpeachable. 
 Why did they not take him away from the 
 paper, and turn him loose upon the world of 
 •the Ancients — the East — which attracted him, 
 and which he could only skim across, for every 
 one of his halting-places was counted by the 
 pages of copy which he sent to his paper ; he 
 appraised the kilometers by the number of lines 
 which they cost him. What books he would 
 have brought back from Egypt, Palestine, Syria, 
 
134 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Mesopotamia, Hindustan, China, and Japan f 
 No one thought about it, I dare say, "in the 
 lofty regions of power " ; no one troubled to 
 increase our literary riches, and as Gautier was 
 neither a learned prig, nor wearisome, they 
 despised him. The very first virtue of a states- 
 man should be discernment. Those who ought 
 to have occupied themselves about Gautier 
 can have had very little, for not one of them 
 was able to recognise his eminent qualities. It 
 is to the detriment of French literature that 
 they left him to sleep on the bed of Procrustes 
 of the dramatic reports, where he was always 
 cramped, and could never stretch himself. 
 
 I know well that Gautier possessed wit, fore- 
 sight, a high degree of originality, and a manner 
 of expressing himself that was quite irreproach- 
 able ; it is just that and no more that is required 
 amongst " the most witty people on earth " in 
 order that a man may never be taken seriously. 
 " Ah ! you are not an imbecile ; well, then you 
 are fit for nothing ! " I must add, so as to omit 
 nothing, that the red doublet, and long hair, 
 worn at the first performance of Hernani 
 overshadowed his whole existence, just as the 
 Ballade A la Lune and le Point sur un i weighed 
 on Alfred de Musset's. 
 
 In 1852 Gautier went to Constantinople, in 
 1858 to Russia; both these journeys, like the 
 
The Traveller. 135 
 
 others, were made with sheaves of copy from 
 day to day, and there were at times terrible 
 anxieties, when the cashier of the paper or the 
 post was behindhand. At the inauguration of 
 the Suez Canal he embarked for Egypt, this time 
 at the expense of the Journal officiel. Ill luck 
 pursued the poor poet, who was rejoiced at the 
 thought of going to salute Abou-Vhoul (the 
 father of terror), that is to say, the Sphinx of 
 Gyzeh, climbing the Pyramids, and ascending 
 the Nile as far as Ibsambul. On board the 
 Mceris, the steamer which was taking him to 
 Alexandria, he fell down and broke his left 
 arm. He resigned himself with outward phi- 
 losophy which did not give way, but the devil 
 lost nothing thereby. Instead of making a 
 new volume out of this journey, he was obliged 
 to content himself with writing a few summary 
 articles which were added to others in V Orient. ' 
 One of his last journeys exercised an extra- 
 ordinary influence over him which he had not 
 foreseen. After having visited Constantinople, 
 which took him somewhat out of his way, and 
 pleased him but little, doubtless on account of 
 the anxiety of mind which he suffered there, he 
 stopped four days at Athens, and then resumed 
 his journey towards Venice — his dear Venice, 
 so much admired, so beloved, so regretted — and 
 
 ' V Orient, 2 vols. Charpentier, vol. ii. from p. 91 to 228. 
 
136 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 there he rested. The second day after his 
 arrival he wrote a letter to Louis de Cormenin, 
 which I have before my eyes now, and from 
 which I copy the following passage, that testifies 
 to the loyalty of an artist incapable of deceiving 
 others while trying to deceive himself : 
 
 " I was enraptured with Athens. Beside the Par- 
 thenon everything appears barbarous and coarse ; one 
 feels that one is Muscogulge, Uscoque, and Mohican 
 before those pure marbles, so radiant and serene. 
 Modern painting seems nothing but the tattooing 
 of cannibals, and statuary a mere kneading of gro- 
 tesques. Returning from Athens, Venice seemed 
 to me trivial and fantastically decadent. Such is 
 my crude impression." 
 
 He toned down the form of this impres- 
 sion later, though he kept to it where he says 
 in his autobiography: "I liked cathedrals very 
 much on the faith of Notre Dame de Paris, but 
 the sight of the Parthenon cured me of the 
 Gothic malady never very strong in me." 
 
 In the matter of admiration it is not bad to 
 have several maladies ; I avow for my part that 
 the Parthenon, the sight of which produced an 
 inexpressible emotion within me, did not in the 
 least prevent me from admiring the temples of 
 Karnac, and that even after having stayed some 
 time at Athens I could never enter Venice with- 
 
. The Traveller. 137 
 
 out emotion. In the expansion of human 
 genius, every superior manifestation finds its 
 place, and has a right to be revered. The 
 pantheon of art contains more than one 
 divinity ; it seems to me wise to honour them, 
 while keeping one's own particular devotion, and 
 offering oblations to such of them as identify 
 themselves the most with our aspirations. It is 
 not expedient to say to artists : " You shall 
 adore one God only." The paradise of art is 
 made like Homer's Olympus ; the gods there 
 jostle one another, love one another, and quarrel, 
 and are none the less gods. 
 
 In juxtaposition to Th^ophile Gautier's 
 opinion, I will place that of M. Daveluy, an old 
 pupil of the normal school, a valued professor, 
 a dignitary of the University. He was director 
 of the French school at Athens, when I arrived 
 there towards the end of the year 1850. I went 
 to call upon him, and while conversing with him 
 I could see through the open window the Acro- 
 polis, bathed in light, which supported the Par- 
 thenon, the temple of the Winged Victory, and 
 the Pandrosium, like a triple diadem of beauty, 
 grace, and elegance. I said to him : " How 
 happy you are to be able to contemplate that 
 wonder work every hour of the day ! " I had 
 made a mistake. Daveluy flung up his arms 
 angrily and cried out : " Shut the blinds, draw 
 
138 Thdophile Gatttier. 
 
 the curtains, the sight is painful to me ; the 
 Parthenon is wearisome, I do not wish any one to 
 talk to me about it, this Greece is to me a land 
 of exile and trial, it is easy to see that you are 
 not forced to live here ! " Then, growing tender 
 and with tears in his eyes, he continued, " Ah I 
 the Luxembourg garden, the courtyard of the 
 Sorbonne, my old Sorbonne in the rue Saint 
 Jacques ! " He repeated over and over again in 
 a moved voice, " the rue Saint Jacques, the rue 
 Saint Jacques ! " Then he let his head fall 
 between his hands and remained silent The 
 poor man regretted his own country, and did not 
 care much for Ictinus, Calicrates and Phidias. 
 He was still, much against his will, at Athens 
 when Thdophile Gautier passed through it ; if 
 they met their conversation should have been 
 interesting. 
 
 Gautier's opinion, as a member of the Chiacle, a 
 leader of great battles fought against the classic, 
 may seem strange, but it is not so however, and 
 did not surprise any one of those who knew him 
 intimately. Like the youth of his time, like the 
 dreamers and artists, feeling that there was 
 " something in it," he had been enticed and led 
 away by the Romanticist movement, which was 
 mistaken for a revolt, and which was — happily 
 — a revolution out of which grew a new order of 
 things literary. He had his exaggerations, his 
 
The Traveller. 139 
 
 " flare-up," his excessive enthusiasms, he loved 
 daggers, morions, and shoes turned up at the 
 toes, that is all right. To be of some value 
 when one is grown up, perhaps one ought 
 to have been an insurgent in one's years of 
 adolescence. In spite of the follies of the new 
 school, with which he was associated if he was 
 not the promoter of it, Th^ophile Gautier had a 
 remarkably well-balanced mind ; however he 
 might preach excitement, he loved upright 
 dealing, and his admirations were always for the 
 most sober-minded of the masters. The delicacy 
 of a stroke, the subtlety of an idea, grace of form,, 
 fascinated him, and he could not resist them, 
 even though he wished to do so. Joubert's 
 Pens^es, which he never ceased to praise, he 
 kept for a long time always beside his bed. 
 Neither Spain nor Italy had completely satisfied 
 him. When at Athens he saw the " temple of 
 such radiant perfection," he was intoxicated. 
 "There, in truth, placed upon the Acropolis as 
 upon a golden tripod, in the midst of a 
 sculptural choir of the mountains of Attica, 
 shines forth for ever true beauty, absolute, 
 perfect." The monuments and landscapes of 
 Hellas seemed to him like something already 
 seen, as though after a long exile he were 
 returning to his longed-for native land. In 
 presence of the most complete efflorescence of 
 
140 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 this Greek Art which Shelley called " the Art of 
 the gods," he felt himself transfigured, and at 
 that moment which counted in his life he could 
 say : 
 
 " Je vols, je sais, je crois, je suis d^sabus6." ■ 
 
 In reality Theophile Gautier, whom they liked 
 to compare to a Turk or a Hindoo, because they 
 were mistaken in his apparent indolence, which 
 hid a rare acuteness of thought, was neither one 
 nor the other, he was much more Greek — a Greek 
 of the grand period, of that epoch the brilliance 
 of which has not yet died out, for it still sheds 
 light upon humanity. After his journey to 
 Greece, in conversation with his intimates, 
 Gautier, when he was in a mood to believe in 
 the transmigration of souls, would declare that 
 he had lived at Athens in the time of Pericles, . 
 and would relate his conversations with Eschylus, 
 and Aristophanes, who he said was sad like all 
 comedians ; he would demonstrate that Aspasia 
 little deserved her reputation, and would 
 recollect that he had found the banquet immor- 
 talised by Plato wearisome. He would say all 
 this with his hardly-perceptible smile, that some- 
 timeg revealed so many mental reservations. 
 Was he paradoxical ? I do not know, for his 
 ' " I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived." 
 
The Traveller. 141 
 
 imagination was sufficiently powerful to deceive 
 himself. 
 
 The sight of the Parthenon revealed to him 
 what he had sought in vain in many countries^ 
 and under many manifestations of art — abstract 
 beauty. He needed no conversion, he recog- 
 nised his god and adored him. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE STORY-TELLER. 
 
 IT was neither against art, nor against poetry, 
 nor against the Greek theatre, that 
 Romanticism made a stand ; it was against 
 clumsy imitations of masterpieces, against an 
 enfeebled literature, a decadent architecture, 
 that under pretext of respect for tradition, 
 repeated itself ceaselessly, reproducing forms of 
 which it had lost the secret, and seeming to fall 
 back into infancy^ — it was not marble that they 
 spurned, but pasteboard statuary. It was high 
 time for a reaction, for they had arrived at the 
 last stage of senility. In opposition to frontals, 
 and cupolas, they fell into an excess of the 
 gothic, proclaimed the superiority of the arcade 
 over the architrave, nearly died of joy before the 
 cathedrals, and attempted a resurrection of the 
 Middle Ages, that, in many cases was nothing but 
 a masquerade. Seriously minded people were 
 carried away, Michelet himself was caught by it, 
 and did not hesitate later to cry mea culpa, 
 when he saw that his good faith had been duped 
 
The Story-Teller. 143 
 
 by itself. What has been forgotten to-day is 
 that the clergy, without openly espousing the 
 quarrel that raged between the two inimical 
 camps, leaned towards Romanticism and sup- 
 ported it without much concealment. There is 
 nothing to surprise us in this. 
 
 Romanticism, logical in its return towards 
 the Middle Ages, frankly acknowledged the God 
 of the crusades and St. Louis, to the detriment 
 of pagan divinities, whom poetry had overdone 
 ad nauseam. It was an impulse not without its 
 value, but there was another, more grave in its 
 consequences, and that was only acknowledged 
 in a low voice between " wise and discreet 
 persons." The taste for Gothic art, so long 
 proscribed as barbarous, sprang up again with 
 singular vigour. The ogival churches with 
 pointed windows, florid and magnificent, fell 
 into ruins, and the public disdained to trouble 
 itself about them. There was an outcry against 
 such vandalism, agitations, and protestations, and 
 the clergy gave their support to these manifes- 
 tations, which might lead to the restoration of 
 religious edifices that had suffered by time, and 
 reinstate such of them as since the Revolution 
 had ceased to be consecrated to worship. It 
 was thus, by this crooked path, that the 
 Romanticist movement, impelled by a motive 
 power strange to art, sprang from the studios 
 
144 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 where it was hatched, and peneti'ated into 
 society, which at that time still exercised a 
 certain influence over opinion. The Middle 
 Ages became the fashion, I will not mention the 
 authors who were celebrated then, and I will not 
 tell after them — come et tonnerre ! — of the 
 escapades in haketons ^ and hennins ^ which 
 were the delight of the fair ladies of the day. 
 Why should we disturb the dead ? 
 
 Th^ophile Gautier was given the watchword 
 and did not conform to it. Victor Hugo had 
 just obtained one of the most brilliant successes 
 ever known, with his publication of Notre Dame 
 de Paris. Gautier thought well of it, but he did 
 not choose to quarrel over the leavings of the 
 master with the neophytes who picked them up 
 with more ardour than originality. He left the 
 Middle Ages to others, and would have nothing 
 to do with them : if in passing he refers to them 
 in les Jeune-France, it is with a want of respect. 
 He wished certainly to adopt their principles,, 
 encourage their efforts, to stand by the comba- 
 tants and inspirit them, but on condition of 
 fighting a partisan fight with his own arms 
 under his own banner. Like Alfred de Musset 
 he understood how to maintain his indepen- 
 dence, and he did maintain it until his last 
 hour, keeping his individuality intact, and not 
 
 ' A jacket or tunic without sleeves. ^ Steeple-headdresses. 
 
The Story-Teller. 145 
 
 allowing himself to be influenced, in spite of the, 
 devotion which he professed for Victor Hugo. 
 
 It has been said that there was a want of 
 energy about Gautier, and that he allowed him- 
 self to be easily influenced by others, but that 
 was a mistake. They mistook his kindliness for 
 weakness, and if in his daily articles he did not 
 always feel obliged to resist the claims of com- 
 radeship, it was wrong to conclude from that 
 that his opinions were vacillating and his con- 
 victions uncertain. He was a traveller, story- 
 teller, poet, — necessity, I repeat, made of him a 
 critic, a very honourable profession assuredly, 
 but which did not suit his nature, he has reiter- 
 ated this often enough for us not to doubt it ; 
 for that very reason he exercised his profession 
 with a good nature which has been described as 
 commonplace. They would have done better 
 to say that the insignificance of most of the 
 works that he had to speak about — how many 
 are mentioned now? — was such that it was 
 indifferent to him whether he praised or blamed 
 them. He lent to the side of praise led by his 
 easy temper, and also by that spirit of justice 
 which I have pointed out in him. He took into 
 account the attempt, and feared the prejudice 
 which severe though just remarks might have 
 upon it. He would tone down what he had to 
 say, and often had nothing but indulgence when 
 II 
 
146 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 he would have been justified in censuring. Those 
 even who profited by his benevolence turned 
 him into ridicule, and accused him of want of 
 character. They were ungrateful, which was 
 natural to them, but they passed a decree 
 which was flagrantly unjust. In what concerns 
 his artistic convictions Gautier was an indepen- 
 dent, he never made any concessions to the 
 literary fashions of his day ; he accepted 
 Romanticist theories without reserve, and 
 pressed them into the service of his originality 
 which they developed, but he only made use of 
 such of them as it suited him to take. He 
 remained what he wished to be, the knight- 
 errant of the new literature, without any other 
 tie but admiration for the general-in-chief, and 
 sympathy with the soldiers. He marched alone, 
 accepting no yoke, not even that of Victor Hugo. 
 To be convinced of this, to understand how 
 personal is his note, one has only to re-read his 
 novels. Above the tumult, in the midst of those 
 clamorously flourishing trumpets, which ex- 
 hausted themselves by their own efforts, they 
 seem like the tones of a violoncello, the vibration 
 of which is prolonged, harmonious and charming, 
 with all the vigour and purity of the initial note, 
 although more than fifty years have passed since 
 the master took up his bow for the first time. 
 Hugo remains in possession of an undisputed, 
 
The Story-Teller. 147 
 
 undisputable glory, lighting up a whole epoch 
 with its radiance ; but without committing the 
 sin of irony, we may point out that the two 
 poets of his school, who remained since his 
 advent the most fresh and living, are just those 
 who separated themselves most from him, 
 Th^ophile Gautier, and Alfred de Musset. 
 
 The first thing that Gautier wrote when he 
 was hardly twenty-two, at the hour of the 
 most violent outburst of Romanticism, strangely 
 resembles a satire. He does not refrain from 
 laughing at eccentricities which he was the 
 first not to shirk himself, in a word, he 
 criticises the historical methods of the new 
 school. Hear what he says of Wildmanstadius, 
 the man of the Middle Ages, " He would have 
 related to you, point by point, the chronicle 
 of the petty Breton king, prior to Gralon and 
 Conan, and you would have surprised him very 
 much by speaking of Napoleon," which proves 
 that admiration and impertinence may go well 
 together. I know that the poem Albertus, com- 
 posed upon the very altar of the new gods, 
 should redeem these peccadilloes, but it was 
 interesting to prove that from the beginning 
 Gautier reserves his prose, he is an ally not a 
 liege man. 
 
 The different articles which collected together 
 form the volume Jeune-France, are doubtless only 
 
148 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 one of those paroxysms of gaiety and buffoonery 
 that burst forth in youth like the blossoming of 
 spring ; for it is the happy age in which one 
 laughs for laughing's sake over everything, 
 at others, and at oneself. We may believe 
 then that if Gautier treats of a subject, at 
 once sweet and sad, having in it something 
 legendary, he will treat it in the Romanticist 
 fashion, with a few grindings of the teeth and 
 suggestions of epilepsy. The first article which 
 he published at his own fancy is dated 1833 ; 
 it is the first pearl of this literary rosary that he 
 tells with so sure, so elegant a hand, le Nid de 
 rossignols — who does not remember it? Two 
 sisters, young and beautiful, possess an exclusive 
 love of music, and most marvellous voices ; 
 they enter into a contest with a nightingale 
 which expires of jealou.sy, first confiding to 
 them his nest containing three little ones crying 
 out to be fed. The nightingales are adopted by 
 the two singers, who, they also, die worn out by 
 their passion while singing a song of super- 
 human beauty, which the little nightingales 
 receive that they may repeat it before the 
 eternal throne. " God afterwards made of 
 these three nightingales the souls of Palestrina, 
 Cimarosa, and the Chevalier Gluck." It is 
 simply told, without any striving after super- 
 fluous poetry of style, without any eccentricities ; 
 
The Story-Teller. 149 
 
 the expression is irreproachable, and the style 
 already presents those qualities which give 
 promise of the master hand. I feel that this 
 is romantic, but I do not see in it any of the 
 Romanticism such as it was conceived to be in 
 1833. One might say it was a protest ; I am 
 persuaded that it was not premeditated, but it 
 is there none the less, all the more clear that 
 it was spontaneous, and, so to say, unconscious. 
 Unknown to himself, perhaps, Gautier was 
 choosing his particular path. If le Nid de 
 rossignols is a d^but in prose works of im- 
 agination, it does not much resemble that of 
 Victor Hugo in his Han d'Islande, which 
 trenches so nearly on the grotesque, that it 
 descends into it oftener than one would wish. 
 This discretion from which Gautier never 
 swerves, is the result of that balance of mind 
 to which I have already called attention, and 
 which was, whatever may have been said of it, 
 one of the characteristic tokens of his talent. 
 It is through it that he could hold aloof naturally 
 from the caricatures and brutalities, of what he 
 himself called the epileptic insanities of the 
 repertory of the Bouffes-Parisiens, and unhealthy 
 romances. Like the sculptures on the Temple 
 of Apollo Epicurius, which represent the combat 
 of the Centaurs and the Lapithae, he remains 
 correct and veracious, so to speak, in painting 
 
150 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 the most violent scenes. That is how in his 
 Voyage en Espagne he has been able minutely 
 to relate the incidents of the bull-fights without 
 ever falling into extremes or trivialities ; if he is 
 present at a scene calculated to stir one's heart 
 with disgust, he contents himself with saying : 
 
 "The last bull was abandoned to the amateurs, 
 who invaded the arena in a tumult, and killed it 
 with stabs of their knives, for such is the passion 
 of Andalusians for these bull-fights, that they are 
 not content to remain spectators, but must even 
 take part in them, or they would retire unsatiated." 
 
 If such a fact had been reproduced by Lottin 
 de Laval, Alphonse Brot, or Petrus Borel, 
 what an orgie of epithets and a riot of super- 
 latives we should have had ! Gautier, initiated 
 into all the resources of the art of writing, 
 understood that exaggerated expression neutra- 
 lises the vigour of it, and weakens the effect. 
 
 In our day, when literary passions, and the dis- 
 putes of the schools are calmed down almost to a 
 state of collapse, we are surprised at the growing 
 moderation of Gautier, for it does not quite agree 
 with the fame that the ultra-Classicists of his time 
 have awarded him. At the little-regretted time 
 when I was still at college, one of our professors, 
 a learned Greek scholar of some notoriety, would 
 talk to us sometimes of the " intemperate in- 
 
Ttw Story-Teller. 151 
 
 novators " — it was his phrase — who threw ballads 
 into the garden of le Franc de Pompignan. 
 One day we asked him what he thought of 
 Thdophile Gautier ; he made a grimace, and 
 replied : " I think nothing of him, for I have 
 had no leisure as yet to study the Iroquois 
 language." Among the followers of Marmontel, 
 father oiDenys le tyran, and La Harpe, the com- 
 piler of a Philoctete, which did not succeed in 
 obscuring the memory of Sophocles, this opinion 
 seems to have been general. They spoke of 
 the looseness of his style, and accused him of 
 drawing and quartering the French language. 
 It is always so when passion leads superficial 
 folk astray, and they are so numerous that their 
 name is legion. All feeling of justice disappears, 
 as is obvious enough at that time when they 
 accused Victor Hugo's verses of being coarse, 
 disconnected and rough, and when they repeated 
 with joy this epigram, which was celebrated, and 
 which the reader perhaps remembers : 
 
 " Oil done Hugo, juchera-t-on ton nom ; 
 justice enfin que faite ne t'a-t-on ? 
 Quand done au corps qu'acad^mique on nomme 
 Grimperas-tu de roc en roc, rare homme ? " ' 
 
 ' ' ' Where then, Hugo, will they place thy name ; 
 Why have they not at last done thee justice ? 
 How soon into the Academic Corps, so named, 
 Wilt thou climb from rock to rock rare man ?" 
 
152 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 This was just a fit of ill-humour which quickly 
 passed away no doubt ? Not at all ! Thirty 
 years after the battle of Hernani, de Pongerville, 
 author of a translation in verse of Lucretia, still 
 spoke of " the terror of bad taste," and of " that 
 interregnum of the arts in which literary 
 demagogy raged, overturned all the glories ot 
 the past, and proscribed the talent which at- 
 tempted to follow in the footsteps of our 
 masters."^ 
 
 We can understand after that that Th(6ophile 
 Gautier was not spared in this classical hue and 
 cry ; his long hair, his braided cloak, his hat of 
 heterodox shape, made him a mark for all pre- 
 judiced eyes, so that he became the scape-goat 
 for the sins of Romanticism ; they ascribed to him 
 every kind of enormity of which he had never 
 been guilty, and he was regarded as the licensed 
 subverter of the French language, that language 
 which he honoured with so much knowledge, 
 accuracy, and elegance. According to his 
 detractors, who, in all good faith, looked upon 
 themselves as people of taste par excellence, he 
 was an impetuous writer without self-control, 
 carrying to the point of absurdity the pursuit 
 of the uncommon, throwing the nouns out of 
 window, dishonouring the adverbs, and taxing 
 
 ' See Nouvelle Biographic ginirak, published by Firmin 
 Didot Bros., vol. iv., page 376. 
 
The Story-Teller. 153 
 
 his ingenuity to create uncouth words, the better 
 to insult revered traditions. This accusation 
 of being an incorrigible neologist was often 
 brought against Thdophile Gautier ; is it at an 
 end now? I won't answer for it, for it is the 
 result of an error, and in certain countries error 
 dies hard. In such a case it would be impru- 
 dent to be too positive, still I believe he never 
 had need to invent a new word, those he knew 
 being amply sufficient. His vocabulary was 
 extraordinarily rich ; there wasn't a word that 
 he was unacquainted with ; in his readings, 
 which very nearly embraced the whole of 
 French literary works from the Renaissance, 
 he had collected expressive words that had 
 fallen into disuse, and were hardly known to 
 the learned, and quite unknown to the public ; 
 these he resuscitated, and restored to them the 
 right of citizenship in the world of letters by 
 employing them appropriately and wisely. In 
 that way he rendered an important service to the 
 French language, which the use of words exclu- 
 sively adopted by " the world," the habit of not 
 calling things by their right names but making 
 use of euphemisms, and, in a word, convention- 
 ality, had singularly impoverished. He did not 
 trouble himself much about shocking "the pro- 
 prieties," but he took pains to speak French, and 
 we must acknowledge that he succeeded. He 
 
154 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 even succeeded without effort, for he wrote with 
 extraordinary facility. 
 
 This facihty declares itself at once in his 
 MSS. The writing, small, round, well-formed, 
 runs on without hesitation, almost without 
 erasures from the first to the last page, and 
 indicates a man sure of his thought and its 
 expression. He always knows what he wishes 
 to say, and how he will say it, and has only to 
 occupy himself with the material part of it, for 
 the work is done. Some one said to Racine one 
 day : — 
 
 " What are you working at now ? " 
 
 " I am just finishing a tragedy." 
 
 " When will it be played .? " 
 
 '' Very soon, I have only got to write it.'' 
 
 Gautier might have said the same. He looked 
 upon facility in literary production as a sign of 
 talent, and already in 1835, in his study of 
 Scud^ry, has stated his opinion on this subject. 
 
 " One of the first qualities of genius is richness, 
 fertility. All the great writers have been enormously 
 productive, and there has never been much merit 
 in spending a long time over small things, what- 
 ever Malherbe and Balzac, and all those particular 
 writers may say, whose brains were congested by the 
 smoke of the midnight lamp, and who suffered from 
 a strangury of thought." 
 
The Story-Teller. 155 
 
 His own facility was such that nothing put 
 him out ; he could work anywhere, in the midst 
 of noise, in his own house, while talking, and in 
 the street among the pedestrians and carriages. 
 Nothing disconcerted him. It was in a printing 
 office, shaken by the vibrations of the steam 
 presses, in spite of the uproar of the workpeople 
 at work, that he wrote his volume Italia, from 
 which a printer's overseer cut away the MS. from 
 under his very pen, ten lines at a time, so as to 
 accelerate the composition. We might think 
 that this faculty — very rarely carried to such 
 a point — was the result of habit, and that he 
 only acquired it by degrees, but that is a mistake, 
 for he possessed it from earliest youth. One 
 recalls that he lived in the rue du Doyenne, that 
 domain of la Boheme galante to which I have 
 already made allusion. His room-fellows, and 
 the friends who visited them, were all young 
 and uproarious, and did not offend in the habit 
 of meditation favourable to work, and yet it was 
 there, in the noisy studio which served as a 
 reception-room, fencing and boxing school, ball- 
 room, dining-room, and school for the study of 
 the French horn, that he wrote in six weeks 
 the second volume of Mademoiselle de Maupin. 
 That was in 1835 when he was just twenty- 
 four. 
 
 The book appeared — what a hubbub I what a 
 
156 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 scandal ! people covered their faces and asked, 
 " alas ! is it possible ? " They appealed to secular 
 justice, and there was an outcry against immo- 
 rality and obscenity, one hardly dared to own 
 that one had held this volume of perdition in 
 one's hand, but it was relished in secret, and no 
 one died of it.^ To-day it would hardly draw a 
 smile from us, for the reading public resembles 
 Mithridates a good deal, who had tasted so many 
 poisons, and become so accustomed to them, that 
 assafoetida sprinkled over with strychnine seemed 
 tasteless to him. What indeed was all the fuss 
 about ? A rather seductive story, interspersed 
 with incidents in which the author expresses his 
 opinions, occasionally illuminating them with a 
 few paradoxical fireworks. A young and very 
 beautiful girl dresses up as a man, and chooses 
 her adventures ; she knows how to resume her 
 own sex on occasion and to make good use of 
 it ; under her double costume, sometimes as a 
 man, sometimes as a woman, she troubles all 
 hearts, and one fine day disappears, leaving 
 behind her, near a pillow which she would have 
 
 " A long time after, criticism smitten with high principles, is 
 still choked with it : " The immorality of the details, the ex- 
 travagance of the plot, the spirit and brilliance of the style, drew 
 down criticisms upon this strange novel. Rarely even in those 
 years of delirium had people been madder, more impertinent, 
 more outrageous" (Dictionnaire de la Conversation, 1859, vol. x., 
 P- 173)- 
 
The Story-Teller. 157 
 
 done better not to go to sleep upon, a few beads 
 from her necklace. Gautier has developed this 
 subject with that love of literary form, and respect 
 for language, which is to be seen in all his work. 
 What may be pointed out as incongruous in it, is 
 excused by the passionate pursuit of abstract 
 beauty shown in it, for Gautier has singularly 
 idealised the virago who served him as a model. 
 Mademoiselle de Maupin was not an imaginary 
 person at all, she was celebrated towards the end 
 of the seventeenth century, and her memory was 
 not yet effaced when I was a child. She was the 
 daughter of Count Armagnac's secretary, called 
 herself d'Aubigny and married an under clerk 
 named Maupin, whom she left promptly to go off 
 with a fencing master, who made a first-class fencer 
 of her. Sometimes dressed as a man, sometimes 
 as a woman, very pretty and daring, having all 
 kinds of odd tastes, she once set fire to a convent, 
 and carried off a nun for whom she felt some 
 friendship. Of fine appearance, endowed with 
 a charming voice, she came out at the opera, 
 where she had a success in singing Lulli's music. 
 She was a dangerous swordswoman, for, in conse- 
 quence of a quarrel at a masked ball, she accepted 
 three challenges all at once, and killed, so they 
 say, all three of her adversaries. From Paris 
 she went to Brussels, where she was the mistress 
 of Count Albert de Bavi^re. She was expelled 
 
158 ThSophile Gautier. 
 
 from Brussels on account of some scandal, went 
 from there to Spain, and returning to France, 
 saw herself treated with scorn by the public 
 which but lately had applauded her. She went 
 into a convent, where she finished her days in 
 1707, at the age of forty- four. 
 
 If les J eune- France is a protest against the 
 surface absurdities of Romanticism, we might say 
 that Mademoiselle de Maupin is a sort of reaction 
 against the mania in force then, to make the soul 
 play a part which should surprise it, and to belie 
 love by reducing it to being — without anything 
 else — but a union of hearts. Men forced their 
 minds to soar in a kind of ether at once pure 
 and devilish, which was not without leaving 
 some traces of ridicule in many of the novels 
 and verses of that time. It would seem as 
 though Gautier wished to restore to the splen- 
 dours of the earth, a literature that was lost in 
 ideasoffalse sentiment, and in a platonic delirium, 
 in which it only found emptiness and bombast. 
 The book was none the less accused of being of 
 an outrageous sensuality, and people dropped 
 their eyes in speaking of it. There is a good 
 deal of hypocrisy in the world's judgments ; it 
 praises with ecstasy books, that, because it is 
 the thing, have been read with yawns, and turns 
 away its head with a look of reproof, on hearing 
 the title of a book mentioned which has been 
 
The Story-Teller. 159 
 
 read in secret with an over-excited if not depraved 
 curiosity. Women excel in this kind of thing, 
 it is they in general who make the success of 
 what is called light literature, but the book which 
 they read is never upon their table, it is in the 
 drawer, at least if it is not under their pillow. 
 
 Fortunio, published in the Figaro of 1837, 
 which was edited by Alphonse Karr, did not in 
 the least calm the storm which had arisen about 
 Mademoiselle de Maupin, on the contrary the 
 accusation of immorality resounded louder than 
 ever. Fortunio is a sort of Hindoo Maharajah, 
 fabulously rich, who comes to Paris to try what 
 can be done there with a great deal of money. 
 The elegancies of Parisian life appear quite 
 ordinary to him. A girl kept by him kills her- 
 self in despair at seeing herself abandoned, when 
 he returns to the shores of the Ganges, after 
 having said his say about modern civilisation. 
 "Good-bye, old Europe, who think yourself 
 young, try to invent a steam engine to turn out 
 beautiful women, and find a new sort of gas to 
 replace the sun — I shall return to the East, it is 
 more simple." It seems to me that Fortunio 
 was thus severe because he had unwisely chosen 
 his surroundings. The impressions he received 
 were bad because they came naturally from the 
 company he frequented — the worst of all, idlers 
 who fritter away an enormous social power — 
 
i6o Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 money — without even knowing on what they 
 might utilise it, and prostitutes, who traffic in 
 themselves, and sell to the highest bidder that 
 which no one can buy — love. 
 
 Fortunio goes away discontented with his 
 experience, and disappointed in the illusions 
 which he had made for himself. He puts no 
 restraint upon himself either, but from time to 
 time launches aphorisms which sound strange 
 to our European ears. He gives utterance to 
 " subversive opinions," and he " saps the founda- 
 tions," as the ministerial journals of the day said, 
 when any one was not of their opinion. 
 
 "He but hates his friends, and would feel more 
 drawn towards philanthropy if men were monkeys ; 
 he can hardly restrain himself from cutting off the 
 heads of the bourgeois who annoy him, and he curses 
 the civilisation which has no other aim but to perch 
 upon a pedestal the aristocracy of soap-boilers and 
 candle-makers. God will be obliged one of these 
 days to come and make over again the world's sphere, 
 levelled by these hordes of charlatans, envious of all 
 splendour and all beauty, who form modern nations ; 
 the newspapers contain considerations upon the state 
 of the cabinets of Europe, written by men who have 
 never learnt to read, and whom one would not even 
 employ as valets.'' 
 
 " Literary demagogy ! " exclaimed M. de 
 
The Story-Teller. i6i 
 
 Pongerville ; it was not that, but a writer's 
 whim, an artist's fancy, the cry of the man who 
 is bored, and thinks he would be happier in 
 some other place. " Fortunio is a hymn to 
 beauty, to riches, to happiness, the only three 
 divinities recognised by us." It is Gautier who 
 writes that in his preface, and we may believe it, 
 but he does not see that the hymn which is sung 
 resembles a de profundis. In his novel, beauty 
 does not suffice to make one beloved, riches are 
 powerless because they only aim at material 
 satisfactions, and happiness is not met with, 
 because we seek it in ephemeral joys. Behind 
 the divinities whom he evokes, and to whom he 
 sacrifices, a fourth creeps in, hostile to the others, 
 always lying in wait, and invincible — satiety. 
 Considered under this aspect the book is moral ; 
 but we only see the theories expressed in it, 
 without taking into account the lugubrious rdle 
 played by the characters, the boredom which 
 assails them, and the denouement which sends 
 them away unsatisfied, one to death, and the 
 other to the "' voluptuous brutality so dear to 
 Orientals." 
 
 In truth Europe, old as she is, had better 
 things to oifer to their riches, their curiosity, 
 and their intelligence. The discerning reader 
 does not doubt it, although the author has not 
 said so. Behind Fortunio they saw Gautier, 
 
 12 
 
1 62 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 and in the words of this Hindoo, so out of his 
 element in Paris, they thought to perceive the 
 expression of the writer's thoughts. In what 
 was only the work of an exuberant, because very 
 young, imagination, they were pleased to see a 
 premeditated attack on society, and poor Gautier 
 was treated like a Turk, by people who would at 
 once have proclaimed the Chevalier de Lamor- 
 li^re grand master of the graces. The outcry 
 did not interfere with the success of the book, 
 but it is possible that Thdophile Gautier was 
 affected by it, for writing to Sainte-Beuve in 
 1 863, to give him some information he had asked 
 for, he said. 
 
 '■'■ Fortunio was the last work in which I freely 
 expressed my real thoughts ; from that time the inva- 
 sion of cant, and the necessity of submitting myself to 
 newspaper proprieties, have thrown me upon purely 
 physical description ; I have enunciated no doctrine 
 since then, and I have kept my thoughts to myself." ' 
 
 Under date 1836 the covers of the books edited 
 by Renduel announce le Capitaine Fracasse. 
 Begun, abandoned, continued, thrown aside, 
 modified in its general plan, taken up and 
 finally completed, this book was only published 
 twenty-five years later, being written as the 
 exigencies of the Revue nationale required, 
 which brought it out without interruption from 
 
 " Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, vol. I., p. 103. 
 
The Story-Teller. 163 
 
 December 25, 1861 to June 10, 1863. "It is a 
 bill of exchange drawn in my youth, and which 
 I have discharged in my mature years," said 
 Gautier. It was indeed amply discharged, with 
 compound interest. Among Gautier's prose 
 works this novel holds the highest place ; as 
 the Revue nationale was a bi-monthly maga- 
 zine, the author had time, so often lacking before, 
 to do it in, and took delight in it. There was 
 nothing to cramp his imagination, he could let 
 it take wing, and he profited by it. It was a 
 sort of rest in the midst of his labour and, as he 
 said himself smilingly, an oasis in the desert of 
 dramatic journalism. That he loved the char- 
 acters he created is easily seen, he lingers over 
 them and places their first meeting in the 
 country around his native place, carried away 
 perhaps by one of those remembrances of child- 
 hood dear to those whom the shadow of age is 
 soon to reach, and for whom life has been with- 
 out gentleness. No book, however, is more 
 impersonal, the date of it even may remain 
 undecided. Who reigned in France when it 
 was written, the son of Marie de Mddicis, or 
 the son of Queen Hortense ? We might be in 
 doubt, for if in spite of a certain tendency to 
 reproduce the language of the first period of the 
 seventeenth century, we feel in every line the 
 maturity of a contemporary master, the sur- 
 
164 ThSophile Gautier. 
 
 roundings in which the actors move, and their 
 bearing, belong so entirely to a definite epoch, 
 that at times we might think we were reading a 
 fragment of memoirs left by some young lad 
 from Beam come to seek his fortune in Paris. 
 Battles and adventures, comical incidents, stroll- 
 ing players, attacks by brigands, rapier thrusts, 
 ambuscades, elopements, generosity, valour, 
 chivalry, how it all crowds about the pen of the 
 writer, uniting to form a charming whole ! Is it 
 improbable ? We have no time to become aware 
 of it, it is almost a fairy tale, the dinouement 
 would make us believe it to be one, for the 
 lovers marry, and the discovery of a treasure 
 enriches the heio. It is a wonderful story, full 
 of freshness and youth, admirable not only on 
 account of the adventures which form the pattern 
 of the fabric, but also from the skill which was 
 required to weave it. 
 
 I picture to myself that often after having 
 accomplished his task, and for the five hundredth 
 time discoursed upon the first vaudeville to 
 hand, or praised the feats executed by some 
 horsewoman or other, Gautier, returned to his 
 little house at Neuilly, must have been happy 
 to find himself again with Isabella and the 
 Seigneur de Sigognac ; how he must have 
 questioned them, listened to their confidences, 
 and got them to tell him about those wonderful 
 
The Story- Teller. 165 
 
 combats which a knight of the Round Table 
 would have envied, and out of which the young 
 Gascon gentleman always came victorious. At 
 their dictation he wrote with joy, for, if it was 
 not verse, it was poetry. The memory of his 
 first home, of the Chateau de la Mis^re, so 
 extraordinarily depicted, painted with such keen 
 eloquence, dominates the whole recital. We 
 divine that the knight who leaves it poor, riding 
 away on his old horse, escorted by his sorrowful 
 dog and cat, accompanied on the first stage of 
 his journey by the servant of his early childhood, 
 will one day re-enter it and be greeted there 
 with happiness and good fortune. We under- 
 stand that he will escape all dangers, will hold 
 his own against destiny, and will triumph over 
 obstacles, and we are grateful to the author of a 
 tale in which we do not encounter the sorrows, 
 pre-occupations, and unsightlinesses of everyday 
 life. What greater service can we render those 
 to whom life is grey and heavy ? Ah ! how 
 right George Sand was when she said : " We 
 are an unfortunate race ; that is why we have 
 urgent need to find distraction from real life in 
 the dissimilations of art ; the more it lies, the 
 more it amuses us." 
 
 Amongst the works of Gautier le Capitaine 
 Fracasse is of an exceptional construction ; the 
 romance has been composed, " engineered " ; it 
 
1 66 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 is not only a bit of marqueterie, as they said, 
 but a piece of furniture carried out on a pre- 
 meditated plan, and all parts of which have 
 been previously rough-hewn before being sub- 
 mitted to the hand of the artist. This fact 
 should be remembered, for Gautier is much less 
 of a novelist than a story-teller. Most of his 
 stories, Fortunio among others, represent the 
 crystallisation of his own dream. That need 
 not surprise us, it could not be otherwise, for 
 Thdophile Gautier was always a dreamer. His 
 pretended nonchalance had no other foundation \ 
 he lived in a sort of world of his own, where 
 visions were naturally evoked, in the midst of 
 which he found happiness ; when anything 
 forced him to leave the ghosts who were so 
 dear to him he was annoyed, and such annoy- 
 ance was of frequent occurrence. Like Gustave 
 Droz, he would have said without hesitation : 
 " The most substantial of this world's blessings 
 is a dream to which we cling, and in which we 
 lose ourselves." Let us recall Tiburce, who is- 
 the hero of la Toison dor. " He would often 
 remain for whole days on his divan, supported 
 by piles of cushions, without uttering a word, 
 his eyes closed, and his hands hanging down." 
 The portrait is striking in its resemblance ; it 
 is Gautier just as his friends knew him, lost in 
 his reverie, that is to say, in the work of his 
 
The Story-Teller. 167 
 
 brain. Like Tiburce, too, he was bold in 
 thought, and timid in action. That was, in fact, 
 one of the most striking characteristics of his 
 nature ; his uncurbed imagination was neutral- 
 ized by an extreme timidity, and a horror of 
 action ; he was a dreamer, content to give the 
 reins to his mind, or perhaps he was simply a 
 sage, who knew that fiction is superior to 
 reality. 
 
 Imagination is not like invention ; the one is 
 independent of the will, the other proceeds from 
 it, or at least finds its power in it. A man can 
 command his will, he cannot command his 
 imagination ; it comes and seizes upon him as 
 it will, flat ubi vult, and tells him stories of 
 which he is almost always the hero, stories gay, 
 tender, or terrible, stories of times past, or of 
 times to come ; as fancy wills she leads the poet 
 into all sorts of surroundings, times, and coun- 
 tries. Returned to earth, he recalls these 
 adventures which he has passed through on 
 the wings of fancy, writes them down, perhaps, 
 to prolong the charm which he has felt, and a 
 story is made, and the public applauds. Gautier 
 was Fortunio, Tiburce, and the Abb6 Romuald, 
 he saw Omphale come towards him, he was 
 Octavanus dreaming in the streets of Pompeii, 
 that Octavanus who made for himself an ideal 
 harem with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, 
 
1 68 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Diana of Poitiers, Joan of Aragon, and a few 
 other beautiful ladies of times of old. 
 
 It is because they were an episode in his 
 intellectual life, that his stories are simple, almost 
 without incidents, but full of feeling nevertheless, 
 and communicating the emotion with which they 
 palpitate. By that we can recognise the charac- 
 ters born of his fancy. At times the same 
 phantom came to visit him at long intervals ; 
 Clarimonde of la Morte amoureuse, who came 
 to him for the first time in 1836, remembers him 
 in 1852, and appears under the name of Aria 
 Marcella. I believe I should be right in saying 
 that the dearest of his mistresses were the great 
 courtesans, the queens, and princesses who in- 
 habited his brain, and perhaps replaced, as far as 
 illusion went, untrustworthy realities ;'in certain 
 cases the waking dream has as much power as 
 the sleeping one. Everything which recalled 
 modern civilisation to him, which he found 
 ill-clothed, poor, mediocre, and hopelessly mo- 
 ,notonous, was odious to him, as he never ceased 
 to repeat, and so his dream, his own good, 
 comforting fairy, came to his aid ; she re-con- 
 stituted for him past civilisations, and made him 
 live according to his taste, in surroundings the 
 fabulous sumptuosity of which, whatever the 
 poets may think, was never of this world, 
 -What matter? he created these splendours for 
 
The Story-Teller. 169 
 
 himself; they did exist for him, and he de- 
 lighted in them. 
 
 He makes long excursions into the past, 
 superior to his visit to Spain and to Italy, for it 
 is a journey to the countries of tradition, embel- 
 lished by the distance of centuries. He lives at 
 Athens in the time of Pericles, and it is perhaps 
 to him that Bachides of Samos gave his chain of 
 gold. At Sardis he saw the last offshoots of the 
 race of the Heraclides perish under the blows of 
 Gyges, the lover of Nyssia. In Egypt he saw 
 the waves of the Red Sea swallow up Pharoah's 
 army, and later, under the dynasty of the Ptolo- 
 mies, he counted the pulsations of the heart of 
 Meiamoun falling at the feet of Cleopatra. It 
 was in this way that he escaped from his own 
 existence, and got away from himself, to go and 
 seek strength in other times and other countries, 
 amongst beings of his choice, who consoled him 
 for his commonplace surroundings, and made 
 their confidences to him, which he in his turn 
 transmitted to his readers. Sometimes he even 
 finds himself carried away into fantastic regions 
 which have nothing in common with those to 
 which alcohol conducted Hoffman, and Edgar 
 Poe ; what he tells us of them makes us long to 
 go there. 
 
 They are in prose, these stories, but we feel in 
 every line that they were written by a poet : 
 
170 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 " M^me quand I'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a 
 des ailes." ^ 
 
 Although they may often unfold themselves in 
 the kingdom of the impossible, they seem 
 to be real, for they have had an intellectual 
 existence. The argument, as I have already 
 said, is always of an extreme simplicity, but the 
 writer has known how to adorn and develop it 
 — sometimes to the point of almost making it 
 disappear — with an elegant and elaborate form. 
 Imagination has not spared itself, and the 
 mounting of the precious stone is often more 
 costly than the stone itself This is an art which 
 appeals to delicate minds, but which the public 
 does not always enjoy, preferring dramatic inci- 
 dents to originality of expression, and ingenuity 
 of thought. It remains to be known whether to 
 a real " votary " a jewel cut by Benvenuto Cellini 
 is not worth more than a diamond, were it even 
 the Regent. In art it is less the material than 
 the workmanship that we have to consider. 
 Without hesitation I should compare Th^ophile 
 Gautier's stories to that little palace which he 
 saw on the Grand Canal at Venice, and which 
 he wished to buy : " Between two great buildings 
 there is a delicious little palace, having one 
 window and a balcony, but what a window, and 
 
 ' " Even when the bird walks, we feel that it has wings." 
 
The Story-Teller. 171 
 
 what a balcony ! — lace-work in stone, scrolls^ 
 guilloches, and open-work which one would 
 only think possible by means of a punching- 
 machine, such as is used to make the ornamental 
 paper put round bon-bons." A window and a 
 balcony — it is not much, but to a sculptor like 
 Gautier, it is sufficient to charm the eyes of those 
 who know how to look. 
 
 Now and again his dreamings made him 
 acquainted with imaginary characters, who 
 talked, were impassioned, and moved like 
 actors on the stage of a theatre, and from this 
 resulted one of his sweetest and most original 
 fancies, Une Larnie dti diable. The prologue 
 to this idyl seems to have been inspired by the 
 beginning of Goethe's Faust, who himself took 
 it from the first scene of the drama o{ Job ; they 
 might have made a worse choice. This " mys- 
 tery," in which everything pleases, very nearly 
 brought misfortune upon Thdophile Gautier,. 
 when it appeared in 1855, added to some other 
 pieces in a volume entitled TMdtre de poche^ 
 The Deity, implored by Magdalena to pardon 
 Satan, replies : " The sentence is irrevocable — 
 I cannot perjure myself like an earthly king." 
 
 At that time the " parquet," as they call it 
 at the Palais de Justice, possessed but a mode- 
 rate liking for literature. Gustave Flaubert and 
 Baudelaire learnt something of this when they 
 
172 TMophile Gautier. 
 
 had to appear in the dock at the police-court, a 
 proceeding which naturally hastened the flower- 
 ing of the fame due to their works. In the 
 phrase quoted above, the bench saw an insidious 
 allusion to the 2nd of December, and to the 
 perjury of the President of the Republic, since 
 become the Emperor Napoleon III. It was a 
 hanging matter, Gautier was summoned before 
 some Imperial functionary, who signified to him 
 that he Tvould be tried before the proper court, 
 he and his editor, and that there would be a 
 prison for them. Gautier, who had but a mode- 
 rate taste for martyrdom, was dismayed, and 
 said : " The fools, they want to send me to the 
 Bastille ! " Luckily he could show that this 
 Larme du diable, attempt against the safety of 
 the State, was only a reprint, that the first 
 edition had appeared in 1839, under the rule 
 of the parliamentary monarchy. As soon as it 
 was made clear that the obnoxious allusion 
 could only have been addressed to Louis 
 Philippe, it received nothing but praise, and 
 Gautier was left in peace ; but the alarm had 
 been disagreeable, and left an unpleasant im- 
 pression upon him. 
 
 Although Gautier would have excelled in 
 dialogue, as shown by Une Larme du diable, 
 and though two of his pieces were played, and 
 he has left important fragments of a comedy in 
 
The Story-Teller. 173 
 
 verse, at which he worked for several years, 
 we cannot say of him without doing violence to 
 the truth, that he was a dramatic author.^ He 
 lived on reveries, poetry, and fancies which had 
 need of space in which to expand. The theatre 
 exists above all in action, in effects springing 
 from combinations more or less probable rather 
 than in everyday expressions, often repeated, 
 accepted commonplaces, which draw the atten- 
 tion and perhaps the applause of the public. To 
 be able to move at ease within these narrow 
 limits, to work up the progression of sentiments 
 by a graduated series of acts which follow one 
 another, requires art, a kind of natural gift, 
 that may be increased by thought and expe- 
 rience, but which is not to be acquired unless 
 the seeds are to be found in one's own tempe- 
 rament. Now Theophile Gautier did not possess 
 this natural gift, and I believe that, in spite of 
 his attempts, he understood his own limits in this 
 respect. Hear what he says : 
 
 " The theatre absolutely excludes imagination. 
 
 ' The piece to which I refer is entitled V Amour souffle oh il 
 veut; according to an agreement signed in the month of February, 
 1850, it was destined for the Com^die Franpaise. Gautier also 
 intended to write an Orestes, and even began it. The twenty- 
 eight verses of the first scene, the only ones he wrote, prove that 
 he had taken his inspiration from Eschylus, but that he did not 
 attempt a translation or an imitation. 
 
174 Thdophile Gautier, 
 
 Fantastic ideas stand out too much in relief there, 
 and the footlights throw too strong a light upon the 
 tender creations of the imagination. The pages of a 
 book are more obliging ; the impalpable ghost of an 
 idea there rises silently before the reader, who only 
 sees it with the eyes of his soul. In the theatre the 
 idea is materialised; you can touch it with your fingers 
 in the person of the actor ; it puts on paint and rouge, 
 wears a wig, and stands there upon its feet, near the 
 prompter's box, listening and shouting. . . . Every- 
 thing which departs from a certain number of situations, 
 and accepted words, appears strange and monstrous, 
 and this makes any innovation in the theatre most 
 difficult and dangerous ; the new scene almost always 
 makes the piece a failure, but there is no example of 
 a commonplace situation compromising a success." 
 
 And, after a few other considerations, he 
 adds : 
 
 "The ode is the beginning of all things — the idea; 
 the theatre is the end of all things — action ; the one 
 is mind, the other matter. It is only in old age that 
 societies have a theatre ; when they are decrepid, and 
 can no longer support the small amount of ideality 
 -contained in the theatre, they have the circus as a 
 resource. After comedians come gladiators, for the 
 eifect of all extreme civilisation is to substitute matter 
 for mind, and the thing for the idea." 
 
 That was wrritten in 1834. Was it of Th6o- 
 
The Story-Teller. 175 
 
 phile Gautier, or Thdophile de Viau that the 
 author of the Grotesques was thinking when he 
 spoke thus ? 
 
 Gautier always loved abstract art, which he 
 put into practice as much as he could, that is 
 why he is so severe in his judgment upon the 
 theatre, which he reproached with having need 
 of so many accessories tending to the same end, 
 to produce the necessary illusion. This illusion 
 he wished to obtain through poetry alone, which 
 does not admit of it, and which cannot act upon 
 the public in the same way as dramatic action, 
 surrounded by all the means which sustain and 
 make the most of it. By way of retaliation, he 
 amused himself — that is the real word for it — in 
 putting his fancies upon the stage, surrounding 
 them with the splendour of scenery and cos- 
 tumes, making groups of women go through 
 evolutions, keeping time to the sounds of music, 
 so as to give them the semblance of fairy-land, 
 as they had appeared to him. They said it was 
 to materialise his own fancies that he made the 
 ballets Gizelle, la PM and Sakountala, which 
 have not been surpassed, and which up to now, 
 at least, seem to have remained inimitable 
 models. Gizelle was represented at the opera 
 for the first time on June 28, 1841. Without 
 insisting upon it, I will point out to Thdophile 
 Gautier's future biographers, that it is at this 
 
176 Thdophile Gautier, 
 
 date they should seek for what the Germans 
 would call the turning point of his existence. 
 
 Literary, art, and dramatic criticisms, accounts 
 of travels, stories, novels, novelettes, comedies, 
 and ballets, Gautier treated them all with a 
 talent that cannot be denied to him ; he was 
 always at work, ever repairing his exhausted 
 energies. If he had been asked what he liked 
 best of his work, I am sure, that recalling Alfred 
 de Musset's verses, he would have replied : 
 
 " J'aime surtout las vers, — cette langue immortelle . . . 
 . , . Ella a cela pour alia 
 Qua las sots d'aucun temps n'an ont su faire cas, 
 Qua le monde I'antend at na la parle pas." ' 
 
 ' " Above all I love poetry, — that immortal tongue . . . 
 ... It has this for itself, 
 That the fools of all time have not known how to value it. 
 That the world hears but does not speak it." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE POET. 
 
 IN the letter of which I have already 
 quoted a fragment, Thdophile Gautier wrote 
 to Sainte-Beuve : " If I had had the smallest 
 fortune of my own, I should have given myself up 
 solely to the pursuit of the poet's laurels." And 
 he complains of having fallen into prose ; we see 
 that the downfall was not mortal, for he excelled 
 in both the forms of literature in which thinkers 
 and dreamers hold communion with the multi- 
 tude. This regret at not being able to be ex- 
 clusively a poet haunted his life ; as early as 
 1 841 he wrote in an album : 
 
 " O poetes divins ! je ne suis plus des votres ! 
 On m'a fait une niche oti je veille, tapi 
 Dans le has d'un journal, comme un dogue 
 accroupi." ' 
 
 ■ " Ah, divine poets, I am no longer one of you ! 
 
 They have made me a niche wrhere I keep watch, crouching 
 In the depths of a journal, like a crouching mastiff." 
 
 13 177 
 
178 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 In truth, everything that in the course of his 
 existence turned him from poetry, to which he 
 came back unceasingly and passionately, seemed 
 to him an attempt directed not only against his 
 will, but against the most imperative need of his 
 nature. He did not appraise the art of poetry 
 so highly when he made his first appearance in 
 1 830, for in the preface to his Pohies, he makes a 
 confession which we shall do well only to be- 
 lieve in part. 
 
 " The author of the present book is a chilly, sickly 
 young man, who spends his life in company with two 
 or three friends, and about as many cats ; a space of a 
 few feet where it is less cold than elsewhere is to him 
 the universe. The chimney-piece is his sky, the back 
 of the fireplace his horizon. He makes verses in order 
 to have a pretext for doing nothing, or does nothing 
 under pretext of making verses.'' 
 
 These are just the ideas of a young conscript of 
 letters, not yet aware that sincerity ought to be 
 the first qualification of every brave man who 
 holds a pen ; then to give himself some im- 
 portance, the young man of nineteen pretends 
 not to take himself seriously ; it is all natural 
 enough, but he would not be very pleased to be 
 taken at his word. 
 
 Of this volume, which appeared in the midst 
 of the hubbub raised by the royal ordinances of 
 
The Poet. 179 
 
 July 25, 1830, there is nothing to be said ; we 
 can only recall the statement placed by Alfred 
 de Musset at the head of the Contes d'Espagne 
 et dUtalie, " My first verses are those of a child." 
 Youth, like the birds, sings by instinct ; it is in- 
 toxicated with its own melody, and cherishes 
 hopes of it which most often end quickly in 
 disappointment, for what it took for promise, 
 is only the voice of illusion. How many youths 
 scarcely out of their University long clothes, with 
 eyes fixed on the heavens, have not imagined 
 themselves to be guided by a star, when they 
 have been but following a will-o'-the-wisp? 
 Such was not the case with Gautier, who was 
 a magi of poetry, the star which he saw shining 
 at the dawn of his spring-time, had lost nothing 
 of its brilliancy in the twilight of his autumn ; it 
 was less fiery perhaps — less "truculent " he would 
 have said — but of a more sparkling shimmer, 
 persistent, and with an aureole of golden rays. 
 
 In poetry Thdophile Gautier made his first 
 real appearance in Albertus, a fantastic poem 
 which made a noise in its time, and which is the 
 gage of adhesion that he gave to Romanticism. 
 The volume is dated 1832, the verses contained 
 in it were composed during the preceding year, 
 when the poet was twenty, the age likewise of 
 the poem. The very choice of the subject indi- 
 cates the date ; one could not be mistaken in it. 
 
i8o ThSophile Gautier. 
 
 Gautier has related in les J eune- France the history 
 of Daniel Jovard, a Classicist by conviction, who 
 became converted to Romanticism, and a Hugo 
 worshipper, after having been baptized in the 
 name of the Odes et Ballades, the preface to 
 Cromwell, and Hernani. Before the falling of 
 the thunderbolt he exclaims : 
 
 " O muses ! chastes sceurs, et toi, grand Apollon, 
 Daignez guider mes pas dans le sacrd vallon ; 
 Soutenez men essor, faites couler ma veine, 
 Je veux boire a longs traits les eaux de I'Hippo- 
 crfene." ' 
 
 But the moment — death and damnation ! — that 
 a fresh blast of inspiration has penetrated his 
 manly breast, he changes his song, deserts the 
 choir led by Phoebus the violinist, and in a 
 breath goes straight to the witches sabbath — I 
 would say to the charivari : 
 
 " Par I'enfer ! je me sens un immense ddsir, 
 De broyer sous mes dents sa chair, et de saisir, 
 Avec quelque lambeau de sa peau bleue on verte, 
 Son coeur demi-pourri dans sa poitrine ouverte ! " ^ 
 
 I It Ye Muses, chaste sisters, and thou, great Apollo, 
 Deign to guide my steps into the sacred valley, 
 Support my strain, make my thoughts to flow, 
 I would drink in deep draughts, the waters of Hippocrene." 
 ° " By hell ! I feel an immense desire 
 
 To crush between my teeth his flesh, and to seize 
 With some shreds of his skin, blue or green. 
 His heart, half rotten within his open breast ! " 
 
The Poet. i8i 
 
 Let the reader be re-assured, Th^ophile 
 Gautier is not Daniel Jovard, and his poetry 
 smacks less of death. It is much more in the 
 subject matter, than in the composition of the 
 verses, that Albertus adheres resolutely to Ro- 
 manticism. I mean a Romanticism violent, 
 determined, and ultra- revolutionary, which was 
 only inspired to be weird, and deadly, and 
 raving. A decrepid sorceress changes herself 
 by aid of her philters into a young woman of 
 irresistible beauty, who allures to her the painter 
 Albertus, with whom she is in love, intoxicates 
 him, makes him madly in love with her, and 
 then suddenly becomes again a horrible old 
 hag, gets astride her broomstick, and carries 
 off to the witches sabbath her lover of an hour, 
 who is found the next morning on the Appian 
 Way, with "his back broken and his neck 
 twisted." When he has ended this account, 
 which comprises no less than one thousand 
 four hundred and seventy-two verses, the poet 
 seeks repose by his fireside : 
 
 " Donnez-moi la pincette et dites qu'on m'apporte 
 Un tome de Pantagruel." ' 
 
 The verse is much less confused, less " fantastic " 
 than might be expected from so strange a theme, 
 
 ' " Give me the tongs, and tell them to bring me 
 A volume of Pantagruel." 
 
1 82 Thiophile Gauiier. 
 
 borrowed from one of those narratives of naive 
 and coarse morality, in which the country folk 
 of the Middle Ages used to revel tremblingly in 
 their long night watches. If the words have 
 sometimes rather too racy a flavour, if the ex- 
 pression strains after an originality which it 
 almost always attains to, the verse is good and 
 sound, without any attempt at metrical gym- 
 nastics. It is young — what a good fault ! — and 
 seeing it so vigorous and lively, we divine that 
 maturity will soon come to give it that robust 
 and healthy form which it will never forsake. 
 I have had much pleasure in re-vea.6.mg Albertus, 
 it is certainly a poem of youthful prime, of the 
 age of audacities, of the storming of fortresses, 
 and indefatigable ardour. Gautier speaks of it 
 with a sort of paternal tenderness ; he loved it 
 rather as we love those old airs heard in our 
 childhood, which bring back memories in which 
 the soul finds again tender impressions. 
 
 This poem is interesting too from other points 
 of view, for it reproduces the ideas afloat at that 
 time. Gautier was just leaving Rioult's studio ; 
 but we must not attribute to that the abuse of 
 names of painters to be found in Albertus — six 
 in the three first stanzas. The Cinack had 
 dreamed of uniting literature and painting, a 
 prudent match which divorce quickly put an end 
 to, was bound to put an end to, for the genesis 
 
The Poet. 183 
 
 and procedure of these two arts, the aim which 
 they had in view, the impression which they may 
 produce, offer so many differences that " incom- 
 patibility of temper " arises between them. Much 
 more appropriately than of the theatre Gautier 
 might have said : " The one is the idea, the other 
 matter." The tendencies of the Romanticist 
 school in painting are clearly pointed out, with- 
 out the author seeming to have any doubts of 
 them. Albertus is a painter ; the reader is con- 
 ducted into his studio, where the sketches on the 
 canvasses declare the prepossessions which at 
 that time dominated the artistic world : 
 
 " Antour du mur beaucoup de toiles accrochdes . . . 
 ... La Ldnore a cheval, Macbeth et les Sorciferes, 
 Las Infants de Lara, Marguerite en pri^res." ' 
 
 That seems to be nothing, but it is a great deal. 
 The David school had adopted the nude, which 
 is the abstract human creature, and antique 
 drapery, which is abstract costume ; it was diffi- 
 cult of execution and the apprenticeship was 
 long. It is certain that the Theseus, the Achilles, 
 and the Hectors were tiresome, when they did 
 not attain to perfect beauty, and they substituted 
 
 ' " Around the walls hung many canvasses . . . 
 
 . . . Lenore on horseback, Macbeth and the witches, 
 Lara's children, Margaret in prayer." 
 
184 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 for them historical figures, legendary and ro- 
 mantic, wearing hose and doublet, and boots up 
 to the knees. As a result the nude disappeared, 
 instead of painting men, they painted stuffs, and 
 the study of anatomy, on which, in teaching 
 drawing, so much care had been bestowed before 
 1830, was actually so entirely neglected, that it 
 no longer existed, to the great detriment of art. 
 In short, it was Romanticism which gave us in- 
 stead of historical painting, anecdotal painting. 
 The often excessive dimensions of the canvasses 
 upon which they are spread do not give to them 
 the qualities which are wanting to make them 
 great art. 
 
 The exaggeration of feeling brought into 
 fashion by Hernani: 
 
 " Oh ! qu'un coup de poignard de toi me serait 
 doux ! " ' 
 
 The inflated metaphors familiar to budding 
 Romanticism, appear in some stanzas, and prove 
 to what an extent people were fatigued by the 
 incessant repetitions in which the Classicists de- 
 lighted. Gautier, who was generally so scrupu- 
 lous in the employment of imagery, who said, 
 " My metaphors hold good, that is everything," 
 in writing Albertus could not resist extrava- 
 
 » " Ah ! how sweet from thee would be the stroke of a dagger ! " 
 
The Poet. 185 
 
 gance of expression. A letter thrown into the 
 fire writhes like one of Dante's lost souls ; 
 Veronica (the witch) writes a note : 
 
 " - . . Sa main rapide en son essor, 
 Comme un cheval de course k New Market, a peine 
 Effleure le papier." ' 
 
 This bombast, which by inflating the words 
 makes them appear empty, had not yet been 
 abandoned by Gautier. Hear the declaration 
 of love which Albertus makes to his mistress : 
 
 " Un ange, un saint du ciel, pour Stre k cette place, 
 Eussent vendu leur stalle au paradis de Dieu, 
 
 . . . et je vendrais men ame 
 Pour t'avoir k moi seul, tout entibre et toujours." = 
 
 How often that phrase will be repeated, and 
 become as commonplace as Aurora with the 
 rosy fingers ; it will remain in the Romanticist 
 glossary, and if Gautier sets it vibrating in one 
 of his stanzas it seems to me excusable, for he 
 
 ' " . . . Her hand, rapid in its flight, 
 Like a race-horse at Newmarket, scarce 
 brushes the paper." 
 ' An angel, a saint from heaven, to be in my place 
 Would sell their seat in God's paradise, 
 
 . . . And I would sell my soul 
 To have thee to myself alone, entirely, and for ever." 
 
1 86 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 was not yet of age. We might say that he 
 furnished the theme which so many others have 
 taken up. The master himself, in the height of 
 his glory, did not disdain to make Ruy Bias 
 speak in 1838 as Albertus did in 1832 : 
 
 " Oh ! mon ame au ddmon, je la vendrais . . . 
 Oui, je me damnerais ! . . ." ^ 
 
 It is just by reason of its exaggeration that this 
 thought has been so often reproduced ; it doubt- 
 less only became a commonplace because it had 
 been admired when it was expressed for the first 
 time. 
 
 Romanticism revolutionised theatrical art ; in 
 the first place by particularising- the action, 
 instead of generalising, but above all by re- 
 placing tragic harangues, by the action of the 
 drama. Instead of recounting the death of 
 Hippolyta and the passing away of Phedre, they 
 took place upon the stage. Let us recall Victor 
 Hugo's dramas in prose or verse, there is not 
 one that has not its murder, like those of Shake- 
 speare. The new school had at its disposition 
 a special medicine chest full of poisons, " which 
 mixed with wine, change wine of Romorantin into 
 wine of Syracuse," and antidotes, " known to none 
 
 ' " Ah ! my soul, I would sell thee to the evil one . . . 
 Yes, I would damn my own soul ! . . ." 
 
The Poet. 187 
 
 but the Pope, M. de Valentinois and Lucretia Bor- 
 gia." They likewise possessed a set of carefully 
 selected armoury which made killing a certainty. 
 People delighted in these brutalities, and five 
 coffins, escorted by monks in their vestments, 
 did not at all displease the spectators. If 
 Romanticism was guilty of some excesses, we 
 must remember that the public was a party to 
 them. At the theatre nothing was to be hidden, 
 in poems and novels everything was to be told, 
 exercising, however, a certain amount of con- 
 sideration for bourgeois prudery, and not dashing 
 full tilt against the prejudices of the police- 
 court. The clouds with which Homer envelops 
 Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida, were no longer 
 admissible in the Romanticist sky, which wished 
 to unveil itself altogether, and where the good 
 Marmontel would have said as in leslncas : " His 
 eyes beheld a thousand charms," they would 
 give a minute account of the charms, for the 
 love of art. That was the law, and Th^ophile 
 Gautier did not try to elude it. At the moment 
 when Albertus begins with Veronica one of 
 those private conversations which gain by re- 
 maining secret, the poet takes up the word and 
 says : 
 
 " C'est ici que s'arrete en son style pudique, 
 Tout rouge d'embarras, le narrateur classique. . . . 
 
1 88 TMophile Gautier. 
 
 . . . Moi qui ne suis pas prude et qui n'ai pas de 
 
 gaze, 
 Ni de feuille de vigne k coller a ma phrase, 
 Je ne passerai rien." ' 
 
 And in fact he did not omit anything, and 
 " frantic mirth " mingles in just proportion with 
 " ecstatic mirth," interspersed with a few Italian 
 words. Literary passion would have it so ; in 
 certain poems and novels of that time, signed 
 with celebrated names, you would without 
 trouble find descriptions which were certainly 
 not written ad usum Delphini. After Albertus, 
 Thdophile Gautier published la Comidie de la 
 mart, a poem to which he added the poetry 
 composed from 1833 to 1838. The author has 
 fixed the dates : " At one o'clock in the after- 
 noon of Thursday, January 25, 1838, I finished 
 this present volume : glory be to God, and 
 peace and goodwill towards men." The book 
 was published by D^sessart, who did not pay 
 for it.2 
 
 ■ " Here the classic narrator in his prudish way. 
 Quite red with embarrassment, would stop. . . . 
 ... I who am not a prude and have no veil, 
 Nor fig leaf to put upon my phrase, 
 I shall omit nothing." 
 ° In the month of April, 1890, I bargained at a second-hand 
 bookstall for a copy of the first edition of this volume. It was 
 in large octavo, 376 pages, and in a good state of preservation 
 — the price was;^i2 (300 francs). 
 
The Poet. 189 
 
 I should not be surprised if la ComMie de la 
 mart was not inspired, but suggested, by Edgar 
 Quinet's Akasuerus, which made a great noise 
 when it appeared in 1833, stirring up problems 
 which disturbed more than one of the greatest 
 minds. To question life and death, to discover 
 to what end man was created, was tempting to 
 a poet, even though he knew that neither life 
 nor death could reply to the question that 
 humanity has been asking ever since its birth, 
 and will continue to ask as long as we exist. It 
 belongs to the unknown, the insolvable. Like 
 many others, Theophile Gautier wished to study 
 this problem, and he has written a poem to which 
 he might have given as epigraph, the last words 
 spoken by Sir Walter Raleigh, before kneeling 
 upon the scaffold which his former mistress, she 
 whom England still names the Great Elizabeth, 
 had caused to be erected for him. " Time has 
 robbed us of our joys and our youth, a little 
 dust, in the dark and silent grave, is all that will 
 remain of us." ^ 
 
 The poet wanders among the tombs, the dead 
 speak to him and entrust him with their secrets, 
 which tell him nothing, he knows as much as 
 they do, for they are his own thoughts which he 
 expresses by their voices from beyond the grave. 
 
 " See Sir Walter Raleigh's verses, found in his Bible in the 
 Gate House at Westminster. (Trans.) 
 
I go Tkhpkile Gautier. 
 
 Raphael thought the human race was dead, be- 
 cause it no longer knew how to paint. Faust, 
 oppressed with the nothingness of science, gives 
 us this precept which every wise person should 
 listen to : 
 
 '■'• Ne cherchez pas un mot qui n'est pas dans le livre ; 
 Pour savoir comme on vit n'oubliez pas de vivre : 
 Aimez, car tout est la ! " ' 
 
 Don Juan, the legendary Don Juan, the man of 
 rapes, seductions, and impiety, a type of " liber- 
 tine " such as the seventeenth century understood 
 it, which had not invented " the free-thinker " 
 whom we meet with in our day, is no more con- 
 tented than Faust ; he, too, acknowledges his 
 •error : 
 
 '' Trompeuse volupt^, c'est toi que j'ai suivie, 
 Et peut-etre, 6 vertu ! I'^nigme de la vie, 
 C'est toi qui la savais." = 
 
 Gautier makes of Don Juan a man who seeks 
 among the crowd of women the ideal woman 
 
 ' " Seek not for a word which is not in the book, 
 To know how we live, forget not to live, 
 Love, for everything lies in that ! " 
 " " Deceitful voluptuousness, it is thee whom I have followed, 
 And perhaps, O Virtue ! it is thou who knowest it, 
 This mystery of life." 
 
The Poet. 191 
 
 seen in his dream ; good, but then she was 
 only to exist in order to be able to love. Don 
 Juan, as I conceive him, does not care much 
 about being loved, he wishes to love, and cannot, 
 which makes him a son of Satan. 
 
 Napoleon, " that sovereign prince, patron of 
 hazardous deeds," as Montaigne would have 
 said, appeared in his turn ; glory, ambition, the 
 noise of battle, the shouts of triumph, what does 
 it all come to ? Instead of being a conqueror, 
 whose name filled the world, and will ring on 
 into posterity, would it not have been more 
 worth while to be a goatherd playing upon his 
 simple flute to please Galatea ? And yet not 
 one of these dead people, chosen from among 
 the most celebrated, the most envied, was con- 
 tent with his lot. In this they resemble the 
 living. In his interrogatory the poet learnt 
 nothing, had he questioned ^akya-Mouni, Ma- 
 homed, and Moses, he would not have known 
 any more. Short or long, unhappy or prosper- 
 ous, life remains an undecipherable problem ; 
 that is why every hypothesis is allowable to 
 prolong it, and re-animate it above terrestrial 
 limits, for, by itself, isolated from the hereafter, 
 which human conceptions attribute to it, it is 
 incomprehensible. 
 
 La ComMie de la mart would seem to have 
 been Gautier's adieu to Romanticism, its influ- 
 
192 Thiophile Gautier. 
 
 ence is still strong, as well in the thought that 
 inspired the verses, as in the form in which they 
 are clothed ; later he emancipates himself from 
 it, and his originality appears free, stripped of 
 all reminiscence. The verses which follow this 
 funereal poem, are exempt from the romantic 
 despair, which is so exaggerated that we hardly 
 believe in it, but we find frequent traces of the 
 unwholesome melancholy, which at that time 
 led so many young men to commit suicide. 
 Gautier was then about twenty-five, the age of 
 sadness without a motive, and languors without 
 cause, and he did not escape them. 
 
 " AUez dire qu'on creuse 
 Sous le pale gazon 
 Una tombe sans nom. 
 Hdlas ! j'ai dans le coeur una tristesse affreuse ! " ' 
 
 In ThJbaide, which is an appeal to Nirvana, in 
 le Trou du serpent and le Lion du cirque we can, 
 without much seeking, find traces of that iner- 
 tia to which dreamers, more than any others, are 
 exposed. This note of sadness, which vibrates 
 like a stifled sob, has nothing aff'ected in it, it is 
 
 ■ " Go tell them to dig 
 Under the dull sod 
 A grave without a name. 
 Alas ! my heart is full of intolerable sadness ! " 
 
The Poet. 193 
 
 natural, and is only a sign of the state of the soul. 
 It is true that in the Tinebres, a very beautiful 
 piece written in 1837, Gautier gives a verse that 
 seems to have been composed to serve as a 
 motto for his whole existence, which was so full 
 of resignation, and at times so empty : 
 
 " Je suis las de la vie et ne veux pas mourir ! " ' 
 
 These lugubrious songs did not last long, they 
 vanished like clouds, which disperse at the 
 breath of the wind, the sun reappears, the poet 
 recovers himself, and exults when he has worked 
 well : 
 
 " Par Apollo ! cent vers ! je devrais Stre las ; 
 On le serait h. moins, mais je ne le suis pas. 
 Je ne sais quelle joie intime et souveraine 
 Me fait le regard vif et la face sereine." = 
 
 He sings of love, of the woods and fields, and 
 the first May beams ; he has forgotten Albertus 
 and Veronica, the witches sabbath, the daggers 
 of Toledo, and the slashed doublets ; of his 
 
 ' " I am tired of life, and yet I would not die ! " 
 = " By Apollo ! a hundred verses 1 I ought to be tired ; 
 Some at least would be so, but I am not. 
 I know not what inward and all-powerful joy 
 Makes my glance so bright, my face serene." 
 
 14 
 
194 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 borrowed plumes nothing remains. When life 
 weighs too heavily upon him he does not invoke 
 angels or demons, but addresses a hymn to 
 
 "Sommeil, dieu triste et doux, consolateur du 
 monde." ' 
 
 Thus, at the age in which all excess is permis- 
 sible, and when even a little folly is not out of 
 place, he played truant at the school of Romanti- 
 cism, found his own path, and followed it with- 
 out wavering. There were not many who 
 imitated him, simply because they were far, 
 very far from having his worth. They clung 
 obstinately to forms, the very excess of which 
 made them at once as obsolete as the forms 
 borrowed from the pseudo-classic. Having no 
 thoughts of their own, they distorted the ideas of 
 others which they did not understand, forget- 
 ting that the attempt to be original when one 
 is not so, naturally leads to ridicule, and they 
 threw discredit upon the movement that Victor 
 Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, and Thdo- 
 phile Gautier started with so much ability. 
 Gautier wrote of les Grotesques of bygone days ; 
 if some well-advised critic could seek out the 
 grotesques of Romanticist poetry from 1830 to 
 about 1 84s, I promise him an anthology which 
 ■ " Sleep, sweet sad god, comforter of the world." 
 
The Poet. 195 
 
 we should not scorn on those days when we are 
 a prey to the blue devils. 
 
 In the author of the verses completing the 
 volume of la Comidie de la mort, the earliest 
 of which date from 1838, it is not difficult to 
 recognize the artist who was to paint the enamels, 
 (Emaux), and cut the cameos, (Camdes). Certain 
 of the smaller pieces, exquisite in composition 
 and colour, seem like the sisters of those which 
 were to spring forth ten years later, and are, so 
 to speak, the favourite children, the comforters, of 
 the saddened poet. The rhythm is different, but 
 the sentiment is the same, and it is certainly the 
 future author of the Coquetterie posthume who 
 wrote : 
 
 " Celle que j'aime a present, est en Chine ; 
 EUe demeure, avec ses vieux parents, 
 Dans une tour de porcelaine fine, 
 Au fleuve jaune oii sont les cormorans." " 
 
 And many others which might be quoted, and 
 which the reader has already thought of, such as 
 la Caravane, la Ckimere, le Sphinx and Pastel, 
 which one is never tired of repeating. 
 
 ' " She whom I love at present is in China, 
 She dwells, with her aged parents, 
 In a tower of fine porcelain, 
 By the yellow stream where the cormorants are." 
 
196 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 In this volume, octosyllabic verses are rare, and 
 yet that was to be the definite form adopted by 
 Thdophile Gautier. Already in his sketch of 
 Scarron he adopts it, praises it, and cries it up. 
 
 "The verse of eight syllables and even rhymes," he 
 says, " offers facilities which make it difficult not to 
 abuse it. In the hands of a mediocre versifier, it soon 
 becomes more mean and bald than slovenly prose, and, 
 to compensate the ear, only offers us a rhyme fatiguing 
 from its apposition. Skilfully handled, this verse, which 
 is that used in the Spanish Romances and Comedies, 
 can produce new and varied effects ; ... it appears 
 to us to be more characteristic than the pompous and 
 redundant Alexandrine ; ... it would save us a good 
 many stereotyped hemistiches, which it is difficult for 
 the best and most careful poets to avoid, so much do 
 the exigencies of the divisions and rhymes of hexameter 
 verse call for them." 
 
 This verse of eight syllables, rather looked upon 
 with contempt formerly, almost exclusively re- 
 served for burlesque writing, and which was 
 called burlesque verse, Th^ophile Gautier took 
 up, and made of it the mould of precision in 
 which he cast his thoughts. 
 
 In the volume Emaux et Cam^es, that volume 
 at which he worked during the last twenty years 
 of his life, he has only employed, with the excep- 
 tion of three pieces, the stanzas of four octo- 
 
The Poet. 197 
 
 syllabic verses with alternate rhymes, and he has 
 made a remarkable effect with it. Every one of 
 the fifty-five pieces that compose this collection, 
 is a jewel, cut by the hand of the master, cut 
 with deliberation, with affection, often corrected, 
 and always improved. As soon as he felt him- 
 self free and at leisure — " leisure the tenth and 
 most inspiring of the muses," he says — he took 
 refuge in himself, refusing all other inferior pre- 
 occupation, and returned once more for himself, 
 for his own enjoyment, to the making of poetry, 
 which he loved so well. He has related this 
 exactly in the i.inaux et Cam^es, in terms which 
 I shall quote, for they give a very clear idea 
 of the solidity of his verses, and of the relief 
 which he found in making them : 
 
 " Mes colonnes sont align^es 
 Au portique du feuilleton ; 
 Ellas supportent, r^sign^es, 
 Du journal le pesant fronton. 
 
 Jusqu'a lundi je suis men maltre. 
 Au diable, chefs-d'oeuvre mort-nds ! 
 Pour huit jours je puis me permettre 
 De vous fermer la porte au nez. 
 
 Les ficelles des mdlodrames 
 N'ont plus le droit de se glisser 
 Parmi les fils soyeux des trames 
 Que mon caprice aime a tisser. 
 
198 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Voix de Tame et de la nature 
 J'dcouterai vos purs sanglots, 
 Sans que les couplets de facture 
 M'dtourdissent de leurs grelots. 
 
 Et portant, dans mon verre a cotes, 
 La santd du temps disparu, 
 Avec mes vieux r6ves pour botes, 
 Je boirai le vin de mon cru ; 
 
 Le vin de ma propre pens^e, 
 Vierge de toute autre liqueur, 
 Et que, par la vie ^crasee 
 R^pand la grappe de mon coeur." ' 
 
 " My columns stand arow 
 At the portico of the feuilleton 
 They support resignedly 
 The journal's pediment. 
 
 Till Monday I am my own master. 
 To the devil with still-born masterpieces 
 For eight days I can have the joy 
 Of shutting the door in your faces. 
 
 The threads of melodramas 
 Have no longer a right to glide 
 Among the silken strands of the weft 
 It pleases my caprice to weave. 
 
 Voices of the soul and of nature, 
 I will listen to your thrilling accents 
 Without letting the couplets, made to order. 
 Distract me with their tinkle. 
 
The Poet, 199 
 
 This little quite personal piece, at once so keen 
 and so sad, seems to be a bit of advice to the 
 reader, for it is immediately followed by the one 
 written by the poet during his journalistic holi- 
 days — le Ch&teau du Souvenir. He sits alone 
 beside his hearth on a foggy day, and the ghosts 
 of his childhood, and of his youth, come to 
 keep him company. They people his solitude, 
 their dim voices speak of the things that are no 
 more, of the good things of the past, which we 
 think are forgotten, and which are only slumber- 
 ing, and will awake in our hours of melancholy. 
 Our first homes stamp their silhouettes on the 
 cloudy horizon, our first mistresses return, and 
 seem to rise from their graves, in the attitudes 
 which the heart remembers, — she whose beauty 
 bursts forth like a pomegranate in summer, she 
 who is like a flower in pastel, a shadow in a ball- 
 dress, she who resembles the wicked Venus 
 presiding at odious amours, to whom we might 
 say: 
 
 And drinking from my ribbed glass 
 
 To the health of times gone by, 
 
 With my old dreams for guests, 
 
 I will drink the wine of my own vineyard. 
 
 The wine of my own, own thought, 
 Unmixed with other brewage, 
 And which, through the bruised life, 
 Pours forth the grapes of my heart. " 
 
200 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 " O toi qui fus ma joie amfere, 
 Adieu pour toujours . . . et pardon ! " ' 
 
 Then, in their turn, the old comrades of the 
 C/nacle rise up and sound the flourish of 
 trumpets of their youth, the poet sees himself 
 again, and can hardly recognize himself ; that it 
 is himself, however, there is no question, the 
 portrait leaves no doubt of it : 
 
 " Dans son pourpoint de satin rose, 
 Qu'un gofit hardi coloria, 
 II semble chercher une pose 
 Pour Boulanger ou Devdria. 
 
 Terreur du bourgeois glabre et chauve, 
 Une chevelure a tous crins 
 De roi franc ou de lion fauve 
 Roule en torrent jusqu'a ses reins." ^ 
 
 " Oh, thou who wast my bitter joy, 
 Adieu for ever . . . and pardon ! " 
 
 ' ' In his doublet of rose-coloured satin, 
 Which a daring taste has coloured, 
 He seems to seek a pose 
 For Boulanger or Dev^ria. 
 
 Terror of the citizen smooth and bald. 
 His hair, like the mane 
 Of a Frankish king or tawny lion. 
 Rolls in a torrent down to his waist.' 
 
The Poet. 201 
 
 He lingers over his memories, and with them 
 reviews the age which he regrets, the past fills 
 him with a charm to which he longs to abandon 
 himself ; but the present, ever exacting, ever in- 
 opportune, knocks at his door, drags him out of 
 his dream and " tells him in vain to forget." Of 
 a tender sadness, profoundly human, without 
 any repinings or recriminations, this piece seems 
 to me one of the most beautiful of the Emaux et 
 Camies. 
 
 For the rest they all possess superior qualities, 
 not one of them is mediocre, and they have this 
 in particular in Thdophile Gautier's work, that 
 they were for the most part inspired by incidents 
 in his life. There are few to which one could 
 not put a name. It is of course not a question 
 of a poem " with a key," but every one of these 
 detached poems wears a mask, which it is easy 
 to raise, and behind which is hidden the face of 
 some dear phantom, whose smile seems to hover 
 above the verses which glorify them. 
 
 What a distance lies between these stanzas, 
 where trembles a soul sorrowful but serene, 
 always enamoured of the beautiful, artistic in 
 every conception, still eager in spite of the 
 clouds which weigh upon it, how far lies this 
 generous wisdom, from the satanic furies of 
 Albertus, and the lugubrious inquests of la 
 ComMie de la mort ! Time has done its work. 
 
202 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Man resembles the silex, which falls from the 
 cliffs and glides into the sea. When the stones 
 escape from the chalky coating which envelopes 
 them, they appear angular, denticulated, and 
 bristling with points. The ocean receives them, 
 tosses them about in its tempests, rocks them 
 with its rhythmic movements, and throws up on 
 the shore the rounded pebble, always hard and 
 resistant, holding within it that inner spark which 
 flashes forth at the least blow, but having lost 
 with the action of the waves — I was going to say 
 of the years — the asperities with which it was 
 disfigured in its primitive days. Of the eccen- 
 tricities of his youth, much more apparent in his 
 verse than in his prose, Gautier, as he grew older, 
 only kept the vigour, and originality, of which 
 they were the indication. 
 
 All the pieces of Emaux et Cam^es are com- 
 posed with a master art which nothing can dis- 
 turb, and for which poetry has no secrets. They 
 are constructed on a definite plan, from which 
 the author does not turn aside; the rhyme, let it 
 be never so difficult, never carries him away from 
 the path which he has traced for himself, for he 
 forces it to obey, and it obeys, coming at the 
 given point to complete his thought, according 
 to the intended form, and the chosen rhythm. It 
 is an uncommon merit, which only the good 
 workers in the art of making verses can appre- 
 
The Poet. 203 
 
 date. In this volume, more perhaps than in any- 
 other, Thdophile Gautier has put in practice the 
 theory which he developed with so much reason, 
 when, speaking of the Stances et Poemes of Sully 
 Prudhomme, he said : 
 
 "The smallest pieces possess the merit of being 
 composed, of having a beginning, a middle and an 
 end, of aiming at an object, of expres§ing_a. precise 
 idea. A sonnet calls for a plan as much as an epic 
 poem, and the most difficult to compose in poetry, as 
 well as in painting, is a single figure. Many authors 
 forget this law of art, and their works show it for 
 neither perfection of style, nor the wealth of the 
 rhymes, can redeem this fault." 
 
 In his youthful poems, as well as in those of 
 his mature age, Gautier possesses a rare quality, 
 so rare that I do not meet with it as a permanent 
 condition except with him — I mean ^rannaaJtical 
 correctness, .Let no one exclaim at this ; to have 
 a proper respect for grammar is an exceptional 
 thing among poets. The greatest of the Clas- 
 sicists and the Romanticists take it very easily, 
 under every sort of pretext, more plausible than 
 real, they resolutely run foul of mistakes in 
 syntax, which they baptize under the name of 
 poetical licence. Agreement of the tenses is 
 particularly distasteful to them, and when they 
 
204 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 are embarrassed by a subjunctive, they promptly 
 replace it by a solecism. That is allowed or at 
 least tolerated, and they are not at all numerous, 
 those who have refused these flights, which the 
 very contexture of the verses even often call for, 
 and which in our day there seems to be some 
 inclination to adopt in prose. In this respect 
 Thdophile Gautier is never false to himself; he 
 uses towards himself a severity which his pro- 
 found knowledge of the French language made 
 easy to him perhaps, but which must none the 
 less be pointed out. Above all it comes from 
 the fact that he attached great importance to 
 form, and that he could not understand form 
 without correctness. 
 
 This preoccupation over purity of style, is in- 
 cessant with Gautier, dominates him, and never 
 leaves him ; it is apparent in the first hours of 
 his literary life, in his abundant prose, in his 
 verse sometimes to excess, and we find it again, 
 imperious and obeyed, when having attained to 
 complete mastery, he prunes his phrases, and 
 transposes with perspicacity, what he has seen 
 and what he has dreamed. 
 
 He arrives at suppressing metaphors almost 
 entirely ; we might say that the apparatus of 
 similies appears to him to be too complicated. 
 He replaces them with a picturesque word drawn 
 unconsciously towards the simplicity which is 
 
The Poet. 205 
 
 the characteristic of writers born and bred. To 
 be simple is, I believe, the best means of being 
 understood by the public, and it is what every 
 sincere author seeks after, although there are 
 some who have pretended, or wish to pretend, 
 that they only write for a limited number of 
 readers. Joubert gave excellent advice to M. 
 Mold, when on October 21, 1803, he said to him : 
 " Always strive to write in such a manner that a 
 clever child could ver}'^ nearly understand you, 
 and that a deep thinker may find something to 
 meditate upon in you." On the whole, to be 
 understood by all the world is the writer's 
 ambition, and those who say that they do not 
 trouble about it, make us think that they are 
 not sincere. 
 
 Form ! I know what Bridoison thinks of it, 
 nevertheless it is a grave question, which has 
 often been agitated precisely apropos of Thdo- 
 phile Gautier, who has been reproached without 
 very serious grounds, with having sacrificed too 
 much to it. They have set down as a fault in 
 him, a quality which was natural to him, which 
 he developed by study, or, to put it better, by the 
 very exercise of his art. He had his form, 
 entirely his own, exclusive, so to speak, and he 
 perfected it as much as he could, he loved it, not 
 hiding the fact from himself, but he never at- 
 tempted to impose it on others. Form is not of 
 
2o6 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 one kind happily, it is manifold, and must be so 
 under pain otherwise of becoming utterly weari- 
 some. Form corresponds to our ideas, adapts 
 itself to them, and turns them to account. Each 
 one has his own, which shows itself for what it is 
 worth, and in such a matter imitation is synony- 
 mous with sterility. Bossuet's prose does not 
 resemble Voltaire's in the least, neither does 
 Voltaire's resemble Pascal's, nor Pascal's Montes- 
 quieu's. Here we have four different forms, and 
 admirable ones too. Is one superior to another 1 
 We may doubt it, it is a question of the reader's 
 taste, who is always free to judge by predilection. 
 A phrase has been used which would have 
 infatuated Gautier. That is quite possible, for 
 the Romanticist of 1830, the member of the 
 Cenacle, was not at all averse from the use of 
 paradoxes ; but that he would have accepted 
 this phrase as a maxim of Art, proper to serve 
 as a motto and rallying word for a school of 
 literature, I do not believe. In spite of the 
 irony which concealed his gentleness, and a 
 certain simple-mindedness, which his experience 
 of life could not entirely destroy, and which 
 often led him to adopt for a moment, formulas 
 the strangeness of which had charmed him, in 
 spite too of his good nature, which made him 
 readily accept the opinions of his interlocutors, 
 iie possessed an imperturbable good sense that 
 
The Poet. 207 
 
 his artistic eccentricities, the aesthetic discussions 
 in which he had been mixed up, his own fancy 
 even, never disturbed, and he was incapable — if 
 the expression may be allowed — of believing 
 the moon to be made of green cheese. 
 
 If in his presence any one had proclaimed 
 this aphorism, " Out of form comes the idea," 
 he would have adopted it at once, without 
 reserve, as though he had discovered the so- 
 lution of a long-sought problem, or the ex- 
 pression of one of those striking truths which 
 no honest soul can reject. I believe we have 
 been mistaken in this matter. Gautier's con- 
 victions in matters of Art were so strong, that 
 it was not difficult to him to remain indifferent 
 to the opinions of others. Indeed he often 
 pretended to approve of them, so as to avoid 
 discussion, which he did not like, for he knew 
 how barren and sometimes disloyal it is. Gautier 
 certainly took pains with his form, attributing 
 great importance to it — as the whole of his work 
 shows — but he knew that it was only the agent 
 for the transmission of ideas. His opinion did 
 not go beyond the Saint Simonian theory, which 
 makes of one the equal of the other. That in the 
 intimacy of friendly converse with literary com- 
 panions, he should have abandoned himself to 
 those sallies of wit which were natural to him, 
 has nothing astonishing in it ; but if he had 
 
2o8 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 suspected that they would be collected and pub- 
 lished later, he would have kept them to himself, 
 and would have amused himself with them in 
 the privacy of his own mind. That literary 
 form never receives enough attention, he be- 
 lieved, and he was right. He repeated it to 
 whoever would listen to him, but between that 
 and saying that form is the mother, the gene- 
 ratrix of ideas, lies an abyss, and this abyss 
 his reason never overstepped. Under the most 
 admirable forms of French literature, we always 
 find the fact or the thought of which it is only 
 the envelope ; the one shows the other off with- 
 out doubt, but the second can, up to a certain 
 point, do without the first, and make its own 
 way in the world. 
 
 Is it really its form that constitutes the beauty 
 of the Arvers sonnet ? To prepare himself for 
 it, Stendhal read up one or two chapters on civil 
 law, and one sees it in his style, but that did 
 not prevent him from writing la Chartreuse de 
 Parme. Leaving on one side the nineteenth 
 century, so as not to wound any suscepti- 
 bilities, we must admit that numerous novels 
 were published in France before the beginning 
 of the year 1801, we could count them by 
 thousands and thousands of volumes. Many 
 of them stirred enthusiasm, and exercised an 
 influence on the manners of their time, but 
 
The Poet. 209 
 
 how many of them exist now ? And by novels 
 I mean purely works of imagination, free from 
 all ideas of philosophical propagandism. Not 
 taking into account Gil Bias, an initial and 
 pregnant work from which was to spring the 
 modern novel, there remained three which took 
 no heed of fashions or customs, which have 
 resisted time, have made all hearts beat, charmed 
 all minds, and which at this hour have lost 
 nothing of their youth : they are la Princesse de 
 Cleves, Manon Lescaut, and Paul et Virginie. 
 Ought we to say three novels, are they not rather 
 three narratives ? 
 
 In truth form counts for little in these three 
 masterpieces, the author did not trouble much 
 about it, neither does the reader. The emotion 
 stirred by them is none the less of an intensity 
 nearly allied to anguish. Leon Gozlan acknow- 
 ledged it with surprise and said : " If we wrote 
 like these people we should be stoned." I 
 imagine, however, that the author of the Nuits 
 du Phe-Lachaise would not have felt too much 
 humiliated if he had written Paul et Virginie or 
 even la Chaumihre indienne. If perfection of 
 form alone opens the door of posterity to works 
 of imagination, whence comes the persistent suc- 
 cess which the translation of certain foreign works 
 has obtained in France ? We must not content 
 ourselves with vain words, which however seduc- 
 15 
 
2IO Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 tive they may be, are only the expression of a 
 paradox, bred in the brains of a man of talent 
 on one of his days of bad temper or cheerful- 
 ness. So little is idea born of form that without 
 the idea the form could not exist. 
 
 If the authors of the Princesse de Cleves, 
 Manon, and Paul et Virginie found for those 
 three stories the style which does not grow old, 
 it is precisely because they did not seek for style, 
 and contented themselves with interpreting in 
 the most straightforward way possible their 
 thoughts and impressions. The simplicity of 
 the form equals the simplicity of the con- 
 ception, there is no disagreement between 
 them ; they are really made for one another, 
 and result in a marvellous harmony. Ernest 
 Renan, to whom no one can deny the art and 
 science of writing, the knowledge of exquisite 
 elegance of style, grace, and ability, proclaimed 
 a striking truth when he said in his Souvenirs 
 d'enfance : " The fundamental rule of style is to 
 keep solely in view the thought that you wish to 
 inculcate, and consequently to have a thought." 
 This is an amplification of the phrase written by 
 Balzac in Wn Prince de la Boheme : " Style comes 
 from ideas, not from words." 
 
 With Gautier the idea was created enveloped 
 in its form, quite clothed so to speak, the two 
 operations of mind being simultaneous ; that 
 
The Poet. 211 
 
 is why he wrote without correcting his MS., and 
 almost always without re-reading it ; he had 
 only to listen to his own dictation. His 
 sesthetics, very simple, consisted in expressing 
 at his best what he had conceived. Literature 
 seemed to him _an art complete in itself, eman-^ 
 cipated Jrorn _ all philosophical^ political, and 
 social interference. He rejected with energy 
 all the metaphysical rubbish with which George 
 Sand so often perplexed herself, disdaining as 
 inferior the novel with a purpose, and affirming 
 by his precepts as well as by his work, that 
 we need not seek elsewhere than in our own 
 imagination the elements of a literary pro- 
 duction. He had, like all of us, his preferences 
 for such or such a manner of creating and prac- 
 tising the art of letters, but he had too en- 
 lightened a mind not to be eclectic. He 
 admired the beautiful wherever he found it, 
 and welcomed it, never thinking of asking 
 for its certificate of baptism. This act of 
 justice was easy to him, for in spite of 
 the bonds of his youth, the persistent and 
 justified admirations of his mature age, he was 
 independent, feeling strong enough not to 
 belong to any coterie, and sufficiently master 
 to be of no school. In this respect there was 
 a certain contradiction in him which was only 
 a pretence, and which I must explain by re- 
 
212 Th^ophile Gautier. 
 
 calling that he said: "After 1833 I buried 
 the Middle Ages." 
 
 Gautier, carried away by his passion for art, 
 actuated perhaps by the instinct of self-pre- 
 servation, which so often guides us without 
 our knowing it, belonged body and soul to 
 the Romanticist school, for only there, in 1830, 
 could he find the freedom for which his literary 
 temperament craved in order to manifest itself 
 without constraint. He remained to the end 
 faithful to the principles he had adopted, not 
 at all out of respect for the accepted compact, 
 nor from habit, but from artistic predilection, 
 because those principles were in accordance 
 with his ideas and aspirations. He said to 
 me one day : " I was a Romanticist by birth " ; 
 and nothing could have been truer. The school 
 did not enrol him one of themselves, he existed 
 before they did ; the result of this is rather 
 singular — he did not believe in schools, on the 
 other hand he believed in individualities, and 
 he was not mistaken. Of all those who entered 
 the family of which Goethe, Schiller, Chateau- 
 briand, and Byron were the ancestors, and of 
 which Victor Hugo was the father, those alone 
 were superior who made a little band apart. 
 Their originality was fortified by the movement 
 with which they associated themselves, but that 
 originality existed of itself, and sooner or later 
 
The Poet. 213 
 
 would have revealed itself. Men born to be 
 captains do not long remain lost in the ranks. 
 I have already mentioned Th^ophile Gautier, 
 and Alfred de Musset, who hardly had time 
 to be disciples before they were masters. 
 
 If Gautier did not believe in schools, still less 
 did he believe in theories in art. Every work of 
 art — novel or picture, symphony or statue — is 
 the result of gestation. When the child has 
 reached its full term it comes into the world : 
 viable or not — no one knows ; the future must 
 decide it. That is why in the artistic world 
 disappointments are so frequent, for no one 
 knows or can know, in virtue of what rules 
 he must produce. Therefore all theories are 
 vain, most frequently the disciples only succeed 
 by doing the contrary to what they have been 
 taught to do, and breaking the circle in which 
 the lessons they have received had enclosed them. 
 David was the pupil of de Vien, and Delacroix 
 of Gudrin. Not only are theories vain, they 
 are never anything but retrospective ; they 
 always come a posteriori, much more for the 
 purpose of justifying faults, than to praise up 
 qualities. Most of them are the product of 
 wounded vanity, which, surprised if not indig- 
 nant at being discussed, resists and wishes to 
 lay down as a new law, precisely the defects 
 with which it is reproached. The story of the 
 
2 14 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 fox without a tail, belongs to all times and 
 all societies. In its essence Art is infinite and 
 universal, to wish to tie it down to rigid rules, 
 to restrict it to fixed limits, is to confound it 
 with trade, to prove that we do not understand 
 it, for deprived of initiative it no longer exists. 
 
 Gautier professed such devotion to Art that 
 he preferred it to nature. In nature he only- 
 saw a document more or less correct, which the 
 artist interprets, modifying it according to his 
 ability, his fancy, and his genius ; he who copies 
 it servilely may be an artisan, endowed with a 
 real talent for imitation, but he will only be 
 an artisan, never an artist. Everything, too, 
 which approached to what has been called 
 realism, or naturalism, displeased him. To him 
 a work was not complete until a man had given 
 his impress to it ; I mean the impress of the 
 master, which is immortal. Gautier preferred 
 the Parthenon to the most beautiful mountains ; 
 the landscapes which he admired most were 
 those of Claude Lorrain, and woman seemed 
 to him inferior to the statue. He thought thus 
 when he was quite young ; what is called the 
 " age of passion " left his artistic opinions 
 intact. He was eighteen when he entered 
 Rioult's studio. 
 
 " The first female model did not appear beautiful 
 
The Poet. 215 
 
 to me," he said, " she disappointed me singularly, 
 so much does Art add to the most perfect nature. 
 She was, nevertheless, a very pretty girl, whose graceful 
 and pure lines I appreciated later by comparison, but 
 after that first impression I have always preferred the 
 statue to the woman, and marble to flesh." 
 
 He was never inconsistent, and never ceased 
 to proclaim the superiority of Art over nature, 
 which on the whole he does not seem to have 
 cared much for. His Tiburce in the Toison d'or 
 resembles him greatly, for " by reason of living 
 in books and pictures he had arrived at no 
 longer finding nature real." And yet when 
 he is at Venice, and saturated with pictures, 
 architecture, and all the masterpieces of the 
 Renaissance, he lands at Fusina, what a cry of 
 joy there is at finding some greenery and 
 walking amongst the wild flowers ! 
 
 If he was enamoured of the literary and 
 plastic arts, there was one on the other hand 
 which he disdained, and to which he remained 
 indifferent — that was music. Apropos of a 
 phrase written in an album : " Music is the most 
 costly and tiresome of all noises," one asked 
 oneself what one was to think of it. We must 
 think what he took care to say himself in his 
 study on Saint Amant. " I must confess that 
 the grating of a saw, or of the fourth string of 
 
2i6 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 the cleverest violinist, have exactly the same 
 effect upon me. He said, moreover, that Victor 
 Hugo and Lamartine suffered in the same way. 
 If in what concerns Art and literature, Thdo- 
 phile Gautier had very advanced ideas, we 
 should be at a loss to determine what was his 
 system of philosophy ; properly speaking we 
 might say he had none. Those for the most 
 part unfathomable problems which we in general 
 only try to resolve by hypotheses, did not frighten 
 him, but they did not attract him either ; he 
 loved tranquility of mind, and was afraid of 
 compromising it if he troubled it with an ex- 
 amination that could never end in anything but 
 a relative certainty. The name of God occurs 
 often in his verses, especially in the earliest 
 ones. What God ? It would doubtless not 
 have been easy to him to explain exactly ; in 
 any case it was the God who loves, who pardons, 
 who understands, and who is not angry with 
 man for using the faculties with which He has 
 endowed him. So simple and consoling a con- 
 ception must have pleased Gautier, for if God 
 has created man in His own image, we must 
 acknowledge that man has made a good return 
 for it. He seems never to have been animated 
 by anything but vague religious scruples, tend- 
 ing towards pantheism, with nothing clearly 
 defined, or correctly orthodox. 
 
The Poet. 217 
 
 He was neither a sceptic nor a believer, but in 
 a way he suffered from religious doubts. Like 
 all those who have lived much, not to say entirely 
 on imagination, he was not a disbeliever in the 
 supernatural, and the various kinds of infernal 
 regions promised to us by various religions 
 did not reassure him at all. He would say 
 with a smile, " Perhaps it is true." Did he see, 
 or had he seen any light beyond the grave t I 
 do not know. Death appeared to him cold, 
 ugly, and black, and he did not like to think of 
 it. He was respectful, never laughing at the 
 faith of others, and said, " I have not, thank 
 God, any Voltairian ideas about the clergy," but 
 the clearness of his understanding did not allow 
 him to shut his eyes to palpable facts, and he 
 agreed that in Spain, at Cordova, Catholicism, 
 " undermined by the spirit of criticism, is 
 growing weaker from day to day even in the 
 countries where it held undisputed sway." 
 Further on, apropos of the cathedrals which 
 elevated the faith of the Middle Ages, he de- 
 plores the weakening of faiths, but this regret 
 is only that of an artist disheartened by the 
 mediocrities of his time. That proves that, like 
 George Sand, he had a soul impossible to satisfy 
 with what interests the greater part of mankind. 
 
 In politics he was neutral from indifference, 
 and above all out of contempt ; he found that 
 
2i8 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 the governments under which he had lived 
 resembled each other in this, that they were all 
 afraid to appear to have understanding. He 
 considered them almost exclusively in their 
 relation to the arts, which gave him a handle 
 when he was in the humour to criticise. Before 
 the Ministry of January 2, 1870, the directorship 
 of the fine arts was added on to the administra- 
 tion of the emperor's household, an office then 
 held by Marshall Vaillant. Gautier said of this 
 transaction : 
 
 "To choose a marshal of France, a venerable 
 soldier, but whose aesthetics leave something to be 
 desired, to give the impetus to painting, architecture, 
 sculpture, and music, is as brilliant an idea, as to 
 confide the command of armies to Ingres, the painter 
 of the Stratoniee, or to Adolphe Adam, singer of the 
 Postilion de Lonjumeau." 
 
 "When Thdophile Gautier proclaimed such 
 palpable truths as these, people smiled conde- 
 scendingly, and accused him of making para- 
 doxes. He made many of the same kind, for 
 abundant matter was furnished to him for 
 the purpose. He usually shrugged his shoul- 
 ders, dreamed of some satirical poetry, said to 
 himself, " What is the use ? " and thought no 
 more about it. 
 
The Poet. 219 
 
 Like most dreamers, he was rather prone to 
 admire men of action, and yet all violence was 
 repugnant to him ; war filled him with horror, 
 and revolutions made him despair. His ideal 
 was not of this world, he wished for a state of 
 civilisation where intelligence, beauty, and the 
 arts, were honoured, and where every effort 
 would have been towards expansion of mind, 
 a sort of abbey of Thelema, on the shores of 
 some peaceful gulf, under the shelter of groves 
 of lemon-trees, in view of the Parthenon. He 
 was born like that, and could not help it, that 
 is why he felt oppressed, and suffered ; rebellion 
 would have been useless, and a struggle absurd ; 
 he knew that, and resigned himself 
 
 Resigned, that is the right word ; in his life, so 
 opposed to all his aspirations, he supported 
 everything with a sort of Musulman fatalism. 
 In his profession of dramatic critic, he was at 
 times placed under men whose intelligence and 
 doubtful probity, justified the contempt which 
 he felt for them, and he submitted to them, 
 saying, " It would seem that it ought to be so, 
 seeing that it is. It is the just punishment of 
 my crime of poverty, and yet God knows that 
 if I am criminal it is much against my will." 
 Certainly he regretted not having the means 
 which would have made him independent, and 
 he was sorry to be forced to live from day to 
 
2 20 Thdophile Gatciier. 
 
 day in such a manner that all idleness, even all 
 sickness, was forbidden to him, under pain of 
 finding the cupboard empty, and hearing the 
 creditors knock at his door. And yet if he had 
 been offered the dreamed-of life, the life of 
 Fortunio, on condition of renouncing poetry 
 and never writing verses again, he would have 
 rejected the offer without hesitation, and, like 
 Antony of Navarre, in his castle of Good 
 Fortune, he would have replied : 
 
 " J'aime mieux ma mie, au gud ! 
 J'aime mieux ma mie." ' 
 
 He was not called upon to resist, for they did 
 not tempt him. He only knew the value of 
 money by the difficulty he had in gaining it. 
 He never understood how to fight for his own 
 interests ; was it from carelessness, from the 
 conviction of his own incompetence in such 
 matters, or modesty? I do not know, but he was 
 the most disinterested of men, and in that his 
 greatness suffered no abatement. Free from all 
 spirit of intrigue, credulous like all those who 
 do not lie, he never put himself forward. He 
 never made more out of his talent than a sub- 
 sistence, and never deigned to push himself, 
 
 ' " I love my love best, i'faith ! 
 I love my love the best." 
 
The Poet. 221 
 
 which would have been easier to him than to 
 any other whom we could name, for at need 
 his pen would have been redoubtable. The 
 struggle for life, so common in our own day, he 
 never attempted, not that he lacked strength or 
 courage, but because the arms that he would 
 have been obliged to employ, were repugnant to 
 the loyalty of his hands and his artistic con- 
 science. He dreamed of gaining some official 
 position, and was surprised that his abilities 
 were not utilised, but to obtain what he desired, 
 he would have been obliged to put himself for- 
 ward, and his muse held him aloof from all 
 competition. If he could not be " something," 
 he was " some one," which is of more value for 
 his reputation. 
 
 The more civilisation, pursuing its resistless 
 march, penetrates into democracy, the less men 
 like Th^ophile Gautier, the dreamers, the poets, 
 the lovers of beautiful things by which we do 
 not live, perhaps because they are immortal, the 
 less will these elect find a place in human 
 society. Their work having no immediate 
 usefulness, and representing but an ideal value, 
 will be more and more disdained. Our day is 
 for action, the dream is condemned. Each one 
 for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. 
 We elbow our way to the front, if we do not cut 
 a way for ourselves. What is the poet to do in 
 
222 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 the midst of this crowd and scrimmage, I mean 
 the man who is entirely a poet, holding his lyre 
 in his hand, having no other care than to pre- 
 vent it from being broken in the strife of in- 
 terested passions? There is no Francois I" 
 in our day to distribute pensions to the makers 
 of rhymes, no prelates to bestow benefits upon 
 them, no great patrons to help them to live. I 
 think it is better so ; poetry has doffed a livery 
 to resume its primitive drapery, but sometimes 
 the costume is insufficient, and the poet suffers 
 for it. What can governments do in the matter? 
 Nothing, or very little. We cannot create poets : 
 competitions, or prizes for poetry are powerless ; 
 they can only be recompensed after they have 
 manifested themselves. I will go further and 
 say it is a duty, when they have given proof of 
 talent, to place them in a position where they 
 will not have to suffer from narrow circum- 
 stances, and can develop their faculties without 
 being condemned to provide for the necessities 
 of life, by means of an irksome labour. When 
 Lamartine published his MMitations in 1820, 
 Louis XVIII. sent him the collection of the 
 masterpieces of French literature, edited by 
 Didot — that was excellent, for Lamartine was 
 rich ; if he had been poor, a pension would have 
 been more useful. 
 
 Did Gautier perhaps regret those days when 
 
The Poet. 223 
 
 the poet, by means of pensions which secured 
 his subsistence, could, without too many ma- 
 terial preoccupations, wind the golden thread of 
 his thoughts on the spinning-wheel of sonorous 
 rhymes ? I should not be surprised. He im- 
 plies it, when, in counting up Scarron's means, 
 and relating the pleasant discussion between 
 Colletet and Richelieu about the word " bar- 
 boter " (to dabble) proposed by the former, 
 rejected by the latter, he exclaims, " What a 
 happy century was that, in which a minister like 
 Richelieu, in the midst of so many great things 
 which he did, or meditated doing, could yet find 
 time to occupy himself with the productions of 
 the mind, and discuss with a poet the appro- 
 priateness of a term ! " Gautier certainly never 
 discussed with M. Rouher the value of a word, 
 the divisions of a verse, or the initial letter, but 
 in the last years of the Second Empire he found 
 — what was of more importance — intelligent 
 patrons who understood him, adopted him, and 
 simplified his life, by making it less difficult.^ 
 By means of his regular work on the Journal 
 officiel, more generously remunerated, and also by 
 a sinecure librarianship with a princess, patron of 
 
 ' By 5> decree of April 25, 1863, M. Rouland, Minister of 
 Public Instruction, accorded an annual indemnity of 3,000 francs 
 (;^i2o) to Th&phile Gautier, who, thanks to M. Jules Simon, 
 received it up to his death. 
 
2 24 ThSophile Gautier. 
 
 letters, he was at last able to emerge from the 
 atmosphere in which he was suffocating. Did 
 he, as was stated, receive a pension paid directly 
 by the Imperial Cabinet ? I do not know, 
 but I do not believe that he did. For the 
 rest he would not have been the only one, 
 for although Napoleon III. had little taste 
 for literature, and understood nothing of Art, 
 whenever it was pointed out to him that 
 there was a kind action to be done, his gene- 
 rosity knew no hesitation. The annual budget 
 of good works — help and patronage— undertaken 
 by his privy purse, was fixed at 3,500,000 francs 
 — 10,000 francs a day, as the writers and artists 
 of his time knew. May this homage rendered 
 to truth be placed to the credit of the fallen 
 sovereign. 
 
 So life began to show itself more pro- 
 pitious towards Gautier ; he might believe him- 
 self free for ever from the worries and diffi- 
 culties which had harassed him for so long. 
 More than this, absolute ease seemed to be 
 secured to his future, for a seat had been pointed 
 out in the senate near the one upon which 
 Sainte-Beuve had sat. The dream was too 
 beautiful that was to delude his old age. He 
 was living in the fairyland of his dream when 
 there came a rough change of scene, and the poor 
 poet foundered in the disaster in which France 
 
The Poet. 225 
 
 nearly perished. The war, the fourth of Sep- 
 tember Revolution, the siege of Paris, and the 
 Commune overwhelmed him. He took two 
 years to die of it, but he did die of it, and he 
 was not the only one who had no longer any 
 wish to live, after so many misfortunes. If he 
 did not despair of our country, he was made 
 desperate by her heroic sufferings ; he heard the 
 little children crying for hunger, he saw Paris 
 burning, he visited the ruins of our homes and 
 monuments, burnt through envy, drunkenness, 
 and folly, and he was stupefied by it. How can 
 this civilisation of which we are so proud con- 
 ceal such barbarism ? We should have thought 
 that after so many centuries the wild beast in 
 man would have been better tamed. Who is 
 the Orpheus, the Van Amburg, doctus lenire 
 tigres, who will tame it ? From that day Gautier 
 was crushed. 
 
 His patriotism, his belief in a less criminal 
 state of society, his love of letters, now more 
 despised than ever, his belief in his own freedom 
 from the cares of life, again and for a long time 
 compromised, everything within him, mourned. 
 He no longer felt strong enough to struggle, 
 and said, " I live from habit ; I have no longer 
 any desire to live." By a natural inspiration, 
 and as though to escape from the troubles of 
 the moment, he returned in thought to the days 
 16 
 
226 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 of his youth, searched through the cemetery of 
 his past life, and amidst the ashes of remem- 
 brance discovered some jewels, just as he found 
 some in the tomb of Aria Marcella. 
 
 His life had been made up of disappointments, 
 and perhaps the most bitter came from the 
 knowledge that he owed his celebrity more to 
 his journalistic work, than to his poems. Was 
 not that what he meant when speaking of him- 
 self he wrote : " This poet, who owes to his 
 journalistic work the small notoriety of his 
 name, has naturally done something in the way 
 of verse-making." All his dreams had vanished 
 one after the other, and he found himself on the 
 threshold of old age, which was approaching, 
 working continuously, though he was already 
 weakened by an illness of which he was still un- 
 aware. Among the desires which he had had, 
 a single one remained to him. He wished to 
 belong to the French Academy, where his talent 
 as a writer, and his profound knowledge of the 
 French language, had for so many years marked 
 out his place. He was tired and surprised 
 that he had to go through so long a proba- 
 tion on that illustrious forty-first fauteuil upon 
 which Balzac and Alexandre Dumas, two 
 great pioneers of literature, had sat before him. 
 Three times already had he knocked at those 
 obstinately closed doors. On the 2nd of May, 
 
The Poet. 227 
 
 1866, he presented himself to succeed Baron 
 de Barante — and old Gratry was elected. On 
 the 7th of May, 1868, he solicited the place left 
 vacant by the death of Ponsard, and Autran was 
 preferred before him. Again, on the 29th of 
 April, 1869, he became a candidate at the elec- 
 tion destined to replace Empis, and after four 
 ballots Auguste Barbier, whom in Italia Gautier 
 had called the bilious poet, came out conqueror 
 from the contest, which was a hot one. 
 
 The Academy regretted, I believe, having ex- 
 cluded the author of so many works which do 
 honour to French literature, and in 1872 they 
 seem to have decided to accord to this great 
 writer the consecration which he asked for. 
 Before they could carry out their intention, 
 however, death had elected the poet who had 
 sung the comedy of it, and who had not even 
 had the consolation of wearing the uniform with 
 the green palms, which — like so many others — 
 he had laughed at in the days of his youth. 
 Does not this recall certain stanzas in Heinrich 
 Heine's Romancero ? The Shah Mohamed calls 
 to mind the poet Firdusi, who lives in poverty 
 in the town of Thus, and he gives orders that 
 " presents equivalent to the annual tribute of a 
 province" be sent to him. The long file of 
 dromedaries laden with the presents from the 
 sovereign sets forward. "The caravan entered 
 
228 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 Thus by the southern gate, with a brilliant 
 flourish of trumpets, and shouts of joy ; but by 
 the northern gate, at the other end of the town, 
 at the same moment a funeral procession passed 
 out, carrying to the grave the dead poet Firdusi." 
 
 The malady which since the days of the war, 
 and the Commune, slowly destroyed Gautier's 
 robust constitution, became so threatening that 
 there was no hope for him, and on the 23rd of 
 October, 1872, he ceased to live, at the age of 
 sixty-one. The terrors of death were spared to 
 him, he fell asleep and did not wake again. 
 Perhaps in the dream of his last slumber, he may 
 have murmured the words of Feuchtersleben, 
 " I depart for a more glorious planet." 
 
 I have nothing more to say about the writer. 
 Of the man I will say but one thing — he was a 
 good man in every sense of the word, and often 
 put in practice for the service of others one of 
 his well-known axioms : " It is only the poor 
 who know how to spend money." Hospitable 
 as an Arab in his big tent, he received at his 
 table — his very modest table — all the hungry 
 souls who presented themselves. During one 
 of the most critical periods of his life, in the 
 years immediately following the 1848 Revolu- 
 tion, he lodged in his flat in the rue Rouge- 
 mont, comrades more destitute than himself, 
 and the idea never entered his head to shirk 
 
The Poet. 229 
 
 these burdens of benevolence, which increased 
 the burdens of duty that were crushing him. 
 He did not boast of it or complain, I doubt if 
 he ever mentioned it, but as a witness I owe it 
 to him to testify to it, and tell the truth. 
 
 To conclude, and to indicate without dwelling 
 upon it, what were the cares with which his life 
 was clouded, I will borrow from M. Spoelberch 
 de Lovenjoul's ^ work a letter which should be 
 quoted without comment, for it explains itself, 
 and throws some light upon the difficulties that 
 ceaselessly assailed the poet. He was at St. 
 Petersburg, whither he had been called to 
 collaborate in a work which, as it was not ac- 
 complished, caused him another disappointment. 
 He had received a letter from his sisters, and he 
 replies to it in these terms on December 17, 
 1858: 
 
 " My sole regret is that I am not richer, and that 
 I can give you so little. I am responsible for you to 
 our dear dead parents, and as long as I live, you will 
 always have what I had no need to promise you, for 
 you knew without my saying a word that 1 would 
 keep my promise until my last IJreath. . . . You 
 know how disgusted and weary I am with men and 
 things, I only live for those whom I love, for per- 
 sonally I have no further pleasure on earth. Art, 
 
 ■ Introduction, xj. 
 
230 Thdophile Gautier. 
 
 pictures, the theatre, books, no longer amuse me, they 
 are to me but the material for irksome labour, which 
 is never-ending. Do not add to all these troubles 
 such phrases as those which end one of your letters, 
 or I shall lay myself down on the earth, and die with 
 my face to the wall, without making any further effort. 
 ... I was very sad on the 2nd of November, think- 
 ing of all those who are no more. It was almost 
 dark at midday, the sky was yellow, the earth covered 
 with snow, and I so far from my country, entirely 
 alone at an inn, trying to write an article which would 
 not come, and upon which depended — bitter thought ! 
 — the daily bread of so many mouths large and small. 
 I goaded myself, and dug the spurs into my flanks, 
 but my mind was like a broken-down horse, who 
 would rather be beaten and die, than attempt to get 
 up. I did accomplish it however — my article, and 
 it was very good. I wrote one too on the day our 
 mother died, and it served to bury her." ' 
 
 This letter is tantamount to a confession. In 
 a few lines it explains a whole life— the accepted 
 sacrifices, the forced labour, the work accom- 
 plished in order not to fail in duties of which 
 we see here but the very smallest part, the 
 tenderness, the devotion, that neither the bitter- 
 ness of life, nor the disgust of forced work, could 
 hinder, the moral suffering over which an in- 
 
 ■ Thfophile Gautier's mother died on Sunday, M^rch 26, 
 1848. 
 
The Poet. 231 
 
 domitable spirit triumphed ; the confession is 
 complete, and should be kept in mind. Those 
 who know how to read this lamentation, weigh- 
 ing the words of it in order to penetrate more 
 deeply into the man's heart, will know Gautier 
 for what he was, and will repeat the words that 
 on his days of melancholy he so often let fall 
 about himself—" Poor Th^o 1 " 
 
UNWIN BROTHERS, 
 CHILWORTH AND LONDON. 
 
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