We are conscious, under all this witty pleasantry, of the distinguished author's vexation with himself for having borne a banner, belonged to a party, even though it was only in literature and as a youth. And the preface, moreover, does not tell the exact truth; for Mérimée's Illyrian prose ballads, though by no means remarkably good in other respects, are distinctly the product of intelligent and careful study, and accurately reproduce the style of Slavonic popular poetry. But Mérimée could never write of himself without self-depreciation. His prefaces, when he on a rare occasion condescends to enter into direct relations with the public by means of a preface, are distinguished by a nonchalant, apathetic humility, a manner which isolates the man who assumes it more completely than the most exaggerated self-assertion.
[1]Guizot:Shakespeare et son temps, 294.
[1]Guizot:Shakespeare et son temps, 294.
[2]Goethe alone publicly proclaimed Mérimée to be the author of the Illyrian poems. In one of his letters Mérimée makes some not unreasonably caustic remarks on the explanation given by the great poet of his divination of the personality concealed under the pseudonymHyacinth Maglanovitch: "It occurred to us that the word Guzla lay concealed in the word Gazul." The fact was that Mérimée, who, like all the other young Romanticists, courted Goethe's favour, had sent him the book along with a letter confiding the secret of its authorship.
[2]Goethe alone publicly proclaimed Mérimée to be the author of the Illyrian poems. In one of his letters Mérimée makes some not unreasonably caustic remarks on the explanation given by the great poet of his divination of the personality concealed under the pseudonymHyacinth Maglanovitch: "It occurred to us that the word Guzla lay concealed in the word Gazul." The fact was that Mérimée, who, like all the other young Romanticists, courted Goethe's favour, had sent him the book along with a letter confiding the secret of its authorship.
The stern or satirical reserve of Mérimée's style is most noticeable in the works which he wrote in his official capacity, in his brief descriptions of French historical monuments, crowded with technical expressions (Notes sur le Midi de la France, &c.) Not a word about himself, not a single personal impression of travel, not one remark addressed to the uninitiated! What a satisfaction there lay in disappointing all the critics who were lying in wait to detect the dilettante and novel-writer in the inspector of historical monuments!
Reserve is also apparent in the love of mystification displayed by the author ofLe Théâtre de Clara Gazuland the Illyrian ballads. We are reminded of Beyle here, though the tendency took a somewhat different form in his case. Mérimée's pseudonymity was of short duration, but whilst it lasted it was impenetrable. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to send his readers on a wild-goose chase. He neglected nothing that could give an appearance of authenticity to his pseudonyms. He supplied his works not only with biographies, but with portraits of their supposed authors. To complete the jest, he prefixed to the first edition ofClara Gazulan engraved portrait of himself dressed as a Spanish lady, in a low-necked dress, with a lace mantilla thrown over his head.
He who misleads by keeping silence is obliged sooner or later to speak, and the mystifier of the public is in the end compelled to admit it into his confidence and bear its criticism. But there is a more impenetrable kind of armour than either silence or mystification, namely irony, and in it Mérimée, like Beyle, clad himself.
There was a satirical vein in his writing from the first; for his ardent admiration for primitive strength of character naturally involved contempt for phrasemongers. Such a play asLes Mécontents, for instance, contains as bitter a satire as ever was penned upon drawing-room revolutionists. A set of Royalist provincial noblemen, old imbeciles whose one passion is to hear themselves speak, concoct a conspiracy against the First Empire; they determine to distribute inflammatory pamphlets, they arrange secret signals, draw up plans of procedure, and quarrel for the presidency at their meetings, but disperse incontinently at the mere sight of a gendarme. A play of much later date,Les deux Héritages ou Don Quichotte(which probably served Émile Augier as a model for some of his dramas), contains an analogous satire upon social and religious hypocrisy, political humbug, the cold, calculating, unchivalrous spirit of a youthful generation, comparing himself with which Mérimée must have been tempted to call himself an idealist and enthusiast.
But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little storyL'abbé Aubain, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent, for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater elegance.L'abbé Aubainis a short series of letters, some of them written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé, the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control are the subject of the silent satire of the author.
In a story of this kind there is no narrator; therefore we are no more conscious than in the plays that the author is suppressing himself. The form of irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is most plainly observable where we have a narrator, but know nothing of him except that he has no share in the emotions he describes. Mérimée's method, which is determined by his natural reserve, is to increase the effect of the story he is telling by an irony betraying itself in minute traits; he either with a little curl of the lip allows the touching incidents to speak for themselves, or he exhibits the painful, the revolting, or the passionate, in a frame of cold, indifferent surroundings.
In that little masterpiece,Le Vase étrusque, the only one of his stories in which he treats a quite modern theme sympathetically, he tells the story of two young beings who love each other secretly. We hear the young man, who has just returned from a night rendezvous, talking to himself:
"How happy I am!" he keeps on saying to himself. "At last I have found the heart which understands mine! Yes, it is my ideal that I have found—friend and mistress in one.... What character! What passion! ... No, she has never loved before!" And as vanity intrudes itself into every earthly concern, his next thought is: "She is the most beautiful woman in Paris;" and in imagination he retraces all her charms.
The narrative continues in this strain for some time before Mérimée interrupts himself with the remark that a happy lover is almost as tedious as an unhappy one. Then, when the relation between the two lovers has reached its most perfect stage, when Saint-Clair's momentary but fatal fit of jealousy of his beloved's past has resolved itself into a mere nothing, a mere misunderstanding, and we have witnessed a love scene which the most subtly tender of writers could hardly surpass, a scene in which tears of repentance mingle with smiles and kisses, how do we learn, six lines farther on in the story, that everything is at an end, that Saint-Clair was killed the following morning in a duel? We hear of it as we hear of such things in real life:
"Well," said Roquantin to Colonel Beaujeu when he met him at Tartoni's in the evening; "is this news true?"
"Only too true," answered the Colonel, looking very sad.
"Tell me how it happened."
"Simply enough. Saint-Clair told me that he was wrong, but that he would rather be shot by Thémines than make an apology to him. I could not but approve. Thémines wanted to draw lots for the first shot, but Saint-Clair insisted upon his firing first. Thémines fired. I saw Saint-Clair wheel round and then fall, dead. I have more than once seen a soldier, after he had been mortally wounded, turn round in the same curious way before he fell."
"How extraordinary!" said Roquantin. "And Thémines, what did he do?"
"Oh! what every one does on such occasions. He threw his pistol on the ground with an exclamation of regret. He flung it with such force that the trigger broke.It is an English pistol, a Manton. I don't believe he will find a gunsmith in the whole of Paris who can make him as good a one."
By describing the sympathy of friends, not in the manner of sentimental authors, but as it expresses itself in real life, Mérimée brings out the passionate sentiment of the relation between the lovers in full force; the neutral tint of the frame enhances the effect of the picture. If the art of icing champagne had not been known before Mérimée's day, he would have invented it.
Let me give one or two more examples of Mérimée's gift of keeping entirely aloof from the emotion which he portrays, and which he excites in the reader. Take the passage inL'Enlèvement de la Redoutewhich describes the main attack. "We were soon at the foot of the redoubt. The palisades had been shattered and the earth torn up by our balls. The soldiers rushed at these ruins with shouts of: 'Vive l'Empereur!'which were louder than one would have expected from men who had been shouting so long." The narrator in this case is not Mérimée himself, but an officer who is relating his first experience of a fight; this officer is, however, near of kin to his creator; he does not share the ardour of the fighting soldiers. Instead of praising their enthusiasm for Napoleon as patriotic or courage-inspiring, he coolly comments upon the strength of their lungs.
It is not at all surprising that this style, this tone, which adds so remarkably to the impression of the reality of the thing described, should have been again and again taken as a sign of the author's want of feeling. As a matter of fact it is no more so than his choice of horrible subjects is a proof of his cruelty. On the contrary, the irony of the style is often only the transparent veil covering compassion and indignation. Study this irony in the little taleTamango, where to the superficial reader the mere choice of subject would be apt to suggest the author's love of the revolting—for what is more horrible than the slave trade and the ill-usage of slaves, or than shipwreck, starvation, and murder? And all this, moreover, told with an ironic smile!
But we feel what the irony signifies when we come upon such a passage as the following:
"The captain, to ratify the bargain, shook hands with the more than half-intoxicated negro chief; and the slaves were immediately delivered to the French sailors, who quickly exchanged the long wooden forks with which the negroes had fettered them, for collars and handcuffs of iron—a proof of the superiority of European civilization."
And its real quality is still more distinctly perceptible in the lines which tell of the captain's attempt to make the pretty negress obedient by flogging her:
"With these words the captain went below, sent for Aycha, and tried to console her; but neither caresses nor blows (for a man loses patience at last) made the beautiful negress amenable."
The cold composure with which the fact is recognised that such is human nature, and that such things happen, actually heightens the impression of indignation produced by the deed of violence. We do not lay the book aside unmoved. We perceive that what at first seemed coldness, is but the petrified eruption of the inward fire of the artist's soul. We comprehend that an emotion underlies the sober, severe style of these tales, and that it is this emotion which gives them their impressiveness.
Of all Mérimée's stories,Arsène Guillotis the one in which the ironical style of the narrative and a strength of feeling which has freed itself from the bonds of prejudice, are most perfectly fused together. The conventional virtue of the pious fashionable lady is contrasted with the absolute ignorance of the doctrines of Christianity and morality displayed by the poor girl whose own mother has sold her. In a moment of despair Arsène jumps out of the window and breaks her leg and several of her ribs. The action of the story passes in her sick-room. The usual irony in the relation of the events prevents compassion and emotion from overstepping the bounds of artistic moderation. Towards the close, however, in the description of Arsène's death, the heart is permitted to speak unrestrainedly, and its simple language communicates a charm to the dying grisette hardly inferior to that which transfigures De Musset's dying Bernerette. At the very end artistic irony again asserts itself. For the line: "Pauvre Arsène, elle priepour nous!" traced in pencil in a woman's delicate handwriting on Arsène's gravestone, informs us in all its brevity that the austere lady has yielded to the same temptation as the ignorant child, that after Arsène died like a heroine, her patroness inherited her lover. Irony is in this case almost too coarse a word. Expressions are lacking to describe these delicate shades. That faintly ironical pencilled line contains in its six words a Mériméan, that is to say, a laconic, sermon on tolerance.
D'Haussonville has preserved for us some remarks made by Mérimée to Émile Augier on the subject of a little story,La Chambre bleue, which the former wrote specially for the Empress, in 1869. They show how this peculiar style of narration, which was originally an unconscious expression of the author's character, in time became a conscious mannerism. Mérimée said: "The story has one great fault, which is due to the fact that in the course of writing it I altered the originally planned ending. As it was my first intention to make the tale end tragically, Inaturallybegan it in a gay tone; then I changed my mind and brought about a cheerful dénouement. I ought to have re-written the first part in a tragic tone, but it was too much trouble; I left it as it was." The method which was originally the stylistic expression of a deeply emotional and very proud soul, became towards the end of the author's life a calculated, excessive use of contrast as a means of producing artistic effect.
In a letter, dated 22nd November 1821, Mérimée the painter writes: "I have a big son of eighteen, of whom I should like to make a lawyer. He has such a gift for drawing that, though he has never copied anything, he sketches like a young student." Like many of the other notable French Romanticists, Prosper Mérimée never entirely gave up pictorial art. He painted in water-colours; but it was especially as the draughtsman that he was both indefatigable and gifted. His talent for drawing seems to have been near akin to his gift of literary style.
Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier are the two authors of the generation of 1830 who supplement each other in the matter of style. Mérimée's strength lies in purity of line, Gautier's in glowing colour. Gautier seems to write with a brush rather than with a pen; he loves draperies and effects of light. His exuberant style is Venetian; it is velvet and brocade, which he bestrews with tinsel and spangles. Mérimée's simple, but extremely elegant presentment is in low-toned monochrome; it resembles an etching. His style, however, possesses a quality which no brilliancy of language can surpass—it is transparent; through it we see his vigorous, wild figures and characters as if they were alive. His defiant sharpness of outline reminds us of a painting or etching by Jacques Callot, an artist with whom he has much in common. One of Callot's youths, stepping out briskly with his long leather-sheathed sword dangling by his side, his plumed hat set jauntily on the side of his head, his buff coat fitting closely to his figure, his wide top-boots showing off his strong leg, his shining spurs clanking as he hastens to look on, with proud, defiant mien, at some deed of violence—such a figure would make an admirable frontispiece for a work like theChronique du Règne de Charles IX.
The final evidence of Mérimée's discreet reserve is to be found in the classically elegant severity of his style. It is smooth and bright as polished steel—not an ornament, not a flower, not a fanciful decoration of any kind; every figure is of beaten metal, accurately proportioned, and as correctly attired as it is life-like. No contemporary French author displayed such aristocratic conservatism in the matter of new words and expressions as Mérimée, not even Charles Nodier. Mérimée used the language which he found ready to his hand, and set his mark upon every sentence he wrote, without employing a single out-of-the-way word, or a single ordinary word in an unusual manner. But he shunned conventional expressions, phrases which throw a veil over the thought, beneath which it looks larger and more important. What especially distinguishes him is his sure touch, his gift of producing with some simple, almost worn-out, word exactly the impression which he desires. Hugo's style is graphic and pathetic, Gautier's (and that of his followers) is sensuous and loaded with imagery—both tried to produce an effect by word-architecture. The masters were justified in the attempt; but the attempts of their imitators and pupils too often recall those magnificent aqueducts which the Romans built with a prodigious expenditure of money and labour to connect one height with another, because they did not know that the force of the water itself was sufficient to raise it from the valley. We admire these mighty erections, but our admiration would have been greater if instead of them we had found simple pipes carried along the ground. The artificial, high-flown expression is like the aqueduct, the simple word that goes straight to the point, like the humble pipe. Mérimée's style, like the pipe, keeps close to the ground, has no useless ornament and no unnecessary loftiness; there is no strength wasted. It is not on this account a style destitute of charm, but it has no other except that of exactly adequate strength. There is not a word too much, and every sentence is in the service of the whole. The old motto,Ne quid nimis, might have been the author's device.
Mérimée's aim in evolving such a style evidently was to make his small works of art, by the renunciation of everything superfluous, as invulnerable as possible to the tooth of time. His endeavour reminds us of what is told of Donatello. The characteristic position of that artist's incomparable St. George—arms and hands close to the body—is said to have been chosen after a careful investigation of the condition of the famous statues of antiquity with the view of ascertaining which parts of them had suffered most, and why. In much the same way, Mérimée has tried to insure his works against the change in taste which time brings about, by keeping them free from every ornamental projection, everything in the nature of a digression.
Yet it was not his style which prevailed and became that of the next generation of writers. It was not Mérimée but Gautier, who, as a stylist, was the founder of a school. And I am not of the number of those who regret that a more luxuriant and sensuous style was victorious, and that later French authors have aimed, not merely at making their periods distinct and faultlessly correct, but also at imparting to them, when possible, melody, colour, fragrance. The treatment of language introduced by Gautier, continued by Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and transmitted by them to Zola and Daudet, has undoubtedly its weak side; and this the most prominent recent master of the descriptive style has not been slow to recognise and acknowledge. Zola himself writes:
"The worst of it is, that I have arrived at the conviction that the jargon of our period, that part of our style which is merely fashionable and must become antiquated, will be known as one of the most atrocious jargons of the French language. It is possible to predict this with almost mathematical certainty. What is most liable to become antiquated is imagery. As long as it is new, the metaphor or simile charms. When it has been employed by one or two generations it becomes a commonplace, a disgrace to the author who employs it. Look at Voltaire, with his dry style, his vigorous period, destitute of adjectives, which relates and does not paint; he remains eternally young. Look at Rousseau, who is our father—look at his imagery, his passionate rhetoric; he has written pages which are perfectly intolerable.... A cheerful fate awaits us who have outbidden Rousseau, us, who on the top of literature pile all the other arts—paint and sing our periods, chisel them as if they were blocks of marble, and require of words to reproduce the perfume of things. All this titillates our nerves: we think it exquisite, perfect. But what will our great-grandchildren say to it? Their ideas will undoubtedly be different, and I am convinced that certain of our works will fill them with astonishment; almost everything in them will be antiquated."
The writer of this melancholy, self-condemnatory criticism obviously goes too far. It is highly probable that our descendants will not think much of our books; but it is not the style in which they are written that will be most to blame for that. Zola's utterance is, however, remarkable as the evidence of a literary colourist in favour of the sober, unimaginative style of which Mérimée is undoubtedly one of the greatest masters in our own century. The best of his works are masterpieces of literature. Seldom, indeed, have short prose pieces been written in such a style. It is the thing itself that stands before us, in clear sunlight, un-obscured by even the faintest mist of sentimentality. It would be unreasonable to regard it as a fault in the author of picturesque prose that his imagery loses by repetition, that he does not stand the ordeal of repeated re-reading; one might just as well blame a composer because his melodies become intolerable by being played on all the street organs. One thing, however, is undeniable—that a severe, unadorned style like Mérimée's survives the works written in the florid style, as surely as the bronze statue survives the blossoming tree.
Curiously enough, Mérimée's contemporaries at first set him down as a naturalist. In some lines in which he naïvely classes him with Calderon, the young Alfred de Musset gives us an excellent idea of the original impression made by his writings. It appeared to his contemporaries that he simply produced casts:
"L'un comme Calderon et comme Mérimée,Incruste un plomb brûlant sur la réalité,Découpe à son flambeau la silhouette humaine,En emporte le moule, et jette sur la scèneLe plâtre de la vie avec sa nudité.Pas un coup de ciseau sur la sombre effigie,Rien qu'un masque d'airain, tel que Dieu l'a fondu."
"Not a stroke of the chisel" is comical, as applied to the work of the most energetic stylist of the period; but so much is clear—Alfred de Musset regarded Mérimée as above everything an imitator of nature. This conception was due to a fact which has already been alluded to, namely, that in Romanticism in its earliest stage there was an element of naturalism. The young Romanticists did not at once perceive the gulf between the two. The poetry of the plumed hat and the Toledo blade was undoubtedly more to their taste than the real life which they saw around them; but reality, too, might be represented poetically when there was colour and character in it, and passion and fire and exotic fragrance; and all this it had in Mérimée's books. The germs of naturalism are to be found in Mérimée as they are in the other Romanticists; but in them all the love of art was stronger than the inclination to imitate nature. Mérimée, nevertheless, with his partiality for brutal subjects and his artificial coldness, distinctly prognosticates the tendency of the succeeding literary generation. In Taine'sVie et Opinions de M. Graindorge(1867) we find a remark on the social life of the day, which applies equally to literature: "Depuis dix ans une nuance de brutalité complète l'élégance." We are conscious of it in almost all the most famous writers of the Second Empire—in the younger Dumas, in Flaubert, whom one might call the Mérimée of the next generation, and in Taine himself, who is delighted, like Mérimée, when he has "a fine murder" to describe, and who makes his Graindorge give the reader exact instructions in the most practical method of cutting the throat with a razor.[1]
To-day Mérimée passes for a Classicist. His perspicuous, transparent style, his determined avoidance of lyrical digressions, of metaphor and rhetoric, seem to insure him a place outside the Romantic School. But we have seen how, in a certain sense, all the French Romanticists are at the same time Classicists; and the fact that this is peculiarly observable in Mérimée's case does not give him a position altogether apart from theirs.
When we remember, moreover, that he, as well as Hugo and De Vigny, was influenced by Scott; that there is a distinct trace of Byronism, of the "Satanic," in some of his work; that, sober sceptic as he was, he wrote works (such asLa Vision de Charles XI.) in Hoffmann's style; that he was Beyle's pupil; and that he almost always, in true Romantic fashion, chose foreign, unmodern subjects, we cannot but recognise in the author possessing so many features in common with the French Romanticists, a true child of the age.
Even if we deny him absolute artistic originality, his figure stands out sufficiently from among the gifted literary group of 1830. The others gallop into the lists clad in gaudily-decorated coats of mail, with gilded helmets and waving pennons. He is the Black Knight in the great Romantic tourney.
[1]"Quand Cromwell passe en Irlande, il marque le nombre et la qualité des gens massacrés, et puis c'est tout. Et cependant quels beaux massacres! Quelle occasion pour pénétrer le lecteur de la froide fureur qui poussait les épées des fanatiques!"—Taine:Essay on Guizot.
[1]"Quand Cromwell passe en Irlande, il marque le nombre et la qualité des gens massacrés, et puis c'est tout. Et cependant quels beaux massacres! Quelle occasion pour pénétrer le lecteur de la froide fureur qui poussait les épées des fanatiques!"—Taine:Essay on Guizot.
On a certain day in the beginning of January 1830, three young men might have been seen making their way along a newly paved road in the neighbourhood of the Champs Élysées in Paris, towards a solitary house, the first of a future street. One of them, a fair-haired youth of nineteen, with a slight stoop and a quick, bird-like walk, and with manuscripts sticking out of all his pockets, was the amiable, refined fantast, Gérard de Nerval, a poet whose chief occupation it was to run himself off his legs in the service of his friends. By his side walked, with stately bearing and Castilian gravity of countenance, the pale, black-bearded Petrus Borel, who as the eldest (already twenty-two) was the central figure of a group of young art enthusiasts. A little behind followed, with lagging steps and much inward perturbation, an olive-complexioned, regular-featured, handsome young fellow of eighteen, whom his two friends had promised to introduce to the master of the lonely house, Victor Hugo, in whose home they themselves were welcome guests, a piece of good fortune envied them by many.
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
Twice did young Gautier mount the steps behind De Nerval and Borel as if his shoes were weighted with lead. He was hardly able to breathe; the cold sweat stood on his brow, and he could hear the beating of his heart. Each time they reached the door and one of the others was about to ring the bell, he turned and rushed down again, pursued by his shouting, laughing companions. The third attempt was successful, as in the fairy tales. The young man, feeling as if his legs would hardly bear him, had just sat down for an instant on the top step to recover himself, when the door opened, and in a stream of light like that which forms the halo round Phœbus Apollo, Victor Hugo himself in all his honour and glory stood revealed to their gaze against the dark background of the stair, attired in a very ordinary black coat and grey trousers, and as carefully shaved as any common philistine. He smiled at the sight of the agitated youth, but did not seem much surprised; for he was accustomed to seeing young poets and painters blush, and turn pale, and stammer on his threshold. He was evidently about to walk out into the street like an ordinary mortal, which was a greater surprise to Gautier than it would have been to see him drive through the town on a triumphal car drawn by five white horses, with a goddess of victory holding a golden crown over his head. But he turned back to his study with the young men, and Théophile Gautier listened in silence to the conversation which followed; he was too embarrassed to take part in it, but it marked an epoch in his existence; from that hour till the day of his death he was Hugo's sworn adherent, ardent admirer, grateful pupil, and unwearied panegyrist. Never, not even momentarily, not even during separation lasting for years and the intellectual separation due to the difference in their political views, did he forget to be absolutely loyal to the man whom at this first meeting he in his heart called lord and master.
The young men's call was made in connection with the first performance ofHernaniat the Théâtre Français. They came to fetch some packets of the little square red tickets, with "Hierro" printed on them. Gautier, who had readLes Orientales, was enthusiastic on the subject of the play, without having read it.
In the part of Paris where he lodged he had long been noted for his eccentricities. In every possible way he bade scornful defiance to the ordinary bourgeois, that personage detested above all others by the young Romanticists. He usually wore a black velvet jacket and yellow shoes, and went about bareheaded, with a parasol or an umbrella, his long, dark brown hair, which suited his olive complexion admirably, hanging down almost to his waist. Cigar in mouth, erect and youthfully dignified, he strolled along, utterly regardless of the contemptuous glances of the scandalised citizens or the jeers of the street boys.
But on the occasion of the first performance ofHernani, he felt it incumbent on him to prepare something more striking. He ordered "the red waistcoat," that waistcoat which was to become a historic garment. Its red was not the red which the revolutionists chose as their symbol, and which politicians think of when the colour is named; no, it was the flaming red which emblematised the hatred of the young artists of the period for grey. The colour tones of a particular piece of scarlet satin had fascinated the young painter and poet. He looked at it in the way we can imagine Veronese looking at a piece of silken stuff. When he had obtained possession of the treasure, he sent for his tailor and explained to him that of this material a waistcoat was to be made—yes, a waistcoat. It was to be shaped like a cuirass, to be full across the chest, and fasten at the back. "If," writes Gautier, "you were to pick out from a set of school drawing copies, representing the different expressions of the human countenance, one of those labelledAmazement, you would have an idea of the look upon the horror-stricken tailor's face." "But such a waistcoat is not fashionable, sir." "It will be—as soon as I have worn it." "But it is a style I know nothing about; it is more like a part of a theatrical costume than of a gentleman's ordinary dress; I am afraid of spoiling the stuff." "I shall give you a linen pattern, designed, cut out, and tacked together by myself." The waistcoat was made; and on that famous and stormy evening at the theatre, Gautier displayed perfect dignity and indifference when the philistines pointed him out to each other, and made him the target of all their opera-glasses. His name became inextricably connected with the legend of the red waistcoat, although he only wore it that one evening. For long little was known about him beyond the fact that he had worn it (I, myself, when in Paris in 1867, met people who believed that he wore it still); and it shines to this day in the history of French literature, a naïve symbol of the love of brightness and colour in life which distinguished that enthusiastic group of youths.
But the essentially luminous and flamboyant was art, pure art; and seldom has the boundless love of art as art taken such entire possession of a heart as it did of Gautier's. He was animated by it all his life, but in his youth he felt it with all the pleasures it brings, all the admiration it arouses, all the courage it imparts, and all the hatred it inspires.
It was this love which made the man who was himself a master, a sincerely, nobly modest admirer of other artists. He was Hugo's servant, Balzac's self-sacrificing friend. He was a poet, but admiration made him a critic; and to no one did a well-constructed line, a luminous word, a picturesque expression, or a bold flight of imagination give more pleasure. He was a painter before he became an author; and no one meted out such ample recognition as he to the powerful, if somewhat blundering, originality which produced that glory of colour in Delacroix's pictures, which blinds one to their deficiencies in the matter of drawing. With what passionate disapproval he fell upon Scribe's platitudes and Delavigne's cautious improvements, upon stupid vaudevilles and passionless tragedies—this man who worshipped style, and who infinitely preferred a performance at the circus to a bourgeois comedy at the Gymnase Theatre! At the circus, where they only shouted Hop! and Hé! they could not possibly commit all Scribe's sins against syntax and metre. With what fury he fell upon Delaroche when the latter (whose real talent developed late) charmed the half-educated with his laboured, highly finished representations of mediæval subjects, and taught them to prefer his Middle Ages to the Middle Ages of Hugo and Delacroix! To rank cautious talent above reckless, alarming genius was true sacrilege in Gautier's eyes; and the favour which these men of mere talent found in the eyes of the public roused in him a perfectly tiger-like fury. He confessed at a later period that he could have eaten Delaroche raw with the greatest of pleasure.
Art for art's sake! Art as its own end and aim!L'art pour l'art!This was Gautier's motto. And that he loved art for its own sake means (as it would mean in the case of anything else) that he loved it without any regard to its so-called morality or immorality, patriotic or unpatriotic tendency, utility or inutility.
Gautier's worship of art indicates an onward step in the development of Romanticism. In its first stage the literary renaissance was devotion to Catholicism and the old monarchy. When the movement, with Hugo at its head, made its second great advance, it undoubtedly entered upon the stage of enthusiasm for art as art; but in the case of the majority the step was an unconscious one; their enthusiasm for art concealed itself under enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, or for the sixteenth century, or for strength of passion, or for local colouring. Gautier alone was fully conscious of the principle which underlay all these manifestations; hence his name is synonymous with that phase of the Romantic movement during which poetry asserts its rights. If we were to judge by certain of Victor Hugo's prefaces (the preface toLes Orientales, for instance), it might seem as if Hugo's poetry, neglecting every other ideal, had no aim but the attainment of perfect liberty for itself; but Hugo was far too much of the agitator by nature to regard this struggle, this endeavour, as more than a preliminary step. It was reserved for the disciple whom the master loved best, to regard this stage as the final one. To Gautier, as to the German Romanticists, the combat of Romanticism with utilitarianism was equivalent to a proclamation of the absolute independence of art.
Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, in the south of France, on the 30th of August 1811. He came of a family of good standing and pronounced Royalist principles. Like Hugo and Dumas, he was descended from a brave officer. Hugo's father, as major in Napoleon's army in Italy, fought with Fra Diavolo, and as general and governor of a Spanish province under Joseph, with the brave Spanish rebels. Dumas' father was an athlete, who, according to tradition (strictly speaking, according to the younger Dumas), could crush a horse to death between his legs and bite through a helmet, and who held the bridge of Brixen alone against an advanced guard of twenty men. Gautier's grandfather won renown by being the first in the attack on Bergen-op-Zoom. He was a man of colossal strength and gigantic proportions, who lived in the open air, hunted every day, and was never seen without his gun, which he would fire into the air again and again if anything put him into specially good spirits. He lived to be a hundred. Théophile's father, who also lived to a great age, displayed his inherited vigour chiefly in intellectual matters. He was a well-educated man of many and varied acquirements. It speaks well for his literary taste and his freedom from prejudice, that he greatly admired the preface toCromwell, and that he approved of his son's poetic tendencies; indeed, he was so delighted with the latter's audacious novel,Mademoiselle de Maupin, that, whilst the book was being written, he often locked the young man into his room with the words: "You don't come out until you have written some pages ofMaupin." Théophile's mother, a stately beauty, who is said to have had Bourbon blood in her veins, united with his father in spoiling and worshipping the son whom nature had so bountifully endowed. He was one of those beings who are created to be admired and beloved, not only by their relatives and friends, but by every one—one of those on whom a pet-name is bestowed by a whole generation; for he was a great artist and a great child. How significant is the abbreviation, Théo, by which he is alluded to hundreds of times in contemporary literature! It was the familiarity of admiration which thus shortened his name.
To the particulars of his pedigree which seem to explain his character, another must be added, namely, that there was undoubtedly some Eastern blood in the family. This is interesting because, like the negro strain which accounts for much of the violence and force in the writings of Dumas the elder and of Pushkin, it is a physiological explanation of the Oriental impress which became observable in Gautier's personality and works as years went on. He was intended by nature to wear a fez or a turban, and to move slowly and with dignity, and it was natural that he should end by displaying as little emotion as possible in his works.
Théophile Gautier left the south of France and came to live in Paris as quite a child. It is a sign of the early development of his character, that at school he preferred the authors who wrote before or after the so-called Golden Age of their literatures to the classic and correct writers. In French literature his favourite authors were Villon and Rabelais; Corneille and Racine made little impression on him. In Latin literature he read with eager enjoyment only the poets and prose authors of the decadence—Claudian, Martial, Petronius, and Apuleius; these he imitated in his Latin verses in every possible metre; upon Cicero and Quintilian he looked down with perfect indifference. This attitude was due in the first place to the artist's love of a picturesque, exuberant style, and in the second place to the youth's aversion for all the imposing general truths and fine sentiments inevitably met with in the writings of every author whom we call classic. A Frenchman who was as wild and mad as Villon, or as exuberant and rich in colour as Rabelais, had in Gautier's eyes the inestimable advantage of being unaffected by the general polish of the great century; a Roman who had African blood in his veins, like Apuleius, or was of Egyptian origin, like Claudius, was necessarily more to his liking than the more tasteful orators and poets of the Augustan age; for he loved the peculiar, the piquant, the disconcerting, and was not repelled by artificiality and mannerism if any charm accompanied them; he liked his literature, so to speak, a little "high." The mature man retained the love of the boy for the authors of the Silver Age. To it we owe the excellent collection of criticisms which he published under the title ofLes Grotesques, the aim of which was the rehabilitation of the whole group of minor poets whom Boileau had disgraced and dismissed in hisL'Art poétiquein order to make more room for the great authors who had observed the rules of Aristotle and the laws of taste. The poor fellows lay unread in the charnel-house of literature with a line of Boileau's upon their foreheads. Gautier, as the sworn enemy of everything regular and commonplace, undertook their defence. His love of the plastic and picturesque found no satisfaction in the study of the dignified authors who had sat writing with periwigs on their heads and lace ruffles at their wrists; but it gave him real pleasure to seek out all those forgotten, curious poets with the strange countenances and grimaces, in whose pages, for the most part sadly remarkable for their bad taste, there are nevertheless to be found many an amusing oddity, many a gleam of originality, many a witty or picturesque line, nay, whole poems as full of life as are the best of François Villon's and Théophile de Viau's. Though their muse was no beauty, there might nevertheless be said of her what Gautier wrote of an attractive woman:
"Elle a dans sa laideur piquanteUn grain de sel de cette merD'où jaillit nue et provocanteL'âcre Vénus du gouffre amer."
And one of these poor poets of the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth century, who had lain drunk in the gutter, or hewn his way through the world with his rapier, or ended his life on the gallows, offered, with his mad humour and his verse, just such a silhouette, just such a characteristic, vivid profile as Gautier loved to sketch.
By his own wish young Théophile was taken from school and placed as a pupil in the studio of Rioult the painter. The youth himself, as well as his relatives, overestimated the talent he showed for drawing and painting, which was in reality merely the subordinate supplement to his absolutely unrivalled gift of picturesque writing. It was Victor Hugo who decided his career. When Hugo blew the horn of Hernani, Gautier answered to the call and forsook painting for literature. But he never lost the habit he had acquired of looking at things from the painter's point of view; and his conversation, and those parts of his writings (such as the preface toMademoiselle de Maupin) where he expressed himself with the same freedom as in conversation, were always plentifully larded with that artistic slang for which the French studios are famous.
It was as a lyric poet that he made his first appearance. Five months after the famous first performance ofHernani, and unfortunately on the very day on which the Revolution of July broke out, he published his first book of poems. They were swept away and lost to sight in the stream of events; but even at a less troubled time they would hardly have attracted much attention. As a lyric poet Gautier is unpopular; his style is vigorous and faultless, but his is not the true lyric temperament; his attention is too much distracted by externals; he lacks intensity and soul. In his youthful poetry he is best when he is giving expression to his antique pagan, essentially Roman, epicureanism—when he tells of the three things that give happiness, "sunshine, a woman, a horse"; when (as in "La Débauche") he sings of the joy of life, and praises colour, song, and verse; or when (as in "Le premier rayon de mai") he reproduces the simple, almost sensual, at any rate perfectly incomplex, feeling of happiness produced by the close vicinity of the beloved one. Very fine, and quite typical of Gautier, is the little poem "Fatuité," the mocking title of which subtly wards off any attack upon its sentiments. It gives expression to the gay arrogance of youthful strength. The first two verses are as follows:
"Je suis jeune; la pourpre en mes veines abonde.Mes cheveux sont de jais et mes regards de feu.Et, sans gravier ni toux, ma poitrine profondeAspire à pleins poumons l'air du ciel, l'air de Dieu.Aux vents capricieux qui soufflent de Bohême,Sans les compter, je jette et mes nuits et mes jours,Et, parmi les flacons, souvent l'aube au teint blêmeM'a surpris dénouant un masque de velours.
It was not until much later in life that Théophile Gautier made his mark as a lyric poet. InÉmaux et Camées, a collection of poems in short, eight-syllabled lines, which in their forms are sometimes faintly reminiscent of Goethe'sWest-Oestlicher Divanand Heine'sBuch der Lieder, we have the most characteristic exemplification of his personal style. The various subjects are treated entirely in the spirit of plastic art. The author's aim was, by means of vividness and careful blending of colour, perfection and delicacy of form, severe purity and general harmony of rhyme, in short by means of a skill which neglected nothing, not even the minutest trifle, to produce poetic equivalents of the miniature masterpieces in agate or onyx bequeathed to us by the ancients, or of the Italian or French enamel painting on gold of the days of the Renaissance. In these poems, along with which should be named "Musée secret," a most admirable poem, suppressed as indecent (to be found in Bergerat'sThéophile Gautier), he attained to a beauty of language which may justly be called ideal. The only thing at all comparable to it is the plasticity of some of Leconte de Lisle's later poems. The poem "L'Art," the last in the book and, as regards language, a truly monumental work of art, contains his view of art carved, as it were, in stone. He so loved that art which he understood so well, that he placed it above everything else in this world, and saw in it the one thing that would endure through all the changes of time. He was, doubtless, too much inclined to estimate the value of a work of art by the difficulties overcome in producing it, but only because he believed that it was the struggle with difficulties which gave the finished work its strength, and made it proof against moth and rust. Hear his own words:
"Tout passe.—L'art robusteSeul a l'éternité.Le busteSurvit à la cité.Et la médaille austèreQue trouve un laboureurSous terreRévèle un empereur.Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent,Mais les vers souverainsDemeurentPlus forts que les airains."
—a saying, this last, which holds good of such verse as Gautier wrote.
For a vivid, spirited picture of the young Bohemian Romanticist group which rallied round Hugo, a picture distinguished by its wanton self-caricature, we have only to turn to Théophile Gautier'sLes Jeunes-France. The author intended his work to satirise Romanticism in much the same manner asLes Précieuses Ridiculeshad satirised the literary fantasticality of an earlier period; but unfortunatelyLes Jeunes-Franceis only the frolicsome effusion of a talented boy, whilstLes Précieusesis a mature work of enduring value.Les Jeunes-Francewas written almost immediately after Gautier's admission into the Romantic camp, and it, like the poetry of Petrus Borel and Philothée O'Neddy, gives us a good idea of the Bohemian camaraderie of the talented young men of the day. Gautier was the very man to write such a book; for not only then, but to the end of his life, he was the real artist—Bohemian; always more or less at variance with society and its notions of respectability; living in his youth, as painter, poet, journalist, and traveller, a Bohemian life in the general acceptation of the word, and in his later years settling down to live with his sisters and his children without a thought of marriage. Of his many liaisons, that with Ernesta Grisi, the mother of his daughters Judith and Estella, lasted longest. He was also for a long time passionately attached to her sister Carlotta. It was for Carlotta that he wrote his ballets. Though he was inconstant as a lover, he was an extremely affectionate brother and father. He gave his daughters a model education. One of his excellent ideas was to have them taught such languages as Japanese and Chinese, proficiency in which was so rare that it provided a woman who required to earn her living with the means of doing so. His daughter Judith reaped the benefit of his foresight.
But the book which gives us the best, completest impression of young Gautier's inner life is notLes Jeunes-France, butMademoiselle de Maupin, the novel which he wrote immediately after that work (1836). InMademoiselle de Maupinthe champagne-froth of his youth seethes. It is a perfectly pagan and at times a perfectly indecent book—as indecent as a dialogue of Crébillonfils—but there is power in it; and though Swinburne exaggerates considerably when he calls it "the golden book of beauty," there is no doubt that it displays an extraordinary sense of beauty. It was an outlet for the young man's redundant vigour.
Théophile Gautier was originally very slightly built, and swimming was the only physical exercise in which he excelled; but he was bent on becoming an athlete, athletes and prize-fighters being above all other mortals the objects of his admiration. For several years he took fencing and boxing, riding and rowing lessons, until his physical condition was entirely changed, and he had the unutterable satisfaction on the day the Château Rouge was opened, of giving a perfectly new "Turk's head" a blow of 532 pounds weight, which has become historical. "This," he says with amiable vanity in his autobiographical sketch, "is the deed of my life of which I am proudest." And he is evidently quite sincere in his assertion; for even when he was an old man he used, when his friends were disputing his paradoxes and all contradicting him together, to command silence by shouting with his hoarse voice: "Moi, je suis fort; j'amène 530 sur une tête de Turc et je fais des métaphores qui se suivent. Tout est là." InMademoiselle de Maupinwe are conscious at one and the same time of the young dandy who can give the tremendous blow and the artist whose "metaphors hang together," that is to say, whose sentences shape themselves into pictures before our eyes. But what we are still more sensible of is the genuinely antique, plastic nature which distinguishes Gautier from all the other men of that gifted generation. He has painted himself in a passage in which he makes the hero describe his own character:
"I am a man of the Homeric age; the world in which I live is not my world, and I do not understand the society by which I am surrounded. Christ has not lived for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. I have never gathered passion-flowers on Mount Golgotha, and the deep stream which flows from the side of the crucified one and encircles the world with a girdle of red has not laved me in its waves. My rebellious body refuses to recognise the supremacy of the soul; my flesh refuses to be mortified. To me this earth is as beautiful as heaven; and in my eyes perfection of form is virtue. Spirituality is not to my mind; I prefer a statue to a phantom, midday to twilight. Three things give me pleasure—gold, marble, and scarlet; brilliancy, solidity, colour. These are the things I dream of, and all my castles in the air are built of them.... I never imagine mist or vapour, or anything floating and uncertain. My sky has no clouds, or if it happen to have any, they are solid, chiselled out of the fragments of marble fallen from the statue of Jupiter ... for I love to be able to touch with my finger what I have seen, and to trace the contours into their most elusive folds.... This has always been my character. I look on women with the eyes of a sculptor and not of a lover. All my life the shape of the flask has interested me, not the quality of its contents. I believe that, if I had had Pandora's casket in my hands, I should not have opened it."
Théophile Gautier is one of the few French Romanticists who present a distinct parallel to the German. His storyFortunio, with its glorification of pleasure and idleness, is the French counterpart of Friedrich Schlegel'sLucinde; and he recalls the German Romanticists by his contempt for the distinctively poetic in poetry. He once said to Taine, who was comparing De Musset with Victor Hugo to the disadvantage of the latter: "Taine, I verily believe you are degenerating into bourgeois imbecility. Sentiment in poetry ... that is not the main thing. Radiant, resplendent words, rhythm, and melody—these are poetry. Poetry proves nothing and tells nothing. Take the beginning of Hugo'sRatbert, for instance; there is no poetry in the world like that; it is the very summit of the Himalayas. All Italy with its medieval heraldry is there—and nothing but words." Gautier resembles Tieck in his love of the poetry of pure form, guiltless of ideas; but there is this marked difference between them, that whereas Tieck aimed at volatilising words into tones, at diluting poetry into simple mood, into music, Gautier, the good Latin, aimed at making words produce light and colour, at condensing poetry into word-painting, word-sculpture.
He harmonised completely with the German Romanticists in his hatred of utilitarianism. His watchword,L'art pour l'art, was the outcome of this aversion. And, regarded from a certain standpoint, this principle of his, so eloquently propounded in the preface toMademoiselle de Maupin, is absolutely incontestable.
It is incontestable when taken in the sense that art is not subject to the same laws of propriety as those which justly rule life, much less to those which rule it unjustly. It is, for instance, perfectly proper that a statue should stand naked in a crowd, though it offends our sense of the proper that a man or woman should do so—life and art stand in entirely different relations to morality. It was Gautier's constant endeavour to free art from subjection to moralising criticism. In the youthfully violent preface toMademoiselle de Maupinhe bursts out, addressing the utilitarian critics: "Non, imbéciles, non, crétins et goîtreux que vous êtes, un livre ne fait pas de la soupe à la gélatine;—un roman n'est pas une paire de bottes sans couture; un sonnet une seringue à jet continu; un drame n'est pas un chemin de fer, toutes choses essentiellement civilisantes." Of the perpetually scandalised critics, he says: "If there is nudity anywhere in a book or a picture, they make as straight for it as a sow for the mire," ... and with an allusion toTartuffe, he continues: "Dorine, the pretty waiting-woman, is at perfect liberty to display her charms as far as I am concerned; I shall certainly not take my handkerchief from my pocket to cover that bosom which ought not to be seen. I look at it as I look at her face, and if it is white and shapely it gives me pleasure." And, defending himself against his critics' reiterated accusations of immorality, he writes: "An extremely curious variety of the so-called moral journalist is the journalist with female relations.... To set up as a journalist of this species a man must provide himself with a certain number of necessary utensils, such as two or three legitimate wives, some mothers, as many sisters as possible, a complete assortment of daughters, and innumerable cousins. The next requisites are a play or novel, a pen, ink, paper, and a printer.... Then he writes: It is impossible to take one's wife to see this play; or: It is a book which a man could not possibly put into the hands of a woman whom he respects.... The wife hides her blushes behind her fan, the sister, the cousin, &c. (The titles of relationship may be varied; all that is necessary is that the relatives should be female.)" Though Gautier's practice is not always defensible, he was right in theory. Poetry has its own morality, the morality which springs from that love of beauty and of truth, which, however indistinctly and indirectly it may be expressed, is its very nature; but it refuses to be bound by the conventions of society. Poetry is in itself a moral power, exactly as science is—such a science, for example, as physiology, which certainly does not confine itself to subjects that are considered fit topics of conversation in polite society. There are immoral poets as there are immoral surgeons, but their immorality has no connection with that regardlessness of convention which the aim of both art and science entails, and which is inherent in the nature of both.
A man of a plastic and artistic temperament like Gautier, who could not have satisfied the demands made of poetry in the name of morality without sacrificing his special talent, was peculiarly fitted to enforce this truth. His special gift is the reproducing of sensuous impressions in words. He was the first to show in the grand style that the doctrine propounded in Lessing'sLaokoonis not the whole truth, for he has described much that Lessing regarded as indescribable. There was nothing for which Gautier lacked words—the beauty of a woman, the appearance of a town, nay, the taste of a dish, or the sound of a voice—he was equal to them all. "Since we have him," said Sainte-Beuve once, "the wordinexpressibleno longer exists in the French language." He had the usual Romantic-Classic aversion for new words, but he enriched modern French with a store of fifteenth and sixteenth century words which had undeservedly fallen into disuse, and with a host of accurately suggestive technical expressions. French dictionaries were his favourite reading. Undoubtedly his was a mind entirely concentrated upon externals; but great intensity and much artistic fervour go to the making of such externality as Gautier's. It was certainly not the aim of his art to touch feeling hearts; but even Goethe had moods in which he wrote:
"Ach, die zärtlichen Herzen! Ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu rühren;Sei es mein einziges Glück, dich zu berühren, Natur!"
Le Capitaine Fracasse, a novel which Gautier planned in his youth, but did not write until well on in life, gives the best idea of his prose. We see its personages as we see people in real life—their figures, their dress, their movements, their background of buildings or landscape.
The book begins with a chapter entitledLe Château de la Misère, which contains a description of the evening meal of a company of strolling players, which they are taking in one of the rooms of an impecunious young baron's dilapidated castle, a building of Louis XIII's time, by the light of two huge wooden stage candelabra, pasted over with gilt paper. It is a description which reminds us of the famous Rembrandt in Dresden known as "The Wedding of Esther." We see the light modelling the faces, and the shadows creeping up the walls. There is not a single emotional word in it, but such a subtle feeling of melancholy pervades the whole that we quite understand how Gautier said to Feydeau, who found him writing it: "It is an exact description of my state of mind."
Another chapter, entitledEffet de Neige, describes the players' waggon driving off at night through the deep snow. After a time the company miss one of their number, the Matamore (the bragging soldier), who had been following the waggon on foot. They search for him in vain, in vain shout his name at the top of their voices across the great snow plain. No answer. One of them carries a lantern, the red light of which moves along the snow; and we see the long, shapeless shadows following the men upon the white ground. The black dog belonging to the company follows them, howling. Suddenly the howls stop, and we are conscious of the death-like stillness which prevails when falling snow stifles every sound. At last the actor who has the sharpest eyes thinks he sees a curious figure lying beneath a tree, strangely, ominously still. It is he, the luckless Matamore. He is lying with his back against the tree, and his long, outstretched legs are half covered with the driving snow. His gigantic rapier, without which he was never seen, stands at such an odd angle to his breast that under any other circumstances one would have laughed. The lantern-bearer holds the lantern to his poor comrade's face, and gets such a shock that he almost drops it. The face is of a waxy whiteness; the ridge of the nose, which is pinched at the nostrils by the bony fingers of death, shines like a piece of cuttle-bone; the skin is tightened across the temples; snow-flakes lie on the eyebrows and lashes; the dilated eyes have a glassy stare. At each end of the heavy, pointed moustache gleams a little icicle, the weight of which drags down the hair. The seal of eternal silence has closed the lips which have delighted so many an audience with their merry brag; and a death's-head shows beneath the pale, thin face, on which the habit of making grimaces has carved furrows, now terrible in their comicality. "Alas!" says one of his comrades, "our poor Matamore is dead. Exhausted and stupefied by the driving snow, he must have sought shelter for a moment under this tree, and as he has not two ounces of flesh upon his bones, he has been frozen to the marrow in no time. When we were in Paris he reduced his rations every day in order to produce more effect, and he had made himself leaner than a greyhound in the coursing season. Poor Matamore! you are safe now from all the kicks and slaps and drubbings which your part obliged you to submit to! You are as stiff now as if you had swallowed your own dagger." The pathos of the situation is here brought out indirectly by a conscientious plastic treatment of the subject.
It was natural that such a degree of feeling as this seldom revealed itself in an art like Gautier's, and that in time he became entirely addicted to a species of descriptive writing which, perfect as it was in its kind, was ever more soulless. He had a passion for travelling; he visited Spain in 1840, Africa (in the company of the Duc d'Aumale) in 1845, Italy in 1850, Constantinople in 1852, Russia (penetrating as far as Novgorod) in the following year; and all these journeys he described, thanks to his fabulous memory for the appearance of things, with incomparable accuracy, though the descriptions were often written long after his return. One disappointment awaits the reader, namely, that everything in the different countries is described except their inhabitants. We are told that when Madame de Girardin had read hisTra los montes, she said to him: "But, Théo, are there no Spaniards in Spain?"—a criticism which is applicable to all his books of this kind. The inner man gradually ceased to exist for him, and even the outer man was at last lost to sight in his clothes. In Gautier's conversations with Bergerat, his son-in-law, we come upon the following comical and characteristic speech: "A royal tiger is a more beautiful creature than a man; but if out of the tiger's skin the man cuts himself a magnificent costume, he becomes more beautiful than the tiger, and I begin to admire him. In the same way, a town interests me only by virtue of its public buildings. Why? Because they are the collective result of the genius of its population. Let the inhabitants be utterly vile and the town a habitation of crime, what does it signify to me so long as I am not assassinated whilst I am inspecting the buildings?" This is the worship of beauty and art carried to a characteristic extreme. The human, the emotional, the modern, life itself, at last lost all interest for Gautier the artist and art-lover. In dramatic art he became indifferent to everything but the style, the costumes, and the scenery. He often maintained that it ought to be possible for a dramatist to produce all his effects by employing four Pierrots in different situations—for all that was wanted was "an impression of life, not life itself." "Life itself is too ugly," he used to add.
Thus he finally, as it were, criticised himself, showing distinctly to all except his blind admirers where his limitations lay. He exhibited in himself the weak side of his axiom,L'art pour l'art; proved that an art which does nothing but revolve round the axis of art itself, inevitably becomes barren and empty. Art enthusiasm creates a Galatea out of marble, but the personal stream of thought is the divine breath which breathes life into the statue.
Nevertheless Gautier did a great and a good work by labouring with unexampled energy to free art from unwarrantable claims, and by developing it in as characteristic a manner as it lay in his power to do. Though this was not enough for art, it was enough for one man to have done. It cannot, however, be said that Gautier's talent was appreciated as it deserved during his lifetime; the artistic circles formed his public; merely literary people, not to speak of the reading world at large, did not understand him. How often have I myself heard from the lips of French scientific men the foolish assertion that Gautier wrote his books out of dictionaries, without caring for anything but the sound of his words and their singularity.
This want of understanding is to a certain degree explained by the fact that, in the mind of the general public, Gautier the journalist had gradually supplanted Gautier the poet. As early as 1836 the man who had told the journalists such bitter truths had joined their ranks to earn his daily bread; and his connection with the press lasted until his death—thirty-six years. His facility in writing was of great advantage to him, and the tasks he accomplished as art and dramatic critic were herculean. According to his own and Bergerat's calculations, which must, however, be exaggerated, his works, if all his articles were collected, would fill three hundred volumes. He wrote for Girardin's paper,La Presse, for nineteen years, and afterwards, under the Empire, chiefly in theMoniteur officiel. His dramatic criticism, which he undertook unwillingly, is only valuable for its fine style. As an art critic he confined himself more and more, as time went on, to describing pictures, an art in which he was unapproachable. Weariness of his profession, disinclination to make enemies, compassion for beginners and the untalented, good-nature and indifference in equally large proportions, made him more and more indulgent. At last he praised everything and everyone with the same serene impassibility and in the same distinguished, ornate style. The general public knew him only as an art and literary critic.
But upon authors, both of poetry and prose, his influence was great. Paul de Saint-Victor, with his excellent prose, Leconte de Lisle, the most unemotional of modern poets, Baudelaire, the "Satanic" lyric poet, and the whole group of young poets who during the Second Empire formed themselves into a school under the name of "Les Parnassiens," are direct descendants of Théophile Gautier. Saint-Victor inherited his sense of form and colour, his devotion to plastic art, Leconte de Lisle his perfect comprehension of foreign civilisations and his Oriental serenity, Baudelaire his partiality for abnormal feelings and passions, and the Parnassians his faultless metre and rhyme.
But although Gautier's influence has thus extended far beyond the 1830 period, and beyond the term of his own life, his is one of the names most inseparably connected with the early, the fighting, days of Romanticism. It is significant and touching that the last, uncompleted article he wrote was a description of the audience on the night of the first performance of Victor Hugo'sHernani.
Gautier's critical writings, though they form such an enormous proportion of his total production, are already almost forgotten; he survives as the novelist and poet. But one of his contemporaries, who like him was both a poet and a critic, and whose name during their lifetime was frequently coupled with his, has had a different fate. The rank which Sainte-Beuve won for himself as a critic is so elevated as completely to overshadow his position as a poet, and as a historian in the usual sense of the word. As a poet he showed himself to be possessed of delicate and original talent; but he was an epoch-making critic, one of the men who inaugurate a system and found a new branch of art. In a certain sense it may be said that he was a greater innovator in his province than the other authors of the period in theirs; for there was modern lyric poetry before Victor Hugo, but modern criticism in the strict acceptation of the word did not exist before Sainte-Beuve. At any rate he remodelled criticism as completely as Balzac did fiction. During the last years of his life his authority was undisputed; nevertheless, it was not until some ten years after his death that the literary public beyond the frontiers of France awoke to a full sense of his preeminence. An excellent foreign critic of French literature, the German historian, Karl Hillebrand, has pronounced Sainte-Beuve's to be the master-mind of the period, an assertion which, though it may be an exaggeration, can only be called absurd if criticism be regarded as in itself a lower branch of art than the drama or lyric poetry. This, however, is surely now an antiquated standpoint. To the author that branch of art is the highest in which his nature finds fullest expression; and though there may be an order of precedence among intellects, it is extremely doubtful if there is an order of precedence among arts, and most doubtful of all when an art or branch of art has been remoulded by a productive intellect into its own special, almost personal, organ. So much is certain, that in reasoning power (not only in critical acumen) Sainte-Beuve holds the first place in the generation of 1830.
The peculiar quality of his mind was its capacity of understanding and interpreting an extraordinary number of other minds. If superiority to the other prominent individuals of the group cannot be claimed for him, the reason lies in the limitations of his gift. Amongst the minds he understood were not numbered the minds of fertile, unrefined geniuses like Balzac, and great but eccentric geniuses like Beyle. And, far-reaching as was his vision, he was seldom able to take a comprehensive view; few historians and thinkers have had such unsystematic minds. This defect had its good side; his freedom from all inclination to systematise kept him fresh to the last, enabled him perpetually, as it were, to slough his skin; so that the man who in 1827 attracted Goethe's attention by his first articles in theGlobe, in 1869 was not only in complete, understanding sympathy with the group of young scientists and artists who at the moment gave France her claim to the consideration of Europe, but was in a manner their leader. To the very last year of his life he was regarded by all the best men as the natural general, under whose eye the "young guard" was specially anxious to distinguish itself. But his lack of system, his inability to grasp his subject as a whole, not only prevented Sainte-Beuve from distinguishing his name by any single great work, but even from ever attaining in his writings to grandeur of proportion, to the grand style. His eye was formed to see details, characteristic, important details, but no whole. He saw these details in constant, perpetually varying movement, the movement which is life, and by imitating all this movement in his brain and with his pen he gave his pictures a more exact resemblance to life than had ever been seen before. But he had not sufficient mastery over his details; he did not possess the gift of tracing apparent to deeper-lying causes, and these to a first cause.