TYGER, TYGER!
What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience?
What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined
itself to the field of art? These questions are answered for us by
Théophile Gautier.
We have seen him at the age of nineteen taking part in the battle of
“Hernani” in his scarlet satin waistcoat; we see him at the same age
leading the art students in mocking dances about a bust of Racine in a
public square of Paris. After that we see him for forty-two years
diligently following the art for art’s sake formula. He declares that he
has no religion, no politics; he has no concern with any moral or
intellectual question, he is purely and simply an artist, devoting
himself with passionate fervor to the production of works of pure
beauty. His fastidiousness is shown by the law he lays down, that a
young artist should write not less than fifty thousand verses for
practice before he writes one verse to be published.
And what is the content of this art? Gautier believes in one thing, the
human body. He believes in it, not as an instrument of the mind, a house
of the spirit, but as a thing in itself, to be fed and pampered and
perfumed, and clad in silks and satins, and taken out to engage in
sexual adventures. The pretensions of art for art’s sake turn out to be
buncombe; the reality of the matter is art for orgy’s sake.
At the age of twenty-four Gautier published a novel, “Mademoiselle de
Maupin,” which might be described as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”
rewritten by the devil. A young lady of beauty and fashion goes
wandering in the costume of a man, and this affords endless
possibilities of sexual titillation; women fall in love with her,
thinking she is a man, and men fall in love with her by instinct, as it
were; the orgies thus postponed are especially thrilling when they
finally occur.
Some men have written this kind of depravity at twenty-four, and learned
something better as they grew older; but Gautier learned absolutely
nothing. To the end of his long life he continued to produce novels and
tales of which the sole purpose is to glorify the orgy, to make it
romantic and thrilling by the elaborate squandering of wealth, the
heaping mountain high of the apparatus of luxury. The device fails, for
the simple reason that the senses are limited. When you are hungry a
dinner interests you, but ten thousand dinners appall; and the same
thing applies to coition. The men and women in these orgies remind us of
people in a besieged castle, living in deadly terror of an enemy who
never fails to get them in the end. The French have made a word for that
victorious enemy: _ennui_.
It should hardly need to be said that the art of Théophile Gautier is a
leisure-class art. These orgies are possible only in a slave
civilization; they presuppose the fact that the masses shall toil to
heap up wealth for a privileged few to destroy in a night of riot. At
the very opening of “Mademoiselle de Maupin” the author portrays his
hero, living at ease with a valet to serve him, and nothing to do but be
discontented. “My idle passions growl dully in my heart, and prey upon
themselves for lack of other food.” He is consumed with imaginings--all,
needless to say, having to do with pleasures which he does not mean to
earn. “I wait for the heavens to open, and an angel to descend with a
revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and a throne to be given
me, for one of Raphael’s virgins to leave the canvas and come to embrace
me, for relations, whom I do not possess, to die and leave me what will
enable me to sail my fancy on a river of gold,” etc.
His dream finally takes the form of a woman, and he spends many pages in
detailing her qualities. Needless to say, she belongs to the rioting
classes. “I consider beauty a diamond which should be mounted and set in
gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful woman without a carriage, horses,
serving-men, and all that belongs to an income of a hundred thousand a
year; there is harmony between beauty and wealth.” Of course this
dream-woman must be entirely subject to the sensual desires of man. “I
consider woman, after the manner of the ancients, as a beautiful slave
designed for our pleasure.”
Victor Hugo was exiled by Louis Napoleon; while Gautier, having “no
political opinions,” remained in Paris and accepted financial favors
from the tyrant. What he considered his master work was published at the
age of forty-five, a volume of verse whose title explains its character,
“Enamels and Cameos.” The art of poetry has become identical with that
of the goldsmith; words are tiny jewels, fitted together with precise
and meticulous care. Words have beauty, quite apart from their meaning,
and the proper study for mankind is the dictionary. Poetry should have
neither feeling nor ideas; while as for the subject, the more unlikely
and unsuitable it is, the greater the triumph of the poet. This is not
an effort to caricature Gautier’s doctrine, it is his own statement, the
theme of one of his poems. But on no account are you to take this poem
for propaganda!
You see how the proposition demonstrates its own absurdity. Théophile
Gautier was during his entire lifetime a fanatical preacher, a
propagandist of sensuality and materialism, a glorified barber and
tailor, a publicity man for the Association of Merchants of Tapestries,
Furniture and Jewelry. When he writes a poem on the subject of a
rose-colored dress, he asks you to believe that he is really interested
in the rose-colored dress, but you may be sure that he is no such fool;
he writes about the rose-colored dress as an act of social defiance. He
says: There are imbeciles in the world who believe in religion, in moral
sense, in virtue, self-restraint and idealism, subjects which bore me to
extinction; in order to show my contempt for such imbeciles, I proceed
to prove that the greatest poem in the world can be written on a
rose-colored dress or on a roof, or on my watch, or on smoke, or on
whatever unlikely subject crosses my mind; I consecrate myself to this
task, I become a moral anti-moralist, a propagandist of no-propaganda.
What are the products of nature bearing most resemblance to enamels and
cameos? They are certain kinds of insects, beautiful, hard, shiny,
brilliantly colored, repulsive, cruel, and poisonous. Such is the art of
Théophile Gautier and his successors, who have made French literature a
curse for a hundred years. This literature possesses prestige because of
its perfection of form; therefore it is important to get clear in our
minds the fact that the ability to fit words together in intricate
patterns is a thing ranking very low in the scale of human faculties.
The feats of the art-for-art-sakers are precisely as important as those
of the man on the stage who balances three billiard-balls on the end of
his nose. The piano-gymnast who leaped to world fame by his ability to
wiggle his fingers more rapidly than any other living man has been
definitely put out of date by the mechanical piano-player; and some day
mankind will adopt a universal language, and forget all the enamels and
cameos in the old useless tongues.
Get it clear in your mind that external beauty is entirely compatible
with deadly cruelty of intellect and spirit. A tiger is a marvelous
product, from the esthetic point of view, and offers a superb theme to
poets, as William Blake has shown us. “Tyger, tyger, burning
bright”--but who wants this gold-striped glory in his garden? In exactly
the same way, there is a mass of what is called literature, possessing
the graces of form--music and glamor, elegance, passion, energy--and
using all these virtues, precisely as the tiger uses his teeth and
claws, to rend and destroy human life. Literary criticism which fails to
take account of such vicious qualities in art works is just exactly as
sensible and trustworthy as the merchant who would sell you a _cobra de
capello_, with a gorgeous black and white striped hood, for a boudoir
ornament and pet.