While one is reading the tales of Gautier, he feels himself to be in
a playhouse, confronted by a bewildering array of stage-settings,
incredibly correct in detail and grouping, oppressively rich in
appointment, and colorful--always colorful. At times characters are
felt to be subordinated to background, yet these surroundings are
so picturesque--or better, perhaps, so pictorial--that they furnish
contrasts and harmonies which bring out rather than overpower the
people who move amidst this very forest of accessory riches.
An examination of Gautier the man, both temperamentally and as his
life was lived--if, indeed, there can be such a distinction--at once
provides an explanation of this pervading love for setting: he was a
passionate lover of the beautiful, and he was a persistent traveller in
quest of things beautiful to look upon.
To speak of an artist, whether in pigments, marbles, or words, as a
lover of the beautiful will at once suggest to the “practical” reader
a deep-eyed dreamer with soulful, upturned look, devoid of humour, and
affecting a Bunthorne stride. Not so Gautier. Robust of body, almost
coarse of physiognomy, and bubbling with life, he could mix his colors
with humor, tone his admirations with censure, charge his prodigious
memory with endless detail, and train his observation to the minutest
accuracy. There was something sensual as well as sensuous in his mind,
and he was saved from grovelling only by the dominance of that subtle
perception and admiration for the beautiful in _all_ its phases, which
challenges continual comment in any consideration of the man and his
work. Gautier was esthetic without being an esthete, witty yet not a
wit, sentient but not sentimental, sensual though not gross.
* * * * *
A journey to the heart of Gautier leads by way of his outward life.
Tarbes, in the south of France, Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées,
was the place of his birth, August 31, 1811. Jean-Pierre Gautier, his
father, was in the revenue service, and an ardent royalist. He hailed
from the Avignon of the Popes that Alphonse Daudet has chronicled so
delightfully. Our author’s mother, Adélaïde-Antoinette Cocard, was a
tailor’s daughter, and a noted beauty, whose sister had married into
the nobility.
When Théophile was only three years old, his parents removed to Paris,
but even at that elastic age the lad retained his love for the South,
and, like his father, often repined for its warmth and color. He was
a precocious youngster, beginning at five to devour books--_Paul and
Virginia_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ among others.
The inevitable _Lycée Louis-le-Grand_ was his academy, and by no means
a happy prison it proved for the impressionable child, so poetic in
temperament. Fortunately, his father soon took him home and entered him
as a day-pupil elsewhere.
In his boyhood Théophile became a worshiper of that master romanticist,
Victor Hugo, whom he was permitted to meet while yet a youth of
nineteen, and who graciously encouraged the boy to publish his verses.
Though Gautier afterward laughed delightedly and delightfully at
the extremes of the earlier romantic school, and though both in his
historical work on romanticism and in his papers on contemporaneous
writers, his biting satire searched out its weaknesses, he never ceased
to feel its influence and cherish a reverence for its anointed apostle,
the creator of _Les Misérables_.
In those formative days the young man was physically slight and almost
frail--remote as yet from the massive giant of flashing black eye and
dark leonine mane, whose physique enabled him to sustain many a bout
with the wine cup and rejoice in pleasures of table, until, his natural
powers otherwise unabated, and but sixty-one years of age, he succumbed
to an enlarged heart and died at Paris, October 23, 1872.
Gautier, like many another man of letters, presents some contradictions
of temperament and production, but for the most part his work is
infused with his own strong individuality.
Like Loti, he knew the life of many lands and wrote sympathetically of
Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, and the alluring East. A painter
turned art critic and journalist--and so indefatigable a journalist
that he himself has estimated that it would require three hundred
volumes to compass his collected writings--he pursued a painter’s
methods in his literary work. A poet of charm and attainment, and a
dramatic critic of secure place, he informed both verse and criticism
with the melodious spirit which issued from his love for music. In
faithful description the precursor of the realists, he still adhered
to his romanticist ideals. Word-connoisseur, and stylist of the first
order, he loved perfection of literary form because such harmonies were
the outward limbs of beauty.
Here was an aggressive, positive, individual man, strong in love as in
loathing, tender to all animals, living, like Balzac, joyously a life
of struggle against debt, and at last winning a place greater than the
forbidden seat in the Academy--a place among the most distinguished
romanticists that France ever gave to the world.
Gautier’s worship of beauty is not easy to formulate. M. de Sumichrast
has termed it “not immoral, but unmoral.” The presence or the absence
of virtue or of vice made no difference to him if only the person were
beautiful. He no more demanded moral qualities in his characters than
he did in the lovely lines of a hill crest. Beauty was the final flame
for the adoration of this sensuous acolyte. In all life, at home and
widely journeying abroad, he sought it, and when he found it, whether
in human form, in relics of ancient art, in modern picture and marble,
or in the unrivalled symmetry of nature, his whole being throbbed with
delight.
As a youth he fell in love with the robust, fleshy women that Rubens
had painted for the Louvre, and straightway pilgrimaged to Belgium to
find the originals. His experiences were laughable--perhaps a trifle
pathetic. The one slattern whose generous bulk met his Rubenic ideals
was scrubbing. But out of this boyish episode grew that exquisite tale,
“The Fleece of Gold”--a modern covering which, unlike Jason’s, was a
woman’s wealth of blonde hair.
As the story runs, Tiburce, a young dilettante painter, had always
found more beauty in the feminine creations of the great painters than
in the most lovely flesh-and-blood women he ever met, so he spent much
time in contemplating these exquisite creations of art. At length, from
having studied certain Flemish pictures, he decided to go into Belgium
“in search of the blonde”--he would love a Fleming.
In Brussels and in Laeken the quest of this new Jason was unsuccessful,
so he went to Antwerp, where he was as diligent as before--and equally
without reward. At length he saw in the Cathedral Rubens’ masterpiece,
“The Descent from the Cross,” and was stricken dumb by the beauty of
the Magdalen in this remarkable picture. “The sight of that face was to
Tiburce a revelation from on high; scales fell from his eyes, he found
himself face to face with his secret dream, with his unavowed hope; the
intangible image which he had pursued with all the ardor of an amorous
imagination, and of which he had been able to espy only the profile
or the ravishing fold of a dress; the capricious and untamed chimera,
always ready to unfold its restless wings, was there before him,
fleeing no more, motionless in the splendor of its beauty.”
Then followed daily visits to the Cathedral, rapt, dazed, worshiping.
One day on the street Tiburce catches sight of a woman who bears--a
striking resemblance to the Magdalen! Her--Gretchen--he eventually
meets, and to her he reluctantly gives his love. Yet, though Gretchen
comes to love Tiburce, she cannot evoke in him quite the same feelings
he knows in the presence of Rubens’ beautiful woman--the Magdalen is
still his ideal. Even when he christens the girl with the name of the
Penitent, the transformation is not complete. At length Gretchen,
hidden behind a pillar, overhears Tiburce sighing out his worship
toward the woman of the painting: “How I would love thee to-morrow if
thou wert living!”--and realizes that she is loved only vicariously.
By and by they go to Paris, where the artist feels his love for the
absent Magdalen grow instead of wane, and Gretchen can bear her
jealous unhappiness no longer. She breaks out into a tender eloquence
of reproach: “You are ambitious to love; you are deceived concerning
yourself, you will never love. You must have perfection, the ideal
and poesy--all those things which do not exist. Instead of loving in
a woman the love that she has for you, of being grateful to her for
her devotion and for the gift of her heart, you look to see if she
resembles that plaster Venus in your study.... You are not a lover,
poor Tiburce, you are simply a painter.”
And so she goes on, uncovering to him his foolish delusion, ending in a
passion of abandonment, of “sublime immodesty,” by appearing before him
like Aphrodite rising from the sea.
Swept by all this nobility of her discerning spirit, and all the
ravishing charm of her beauty, Tiburce seizes his brushes and does
master work--and then begs his new-found love to name the day for the
crying of their banns.
* * * * *
Perhaps it needs no word here to emphasize one phase of Gautier’s
nature--he _knew_ himself to be a beauty-lover, and he knew all the
limitations of character that this cult rendered inevitable.
* * * * *
A second force in Gautier’s life was his orientalism. In this he was
not only conscious of the strain of eastern blood that pulsed through
both body and temperament, but he was, by reason of long application,
constant travel, and the varied opportunities of a critic’s life, a
savant on matters oriental, particularly Pompeian and Egyptian.
Here, again, “The Romance of a Mummy,” a long tale, “One of Cleopatra’s
Nights,” a short tale, and “The Mummy’s Foot,” which follows in
translation, display the savant in his work. The movement of life in
ancient Egypt in the time of the Hebrew bondage, and all that highly
colored, picturesque civilization, afford him the always coveted
background which he valued as much for itself as for its use as a
setting.
In another of his shorter stories, “Arria Marcella,” the savant is
also evident. The familiar but terrible theme of the vampire woman is
set in an idealized reconstruction of Pompeian life; just as that one
perfect short-story from the pen of Gautier, “The Dead Leman” (_La
Morte Amoureuse_), marvellously made to live again the mediæval spirit
in the poignantly pitiful mistress whose end is the heart-break of
selfish passion; and “The Thousand-and-Second Night” evokes anew the
indistinct, subtle, alluring odors of the Arabian Nights.
The three best-known longer tales of Gautier--technically they are
not precisely novels--are _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, a prose-song to
beauty--immoral, daring, and beautiful; _Captain Fracasse_, whose
smash-’em-up, picaroon hero leads us through abundant adventures; and
_Spirite_, a notable contrast to the materialism displayed--almost
flaunted--in his other work. _Spirite_ is a story of fantasy; but it
is more: with a tender delicacy and spiritual subtlety which well may
surprise his public, Gautier presents the contrasting love-lure of
Lavinia d’Audefini, a disembodied woman, and the very real but--here
is the remarkable part--less attractive charms of Mme. d’Ymbercourt, a
red-ripe woman indeed. We are indebted to Gautier for this one story
as a demonstration that, while his tales are mostly as unmoral as
the pigments of his literary palette, he can at will delineate the
ethereal, and in so doing disclose a fine understanding of spiritual
values.
THE MUMMY’S FOOT
(_LE PIED DE MOMIE_)