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 to
_Les 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 to _Cromwell_,
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 of _Maupin_." 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 of _Les Grotesques_, the aim of which was the rehabilitation
of the whole group of minor poets whom Boileau had disgraced and
dismissed in his _L'Art poétique_ in 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 piquante
Un grain de sel de cette mer
D'où jaillit nue et provocante
L'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 to _Mademoiselle 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 of _Hernani_, 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 profonde
Aspire 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 blême
M'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. In _Émaux et Camées_, a collection of poems
in short, eight-syllabled lines, which in their forms are sometimes
faintly reminiscent of Goethe's _West-Oestlicher Divan_ and Heine's
_Buch 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's _Théophile 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 robuste
Seul a l'éternité.
Le buste
Survit à la cité.
Et la médaille austère
Que trouve un laboureur
Sous terre
Révèle un empereur.
Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent,
Mais les vers souverains
Demeurent
Plus forts que les airains."
--a saying, this last, which holds good of such verse as Gautier wrote.
XXVIII
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
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's _Les
Jeunes-France_. The author intended his work to satirise Romanticism
in much the same manner as _Les Précieuses Ridicules_ had satirised
the literary fantasticality of an earlier period; but unfortunately
_Les Jeunes-France_ is only the frolicsome effusion of a talented
boy, whilst _Les Précieuses_ is a mature work of enduring value. _Les
Jeunes-France_ was 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 not _Les Jeunes-France_, but _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_, the novel which he wrote immediately after that work (1836).
In _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ the champagne-froth of his youth seethes.
It is a perfectly pagan and at times a perfectly indecent book--as
indecent as a dialogue of Crébillon _fils_--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." In _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ we
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 story _Fortunio_, with its
glorification of pleasure and idleness, is the French counterpart of
Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinde_; 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's _Ratbert_, 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 to _Mademoiselle 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 to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ he
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 to _Tartuffe_, 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.