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's _Laokoon_ is 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 word _inexpressible_ no 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 entitled _Le 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, entitled _Effet 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 his _Tra
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 the _Moniteur 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's _Hernani_.
XXIX
SAINTE-BEUVE
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 the _Globe_,
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.
[Illustration: SAINTE-BEUVE]
As a critic he was only capable of describing the isolated individual,
and even of the individual he only very occasionally gave a complete,
final idea (Talleyrand, Proudhon); he showed him now from this side,
now from that, now at one, now at another age, now in one, now in
another relation to society. Even his short articles display a lack
of the power of concentration; he hid his best ideas in subordinate
clauses, his most suggestive thoughts in notes. He broke his bread of
life into crumbs. He hid his gold, as peasants used to do, in dark
corners, in holes in the floors and walls, at the bottom of chests and
in stockings; he was incapable of moulding it into figures.
The freedom from system which was his strong point had this great
advantage, that it preserved his writings from artificial symmetry. He
never sacrificed for the sake of the inward equilibrium of his work a
syllable of what he thought ought to be said; and much less would he
have done so to make his description and his style graphic. He had no
aversion for the complicate, the intricate, the unfinished. But the
result of his lack of that philosophic spirit which largely consists
in a tendency to summarise and the love of a whole as whole, is that
one never receives powerful, simple impressions from his works. The
important and the less important too often occupy the same plane.
Regarded as an artist, he reminds us of those Japanese painters,
the great artistic value of whose work began to be acknowledged in
Europe about the year 1880. One reason why the pictures of these
artists surprise and delight is, that there is not a trace of academic
symmetry in them; they never completely satisfy us because they despise
perspective, but they bring living things before us as if they were
alive.
Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer on the
23rd of December 1804. His father, a clever government official and
cultured gentleman, was fifty-two before he made up his mind to marry;
and his mother at the time of her marriage was nearly forty. Monsieur
Sainte-Beuve died before they had been married a year, two months
before the birth of his son, whose critically reflective turn of mind
was plainly an inheritance from the father he never saw. Sainte-Beuve
the elder was interested in all kinds of literature, but especially in
poetry; he left his books with their margins crowded with annotations
and remarks, the spirit of which curiously anticipates the tendency
of his son's writings.[1] Madame Sainte-Beuve, whose mother was an
Englishwoman, taught her son English at an early age, and to her is
doubtless due his taste (a very uncommon taste in France in those days)
for English lyric poetry, for Bowles, Crabbe, Cowper, and especially
for Wordsworth and those other poets of the Lake School whom he so
often translated and quoted. Something melancholy and prematurely old
in his temperament is in all probability attributable partly to the
advanced age of both his parents, and partly to the effect produced on
his mother's mind, before he was born, by the illness and death of her
husband.
Sainte-Beuve was a timid, melancholy child. At the age of twelve, home
influence had developed in him an almost alarming degree of childish
piety; he served as an acolyte at the mass with extraordinary fervour.
The fever of Catholicism was short, but it left its traces, which
at one time in later life showed very plainly; and during all the
earlier years of his youth the lad not only retained his reverence
for Christianity, but dwelt much on religious doubts and theological
questions. This lasted until, as a student, he felt himself at once
drawn to the philosophers of the eighteenth century and to the living
representatives of the sensationalistic philosophy, Tracy, Daunou, and
Lamarck, with whose assistance he soon freed himself from the grasp of
theology. His intellectual position on entering manhood was that of
the pure empiricist; at a later period religious moods and tendencies
reasserted themselves; but these again gave way to empiricism,
which proved to be the final attitude of his mind. At school he had
distinguished himself in history and languages; but, in spite of his
strong literary tendencies, he determined, partly for the sake of his
future, partly to counteract a too purely literary training, to study
medicine. From 1823 to 1827, whilst by no means neglecting literature,
he pursued the usual physiological and anatomical studies with ardour
and interest. He was poor, but never in want; for he was frugal and
extremely industrious.
The young medical student was anything but good-looking. His big round
head, covered with fine and yet rough reddish hair, was almost too
large for his body; and his figure was bad. But in the bright blue
eyes, which seemed now large, now small, and which sometimes dilated
strangely, there shone a thousand questions, smiled a mischievous
wit, and dreamed a curiously ingratiating, half-poetic, half-sensual
longing. As the poor, plain-looking student, his acquaintance with
the fair sex was almost entirely limited to the frail sinners of
the Quartier Latin. He had an ardently sensual, gross temperament,
which demanded the immediate gratification of its desires; but with
the gratification invariably came remorse and a strong feeling of
humiliation. Quite as markedly developed as the sensuality was a
dreamy, poetic imaginativeness, which, tinged as it was with a gentle
melancholy, naturally took the direction of romanticism and mysticism.
He had, perhaps, a little of the ugly man's involuntary jealous dislike
of the men whose good looks capture feminine hearts at once, and yet he
himself had something of their dangerously insinuating quality.
Early in 1827 Sainte-Beuve published in the _Globe_ two articles on
Victor Hugo's _Odes et Ballades_, which procured him admission to
the Romanticist circle. Hugo came to thank him, but did not find
him at home. A few days later Sainte-Beuve returned the call. He
found Hugo and his wife at breakfast, and thus made at the same
moment the acquaintance of the two persons who were to have most
influence over his life for many years to come. He soon became the
accredited critic of the Romantic School. His first important task
was to prove the connection of the new school with the older French
literature, to provide it, so to speak, with Gallic ancestors. This
task he accomplished in his excellent critical work, _Tableau de la
Poésie française au XVIe Siècle_ (1827-28), the aim of which is to
show plainly the thread which stretches across the classical age and
connects the generation of 1830 with Ronsard, Du Bellay, Philippe des
Portes, and those other authors of the Renaissance who had been so
long and so unjustly despised. This book occupies the same position
among Sainte-Beuve's works that _Les Grotesques_ does among Théophile
Gautier's. It was written before _Les Grotesques_, and is as thorough
and critically discriminating as Gautier's work is plastic and
eccentric.
In 1829 followed Sainte-Beuve's first lyric essay, _Poésies de Joseph
Delorme_, a collection of curious, elaborate poems which made no small
sensation. They purported to be written by a young medical student who
had died of consumption; but in the preface, under the transparent
pseudonym, Sainte-Beuve described himself and his own life. Joseph
Delorme is of the race of Obermann--poor, gifted, full of compassion
for the woes of humanity, a lustreless genius like the founder of the
race, but of even a more complex character than he; for Joseph is a
philosopher who is unhappy because of his scepticism, an idealist who
with all his idealism is addicted to low dissipation. The hero is the
usual despairing youth of the 1830 period, but there is more of the
bourgeois in him than in the heroes of Saint-Beuve's contemporaries;
his despair is less magnificent and more true to nature. As regards
form, the poems are remarkable for their return to the charming old
French metres of Ronsard and Charles d'Orléans, and also for the
frequency with which the sonnet (beloved of Sainte-Beuve as of Wilhelm
Schlegel) recurs. But they interest us chiefly because of the tendency
to realism which their author already begins to display, a realism
which, though it can sometimes be traced to the influence of the
English poets of the Lake School, is yet as a rule, with its daring
choice of subjects (in the poem "Rose" for example), original and
essentially French. The ideal element is represented by the author's
ecstatic effusions on the subject of the _Cénacle_, the little
fraternal circle of poets and painters into which he had lately been
admitted, and the members of which he panegyrises, now collectively,
now singly. His admiration of his friends knows no bounds. Some of
the poems at the time of their appearance were ridiculed for their
affectation ("Les rayons jaunes" undoubtedly verges on the ridiculous)
others were considered vulgar. Guizot characterised Joseph Delorme as
"un Werther jacobin et carabin" (Werther as the Jacobin and "medical").
On the whole, however, the book may be said to have had the decided
success which it deserved.