1
Gautier has spoken for himself in a famous passage of _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_: "I am a man of the Homeric age; the world in which I live is
not my world, and I understand nothing of the society which surrounds
me. For me Christ did not come; I am as much a pagan as Alcibiades or
Phidias. I have never plucked on Golgotha the flowers of the Passion,
and the deep stream that flows from the side of the Crucified and sets
a crimson girdle about the world, has never washed me in its flood; my
rebellious body will not acknowledge the supremacy of the soul, and my
flesh will not endure to be mortified. I find the earth as beautiful as
the sky, and I think that perfection of form is virtue. I have no gift
for spirituality; I prefer a statue to a ghost, full noon to twilight.
Three things delight me: gold, marble, and purple; brilliance,
solidity, colour.... I have looked on love in the light of antiquity,
and as a piece of sculpture more or less perfect.... All my life I have
been concerned with the form of the flagon, never with the quality of
its contents." That is part of a confession of faith, and it is spoken
with absolute sincerity. Gautier knew himself, and could tell the truth
about himself as simply, as impartially, as if he had been describing
a work of art. Or is he not, indeed, describing a work of art? Was not
that very state of mind, that finished and limited temperament, a thing
which he had collaborated with nature in making, with an effective
heightening of what was most natural to him, in the spirit of art?
Gautier saw the world as mineral, as metal, as pigment, as rock, tree,
water, as architecture, costume, under sunlight, gas, in all the
colours that light can bring out of built or growing things; he saw it
as contour, movement; he saw all that a painter sees, when the painter
sets himself to copy, not to create. He was the finest copyist who ever
used paint with a pen. Nothing that can be expressed in technical terms
escaped him; there were no technical terms which he could not reduce
to an orderly beauty. But he absorbed all this visible world with the
hardly discriminating impartiality of the retina; he had no moods, was
not to be distracted by a sentiment, heard no voices, saw nothing but
darkness, the negation of day, in night. He was tirelessly attentive,
he had no secrets of his own and could keep none of naturels. He could
describe every ray of the nine thousand precious stones in the throne
of Ivan the Terrible, in the Treasury of the Kremlin; but he could tell
you nothing of one of Maeterlinck's bees.
The five senses made Gautier for themselves, that they might become
articulate. He speaks for them all with a dreadful unconcern. All his
words are in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have no
recollection. If the body did not dwindle and expand to some ignoble
physical conclusion; if wrinkles did not creep yellowing up women's
necks, and the fire in a man's blood did not lose its heat; he would
always be content. Everything that he cared for in the world was to be
had, except, perhaps, rest from striving after it; only, everything
would one day come to an end, after a slow spoiling. Decrepit,
colourless, uneager things shocked him, and it was with an acute,
almost disinterested pity that he watched himself die.
All his life Gautier adored life, and all the processes and forms of
life. A pagan, a young Roman, hard and delicate, with something of
cruelty in his sympathy with things that could be seen and handled,
he would have hated the soul, if he had ever really apprehended it,
for its qualifying and disturbing power upon the body. No other modern
writer, no writer perhaps, has described nakedness with so abstract a
heat of rapture: like d'Albert when he sees Mlle, de Maupin for the
first and last time, he is the artist before he is the lover, and he
is the lover while he is the artist. It was above all things the human
body whose contours and colours he wished to fix for eternity, in the
"robust art" of "verse, marble, onyx, enamel." And it was not the body
as a frail, perishable thing, and a thing to be pitied, that he wanted
to perpetuate; it was the beauty of life itself, imperishable at least
in its recurrence.
He loved imperishable things: the body, as generation after generation
refashions it, the world, as it is restored and rebuilt, and then
gems, and hewn stone, and carved ivory, and woven tapestry. He loved
verse for its solid, strictly limited, resistant form, which, while
prose melts and drifts about it, remains unalterable, indestructible.
Words, he knew, can build as strongly as stones, and not merely rise
to music, like the walls of Troy, but be themselves music as well as
structure. Yet, as in visible things he cared only for hard outline
and rich colour, so in words too he had no love of half-tints, and was
content to do without that softening of atmosphere which was to be
prized by those who came after him as the thing most worth seeking.
Even his verse is without mystery; if he meditates, his meditation has
all the fixity of a kind of sharp, precise criticism.
What Gautier saw he saw with unparalleled exactitude; he allows himself
no poetic license or room for fine phrases; has his eye always on the
object, and really uses the words which best describe it, whatever
they may be. So his books of travel are guide-books, in addition to
being other things; and not by any means "states of soul" or states
of nerves. He is willing to give you information, and able to give
it to you without deranging his periods. The little essay on Leonardo
is an admirable piece of artistic divination, and it is also a clear,
simple, sufficient account of the man, his temperament, and his way of
work. The study of Baudelaire, reprinted in the _édition définitive_
of the "Fleurs du Mal," remains the one satisfactory summing up, it
is not a solution, of the enigma which Baudelaire personified; and it
is almost the most coloured and perfumed thing in words which he ever
wrote. He wrote equally well about cities, poets, novelists, painters,
or sculptors; he did not understand one better than the other, or feel
less sympathy for one than for another. He, the "parfait magicien
ès lettres françaises," to whom faultless words came in faultlessly
beautiful order, could realise, against Balzac himself, that Balzac
had a style: "he possesses, though he did not think so, a style, and a
very beautiful style, the necessary, inevitable, mathematical style of
his ideas." He appreciated Ingres as justly as he appreciated El Greco;
he went through the Louvre, room by room, saying the right thing about
each painter in turn. He did not say the final thing; he said nothing
which we have to pause and think over before we see the whole of its
truth or apprehend the whole of its beauty. Truth, in him, comes to
us almost literally through the eyesight, and with the same beautiful
clearness as if it were one of those visible things which delighted him
most: gold, marble, and purple; brilliance, solidity, colour.
1902.