Hero-worship is appropriate only to youth. With age one becomes cynical,
or indifferent, or perhaps too busy. Either the sense of the marvelous
is dulled, or one's boys are just entering college and life is agreeably
practical. Marriage and family cares are good if only for the reason
that they keep a man from getting bored. But they also stifle his
yearnings after the ideal. They make hero-worship appear foolish. How
can a man go mooning about when he has just had a good cup of coffee
and a snatch of what purports to be the news, while an attractive and
well-dressed woman sits opposite him at breakfast-table, and by her
mere presence, to say nothing of her wit, compels him to be respectable
and to carry a level head? The father of a family and husband of a
federated club woman has no business with hero-worship. Let him leave
such folly to beardless youth.
But if a man has never outgrown the boy that was in him, or has never
married, then may he do this thing. He will be happy himself, and
others will be happy as they consider him. Indeed, there is something
altogether charming about the personality of him who proves faithful
to his early loves in literature and art; who continues a graceful
hero-worship through all the caprices of literary fortune; and who,
even though his idol may have been dethroned, sets up a private shrine
at which he pays his devotions, unmindful of the crowd which hurries
by on its way to do homage to strange gods.
Some men are born to be hero-worshipers. Théophile Gautier is an
example. If one did not love Gautier for his wit and his good-nature,
one would certainly love him because he dared to be sentimental. He
displayed an almost comic excess of emotion at his first meeting with
Victor Hugo. Gautier smiles as he tells the story; but he tells it
exactly, not being afraid of ridicule. He went to call upon Hugo with
his friends Gérard de Nerval and Pétrus Borel. Twice he mounted the
staircase leading to the poet's door. His feet dragged as if they had
been shod with lead instead of leather. His heart throbbed; cold sweat
moistened his brow. As he was on the point of ringing the bell, an
idiotic terror seized him, and he fled down the stairs, four steps at
a time, Gérard and Pétrus after him, shouting with laughter. But the
third attempt was successful. Gautier saw Victor Hugo--and lived. The
author of _Odes et Ballades_ was just twenty-eight years old. Youth
worshiped youth in those great days.
Gautier said little during that visit, but he stared at the poet with
all his might. He explained afterwards that one may look at gods,
kings, pretty women, and great poets rather more scrutinizingly than
at other persons, and this too without annoying them. 'We gazed at
Hugo with admiring intensity, but he did not appear to be
inconvenienced.'
What brings Gautier especially to mind is the appearance within a few
weeks of an amusing little volume entitled _Le Romantisme et l'éditeur
Renduel_. Its chief value consists, no doubt, in what the author, M.
Adolphe Jullien, has to say about Renduel. That noted publisher must
have been a man of unusual gifts and unusual fortune. He was a
fortunate man because he had the luck to publish some of the best
works of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de
Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, and Paul Lacroix; and he was
a gifted man because he was able successfully to manage his troop of
geniuses, neither quarreling with them himself nor allowing them to
quarrel overmuch with one another. Renduel's portrait faces the
title-page of the volume, and there are two portraits of him besides.
There are fac-similes of agreements between the great publisher and
his geniuses. There is a famous caricature of Victor Hugo with a brow
truly monumental. There is a caricature of Alfred de Musset with a
figure like a Regency dandy,--a figure which could have been acquired
only by much patience and unremitted tight-lacing; also one of Balzac,
which shows that that great novelist's waist-line had long since
disappeared, and that he had long since ceased to care. What was a
figure to him in comparison with the flesh-pots of Paris!
One of the best of these pictorial satires is Roubaud's sketch of
Gautier. It has a teasing quality, it is diabolically fascinating. It
shows how great an art caricature is in the hands of a master.
But the highest virtue of a good new book is that it usually sends the
reader back to a good old book. One can hardly spend much time upon
Renduel; he will remember that Gautier has described that period when
hero-worship was in the air, when the sap of a new life circulated
everywhere, and when he himself was one of many loyal and enthusiastic
youths who bowed the head at mention of Victor Hugo's name. The reader
will remember, too, that Gautier was conspicuous in that band of
Romanticists who helped to make _Hernani_ a success the night of its
first presentation. Gautier believed that to be the great event of his
life. He loved to talk about it, dream about it, write of it.
There was a world of good fellowship among the young artists,
sculptors, and poets of that day. They took real pleasure in shouting
Hosanna to Victor Hugo and to one another. Even Zola, the
Unsentimental, speaks of _ma tristesse_ as he reviews that delightful
past. He cannot remember it, to be sure, but he has read about it. He
thinks ill of the present as he compares the present with 'those dead
years.' Writers then belonged to a sort of heroic brotherhood. They
went out like soldiers to conquer their literary liberties. They were
kings of the Paris streets. 'But we,' says Zola in a pensive strain,
'we live like wolves each in his hole.' I do not know how true a
description this is of modern French literary society, but it is not
difficult to make one's self think that those other days were the days
of magnificent friendships between young men of genius. It certainly
was a more brilliant time than ours. It was flamboyant, to use one of
Gautier's favorite words.
Youth was responsible for much of the enthusiasm which obtained among
the champions of artistic liberty. These young men who did honor to
the name of Hugo were actually young. They rejoiced in their youth.
They flaunted it, so to speak, in the faces of those who were without
it. Gautier says that young men of that day differed in one respect
from young men of this day; modern young men are generally in the
neighborhood of fifty years of age.
Gautier has described his friends and comrades most felicitously. All
were boys, and all were clever. They were poor and they were happy.
They swore by Scott and Shakespeare, and they planned great futures
for themselves.
Take for an example Jules Vabre, who owed his reputation to a certain
Essay on the Inconvenience of Conveniences. You will search the
libraries in vain for this treatise. The author did not finish it. He
did not even commence it,--only talked about it. Jules Vabre had a
passion for Shakespeare, and wanted to translate him. He thought of
Shakespeare by day and dreamed of Shakespeare by night. He stopped
people in the street to ask them if they had read Shakespeare.
He had a curious theory concerning language. Jules Vabre would not
have said, As a man thinks so is he, but, As a man drinks so is he.
According to Gautier's statement, Vabre maintained the paradox that
the Latin languages needed to be 'watered' (_arroser_) with wine, and
the Anglo-Saxon languages with beer. Vabre found that he made
extraordinary progress in English upon stout and extra stout. He went
over to England to get the very atmosphere of Shakespeare. There he
continued for some time regularly 'watering' his language with English
ale, and nourishing his body with English beef. He would not look at a
French newspaper, nor would he even read a letter from home. Finally
he came back to Paris, anglicized to his very galoshes. Gautier says
that when they met, Vabre gave him a 'shake hand' almost energetic
enough to pull the arm from the shoulder. He spoke with so strong an
English accent that it was difficult to understand him; Vabre had
almost forgotten his mother tongue. Gautier congratulated the exile
upon his return, and said, 'My dear Jules Vabre, in order to translate
Shakespeare it is now only necessary for you to learn French.'
Gautier laid the foundations of his great fame by wearing a red
waistcoat the first night of _Hernani_. All the young men were
fantastic in those days, and the spirit of carnival was in the whole
romantic movement. Gautier was more courageously fantastic than other
young men. His costume was effective, and the public never forgot him.
He says with humorous resignation: 'If you pronounce the name of
Théophile Gautier before a Philistine who has never read a line of our
works, the Philistine knows us, and remarks with a satisfied air, "Oh
yes, the young man with the red waistcoat and the long hair." ... Our
poems are forgotten, but our red waistcoat is remembered.' Gautier
cheerfully grants that when everything about him has faded into
oblivion this gleam of light will remain, to distinguish him from
literary contemporaries whose waistcoats were of soberer hue.
The chapter in his _Histoire du Romantisme_ in which Gautier tells how
he went to the tailor to arrange for the most spectacular feature of
his costume is lively and amusing. He spread out the magnificent piece
of cherry-colored satin, and then unfolded his design for a
'pour-point,' like a 'Milan cuirass.' Says Gautier, using always his
quaint editorial _we_, 'It has been said that we know a great many
words, but we don't know words enough to express the astonishment of
our tailor when we lay before him our plan for a waistcoat.' The man
of shears had doubts as to his customer's sanity.
'Monsieur,' he exclaimed, 'this is not the fashion!'
'It will be the fashion when we have worn the waistcoat once,' was
Gautier's reply. And he declares that he delivered the answer with a
self-possession worthy of a Brummel or 'any other celebrity of
dandyism.'
It is no part of this paper to describe the innocently absurd and
good-naturedly extravagant things which Gautier and his companions
did, not alone the first night of _Hernani_, but at all times and in
all places. They unquestionably saw to it that Victor Hugo had fair
play the evening of February 25, 1830. The occasion was an historic
one, and they with their Merovingian hair, their beards, their
waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively
and picturesque occasion.
I have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in
Gautier's _Histoire du Romantisme_. The narrative is one of much
sweetness and humor. It ought to be translated for the benefit of
readers who know Gautier chiefly by _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ and that
for reasons among which love of literature is perhaps the least
influential.
It is pleasant to find that Renduel confirms the popular view of
Gautier's character. M. Jullien says that Renduel never spoke of
Gautier but in praise. 'Quel bon garçon!' he used to say. 'Quel brave
coeur!' M. Jullien has naturally no large number of new facts to give
concerning Gautier. But there are eight or nine letters from Gautier
to Renduel which will be read with pleasure, especially the one in
which the poet says to the publisher, 'Heaven preserve you from
historical novels, and your eldest child from the smallpox.'
Gautier must have been both generous and modest. No mere egoist could
have been so faithful in his hero-worship or so unpretentious in his
allusions to himself. One has only to read the most superficial
accounts of French literature to learn how universally it is granted
that Gautier had skillful command of that language to which he was
born. Yet he himself was by no means sure that he deserved a master's
degree. He quotes one of Goethe's sayings,--a saying in which the
great German poet declares that after the practice of many arts there
was but one art in which he could be said to excel, namely, the art of
writing in German; in that he was almost a master. Then Gautier
exclaims, 'Would that _we_, after so many years of labor, had become
almost a master of the art of writing in French! But such ambitions
are not for us!'
Yet they were for him; and it is a satisfaction to note how invariably
he is accounted, by the artists in literature, an eminent man among
many eminent men in whose touch language was plastic.