possession of us. In the first place we were obliged to borrow the plan
from the old Romans; and even before it was finished, our Panthéon
tottered on its legs like a child with the rickets and staggered like a
drunken man, so that we had to give it crutches of stone, otherwise it
would have measured its shameful length on the ground, in sight of all
the world, and would have given the nations something to laugh at for
more than a hundred francs.--We thought it better to set up an obelisk
on one of our squares; we had to go and filch it at Luxor, and we were
two years bringing it home. Old Egypt lined its roads with obelisks as
we line ours with poplars; it carried bundles of them under its arm as
the market-gardener carries bunches of asparagus, and carved a monolith
from the sides of its mountains of granite more easily than we make
tooth-picks or ear-picks. A few centuries ago Raphael was living and
Michael Angelo; now we have Monsieur Paul Delaroche, all because we
are progressing.--You boast of your Opéra; ten Opéras like yours could
dance a saraband in a Roman circus. Monsieur Martin, himself, with his
tame tiger and his poor gouty lion, sound asleep like a subscriber
to the _Gazette_, makes a very poor showing beside the gladiator of
antiquity. Take your benefit performances that last till two o'clock
in the morning--what do they amount to when you think of the games
that lasted a hundred days, of the plays in which real ships really
fought in real water; in which thousands of men conscientiously cut
one another in pieces;--aye, turn pale O heroic Franconi!--in which,
when the sea retired, the desert arrived with its roaring tigers and
lions, awe-inspiring supernumeraries who did duty but once; in which
the leading rôle was taken by some robust, athletic Dacian or Pannonian
whom they would very often have found it embarrassing to produce at
the end of the play, his sweetheart being a lovely and dainty Numidian
lioness who had fasted for three days?--Does it not seem to you that
the rope-dancing elephant was superior to Mademoiselle Georges? Do you
suppose Mademoiselle Taglioni is a better dancer than Arbuscula, and
Perrot better than Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius could have
given points to Bocage, excellent actor though he is,--Galeria Coppiola
played _ingénue_ rôles when she was more than a hundred years old. It
is fair to say that the oldest of our _jeunes premières_ is but little
more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars shows no sign of progress
in that direction: they had three or four thousand gods in whom they
believed, and we have only one and we hardly believe in him; that is a
strange kind of progress.--Was not Jupiter a better man than Don Juan
and a much more successful seducer? Verily, I cannot see what we have
discovered or even improved.
After the progressive journalists, as if to serve as a foil to them,
come the blasé journalists, who are usually twenty or twenty-two years
old, who have never left their quarter and have as yet lain only with
their housekeeper. Everything bores them, tires them out; they are
sated, blasé, used up, inaccessible. They know beforehand what you
are going to say to them; they have seen, felt, heard, experienced
everything that it is possible to see, feel, hear, and experience; the
human heart has no corner so dark that they have not held a lantern
to it. They say to you with marvellous self-possession: "The human
heart is not like that; women are not made so; that character is
falsely drawn;"--or else: "What's this! always love or hatred! always
men and women! Can't you talk about something else? Why, man is worn
threadbare, and woman, more so, since Monsieur de Balzac took a hand.
"'Who will deliver us from men and women?'
"Do you think your fable is new, monsieur? it is new after the fashion
of the Pont-Neuf:[2] nothing in the world could be more common; I read
it somewhere or other;--when I was out at nurse or somewhere else;
it's been dinned into my ears for ten years.--By the way, monsieur,
understand that there's nothing I don't know, that everything is
worn threadbare for me, and that even if your idea were as virginal
as the Virgin Mary, I would swear, none the less, that I had seen it
prostituting itself on street corners to the vilest scribblers and the
most contemptible pedants."
Journalists of that stamp are responsible for Jocko, Le Monstre Vert,
Les Lions de Mysore, and a thousand other charming conceits.
They are constantly complaining of being obliged to read books and see
plays. Apropos of a paltry vaudeville, they will talk about flowering
almond-trees, limes that perfume the air, the breezes of spring, the
odor of the young foliage; they set up for lovers of nature after the
style of young Werther, and yet they have never set foot outside of
Paris and could not tell a cabbage from a beet.--If it is winter, they
prate about the joys of the domestic fireside, and the crackling fire,
and the andirons, and the slippers, and the reverie and the state
between sleeping and waking; they never fail to quote Tibullus's famous
line:
Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem,
by the aid of which they assume a knowing and at the same time
ingenuous air, the most fascinating thing imaginable. They pose as men
upon whom the work of men can no longer make any impression, whom the
emotions aroused by the drama leave as cold and hard as the knife with
which they cut their quills, but who exclaim, nevertheless, with Jean
Jacques Rousseau: "Ah! there's the periwinkle!" They profess fierce
antipathy to the colonels at the Gymnase, the American uncles, the
cousins, male and female, the sensitive old grumblers, the romantic
widows, and try to cure us of the vaudeville by proving every day by
the _feuilletons_ that all Frenchmen are not born wicked.--In truth,
we see no great harm in that, but the contrary, and we are glad to
acknowledge that the extinction of the vaudeville or the opera-comique
in France--national style--would be one of the greatest benefactions
that the press and Heaven could bestow.--But I should be very glad
to know what species of literature these gentlemen would allow to be
established in its place. To be sure, it could be no worse.
Others preach against false taste and translate Seneca the tragedian.
Lastly, and to close the procession, a new battalion of critics has
been formed, of a species never before seen.
Their formula for estimating a work is the most convenient, the most
elastic, the most malleable, the most peremptory, the most superlative,
and the most successful that a critic ever could have conceived. Zoilus
would certainly have lost nothing thereby.
Hitherto, when it has seemed desirable to depreciate a work of any
sort or to cast odium upon it in the eyes of the patriarchal and
simple-minded subscriber, the ordinary method has been to make false
or cunningly isolated quotations; to maim sentences and mutilate
lines in such a way that the author himself would have considered
himself the most ridiculous creature on earth; to bring accusations of
imaginary plagiarisms; to place passages from his book side by side
with passages from ancient or modern authors, which had not the least
connection therewith; to accuse him, after the style of a cook and with
innumerable solecisms, of not knowing his own language and of degrading
the French of Racine and Voltaire; to assert in all seriousness that
his book tended toward anthropophagy, and that readers would infallibly
become cannibals or have hydrophobia in the course of the week; but all
that was paltry, out of date, false and fossilized to the last degree.
By dint of having dragged along through _feuilletons_ and _Variétés_
articles, the charge of immorality became insufficient, and so unfit
for service that the _Constitutionnel_, a bashful and progressive
journal, as we know, was almost the only one that had the desperate
courage to continue to use it.
So they invented the criticism of the future, the Prospective
criticism. Can you imagine, at first thought, what a charming thing it
is and what a prolific imagination it indicates? The recipe is simple
and I can tell you what it is. The book that will be considered fine
and will be praised is the book that has not yet appeared. The one that
has just appeared is infallibly detestable. The one to appear to-morrow
will be superb; but it is always to-day. It is the same with this sort
of criticism as with the barber who had these words in huge letters for
his sign:
SHAVING FREE HERE TO-MORROW.
All the poor devils who read the placard promised themselves for the
next day the ineffable, sovereign sweetness of being barbered once in
their lives without unloosing their purse-strings: and the hair on
their chins easily grew half a foot during the night that preceded
that blessed day; but when they had the napkin around their necks, the
barber asked them if they had any money and bade them pay up, or he
would treat them like nut-pickers or apple-gatherers of Le Perche; and
he swore a mighty _sacre dieu_ that he would cut their throats with
his razor unless they paid him; and when the poor devils, whining and
whimpering, talked about the sign and the sacrosanct inscription:--"Ha!
ha! my little fatties!" said the barber, "you don't know so much
after all, and you'd much better go back to school! The sign says:
'To-morrow!' I'm no such whimsical fool as to shave for nothing to-day;
my confrères would say I was throwing away my trade.--Come another
time, come the week that has two Sundays together, and you'll find
everything all right. May I be called a niggardly fellow and a flat, if
I don't shave you for nothing, on the word of an honest barber."
Authors who read a prospective article in which an existing work is
attacked always flatter themselves that the book they are writing will
be the book of the future. They try to accommodate themselves, as
much as possible, to the ideas of the critic, and become socialists,
progressives, moralizers, palingenetics, mystics, pantheists,
buchezists, thinking in that way to escape the anathema; but the same
thing happens to them that happened to the barber's customers:--to-day
is not the eve of to-morrow. The to-morrow that we hear so much about
will never shine upon the world; for the formula is too convenient to
be abandoned so soon. Even while decrying the book of which they are
jealous and which they would be glad to annihilate, they put on the
gloves of the most generous impartiality. They apparently ask nothing
better than to approve and praise it, and yet they never do it. This
recipe is very superior to the one that we might call retrospective,
which consists in vaunting ancient works only--works which no one reads
and no one cares about--at the expense of modern books, which people do
think about and which wound their self-esteem more directly.
We said, before beginning this review of messieurs the critics, that
the material would fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but that
we would content ourselves with a few lines; I am beginning to fear
that those lines will prove to be each two or three thousand fathoms
long and will resemble those thick, bulky pamphlets that a cannon-ball
would not make a hole through, which bear the perfidious title: "A
word concerning the Revolution," a word concerning this or that. The
history of the doings of the manifold loves of the goddess Madeleine
de Maupin, would run great risk of being elbowed out of the first
book, and you will understand that two whole volumes are not too much
to sing worthily the adventures of that lovely Bradamante.--That is
why, however much we may desire to continue the blazonry of the
illustrious Aristarchuses of the age, we will content ourselves with
the partial sketch we have drawn, adding a few reflections concerning
the good-nature of our easy-going confrères in Apollo, who, as stupid
as the Cassander of pantomime, stand still to receive the blows from
Harlequin's lath and the clown's kicks in the stern, without budging
any more than an idol.
They resemble a fencing-master, who should fold his arms behind his
back during a bout, and receive all his opponent's thrusts in his
unprotected breast without attempting a single parry.
It is like the trial of a cause in which the king's attorney only is
allowed to speak, or a debate in which no reply is permitted.
The critic puts forward this or that theory. He makes a great dash
and ostentatious display. Absurd, detestable, monstrous; it resembles
nothing, it resembles everything. A drama is produced, the critic goes
to see it; he finds that it bears no resemblance to the drama he had
constructed in his head on the strength of the title; thereupon he
substitutes, in his _feuilleton_, his own drama for the author's. He
interlards it with his erudite phrases; he relieves himself of all the
knowledge he has collected the day before in some library, and belabors
people to whom he ought to go to school, and the least of whom could
teach greater men than he.
Authors endure this with a magnanimity, a long-suffering which seems
to me truly inconceivable. After all is said and done, who are these
critics whose tone is so cutting, whose words are so peremptory, that
one would say they were veritable sons of the gods? they are simply
men who were our school-fellows, and who have evidently profited
less by their studies than we, since they have produced nothing and
can do nothing but befoul and spoil the work of others like genuine
Stymphalian vampires.
Would it not be worth while to criticise the critics? for those
disgruntled great men, who are so fond of playing the magnificent
and the fastidious, are far from being infallible like the Holy
Father. There would be matter enough to fill a daily newspaper of the
largest size. Their errors, historical or otherwise, their distorted
quotations, their mistakes in grammar, their plagiarism, their drivel,
their oft-repeated, ill-bred jests, their paucity of ideas, their
lack of intelligence and tact, their ignorance of the simplest
things which leads them to mistake the Piræus for a man and Monsieur
Delaroche for a painter, would furnish authors with ample material for
vengeance, without other labor than that of drawing a line under the
passages and reproducing them word for word; for one does not receive
a commission as a great writer with a commission as critic, and to
reproach others for errors in language or taste is not enough to ensure
one against making them himself; our critics prove it every day.--If
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and other men of that stamp should become
critics, I could understand that people might go down on their knees
and worship them; but that Messieurs Z. K. Y. V. Q. X., or any other
letter of the alphabet between Alpha and Omega, should set themselves
up as little Quintilians and scold you in the name of morality and
good literature--that is what always disgusts me and sends me into
an unparalleled rage. I would like to have a police ordinance issued
prohibiting certain names from attacking certain others. To be sure, a
cat may look at a king, and Saint-Peter's at Rome, giant that it is,
cannot prevent the Transteverins from defiling its base in strange
fashion; but I do not believe, nevertheless, that it would be a bad
idea to inscribe upon certain monumental reputations:
NO FILTH DEPOSITED HERE.
Charles X. alone understood the question. By ordering the suppression
of newspapers he conferred a great service upon the arts and
civilization. Newspapers are in a certain sense courtiers or jobbers,
who interpose between artists and public, between king and people. We
know the fine things that resulted therefrom. This perpetual barking
and snarling benumbs inspiration and causes such a feeling of distrust
in the heart and mind, that no one dares place his confidence either
in a poet or in a government; the result being that royalty and poesy,
the two greatest things in the world, become impossible, to the great
detriment of the people, who sacrifice their well-being to the paltry
pleasure of reading every morning a few vile sheets printed on vile
paper, besmeared with vile ink, and filled with vile stuff. There
was no criticism of art under Julius II., and I never heard of any
_feuilleton_ on the subject of Daniel de Volterra, Sebastiano del
Piombo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Ghiberti della Porta, or Benvenuto
Cellini; and yet I think that, for people who had no newspapers, who
did not know the word _art_ or the word _artistic_, they had a fair
share of talent and acquitted themselves reasonably well at their
trade. The reading of newspapers hinders the growth of genuine scholars
and genuine artists; it is like daily dissipation that brings you,
enervated and weak, to the bed of the Muses, those harsh, exacting
damsels who will have none but fresh and lusty lovers. The newspaper
kills the book, as the book has killed architecture, as artillery has
killed physical courage and muscular strength. No one realizes the
pleasures that the newspapers deprive us of. They strip everything of
its virginity; they prevent us from having anything of our own, even
from owning a book all by ourselves; they deprive us of the pleasure
of being surprised at the theatre by telling us beforehand how every
play ends; they deprive us of the pleasure of spreading idle gossip and
tittle-tattle and slander, of inventing false news or peddling genuine
news for a whole week through every salon in society. They drone
ready-made opinions to us, do what we will, and warn us against things
we might like; by their means, dealers in phosphorous matches, although
they have poor memories, discuss literature as impertinently as
provincial academicians; by their means we hear, all day long, in place
of artless opinions or individual nonsense, ill-digested fragments of
newspapers, which resemble omelets half cooked on one side and burned
on the other,--and we are pitilessly stuffed with news three or four
hours old, which children at the breast already know; they deaden our
taste, they make us like those people who drink spiced brandy, and
those who swallow lemons and grape-stalks, and lose the flavor of the
most generous wines and cannot appreciate their delicate, perfumed
bouquet. If Louis-Philippe should suppress all literary and political
journals once for all, I should be infinitely grateful to him and I
would dash off on the spot a fine, rambling dithyramb, in soaring verse
with alternate rhymes; signed: "Your most humble and loyal subject,"
etc. Pray do not imagine that there would be no further interest in
literature; in the days when there were no newspapers, a quatrain
engrossed all Paris for a week, and a first performance for six months.
It is true that this step would result in the loss of advertisements
and puffs at thirty sous a line, and notoriety would be less sudden
and less overwhelming. But I have thought out a very ingenious way
of replacing advertisements. If, between now and the day when this
magnificent novel is placed on sale, my gracious sovereign shall
have suppressed the newspapers, I shall most assuredly make use of
it, and I anticipate wonders therefrom. When the great day arrives,
twenty-four mounted criers, in the livery of Renduel, with his address
on their backs and breasts, carrying banners in their hands with the
title of the novel embroidered on both sides, each preceded by a
drummer and kettle-drummer, will ride through the city, and, halting
on all the squares and corners, will shout in a loud, distinct voice:
"To-day, not yesterday or to-morrow, is placed on sale the admirable,
the inimitable, the divine and more than divine novel by the most
illustrious Théophile Gautier, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, which Europe,
not to mention other parts of the world and Polynesia, has been
awaiting so impatiently for a year and more. It is selling at the
rate of five hundred a minute, and editions follow one another from
half-hour to half-hour; the nineteenth is already on sale. A detachment
of municipal guards is stationed at the door of the shop, holding back
the crowd and preventing all confusion." Surely that would be worth as
much as three lines in the _Débats_ or the _Courrier Français_, between
advertisements of elastic belts, hoop-skirts, nursing-bottles with
indestructible teats, Regnault paste, and remedies for fluor albus.
_May, 1834._
[Footnote 1: April fools--literally, April fishes.]
[Footnote 2: New Bridge.]
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN
I
You complain, my dear friend, of the infrequency of my letters.--What
would you have me write you except that I am well and that my affection
for you never changes?--Those are facts that you know perfectly well,
and that are so natural to my age and to the noble qualities that every
one recognizes in you, that it is almost absurd to send a paltry sheet
of paper a hundred leagues to say nothing more.--In vain do I cudgel my
brains, I know of nothing that is worth the trouble of repeating; mine
is the most monotonous life imaginable and nothing happens to break the
monotony. To-day leads up to to-morrow as yesterday led up to to-day;
and without claiming to be a prophet, I can boldly prophesy in the
morning what will happen to me in the afternoon.
This is how I arrange my day:--I rise, that goes without saying, and
that is the beginning of every day; I breakfast, I fence, I go out to
walk, I come home, I dine, make a few calls or amuse myself reading:
then I go to bed precisely as I did the day before; I go to sleep, and
as my imagination is not excited by unfamiliar objects, it supplies me
with none but threadbare, often repeated dreams, as monotonous as my
actual life: all this is not very entertaining, as you see. However,
I reconcile myself to this existence better than I should have done
six months ago.--I am bored, to be sure, but in a tranquil, resigned
fashion, which does not lack a certain agreeableness, which might well
be compared to those gray, mild autumn days in which one finds a secret
charm after the excessive heat of summer.
This sort of existence, although I have apparently accepted it, is
hardly suited to me, however, or, at all events, it bears but little
resemblance to the existence I dream of and consider myself well
adapted for.--Perhaps I am mistaken and am in reality adapted for no
other kind of life than this; but I can hardly believe it, for, if it
were my real destiny, I should more readily have adapted myself to it
and should not be so painfully bruised by its sharp corners in so many
places.
You know what a powerful attraction strange adventures have for me,
how I adore everything out of the common course, extravagant and
dangerous, and with what avidity I devour novels and tales of travel;
I doubt if there is on this earth a madder, more vagabond fancy than
mine; and yet, by some curious fatality or other, I have never had an
adventure, I have never made a journey. So far as I am concerned, the
tour of the world means the tour of the town in which I live; I touch
my horizon on every side; I am elbow to elbow with reality. My life is
that of the shell on the sand-bank, of the ivy clinging to the tree, of
the cricket on the hearth.--Verily, I am surprised that my feet have
never taken root.
Cupid is represented with a bandage over his eyes; Destiny should be
represented in the same condition.
I have for a valet a sort of rustic boor, loutish and stupid enough,
who has travelled as much as the north wind, who has been to the
devil, to every conceivable place, who has seen with his eyes all the
things of which I conceive charming ideas, and cares as little about
them as about a glass of water; he has been in the most extraordinary
situations; he has had the most amazing adventures that a man can have.
I make him talk sometimes, and I rage inwardly when I think that all
those fine things have happened to a clown who is capable neither of
sentiment nor reflection, and who is good for nothing but to do what he
does, that is to say, brush clothes and clean boots.
It is clear that that knave's life should have been mine.--For his
part, he considers me very fortunate, and his surprise is unbounded
when he sees how melancholy I am.
All this is not very interesting, my poor friend, and hardly worth the
trouble of writing, is it? But as you insist upon it that I must write
to you, I must tell you what I think and what I feel, and must give you
the history of my ideas, in default of events and acts.--It may be that
there will be little order and little novelty in what I shall have to
say to you; but you must blame nobody but yourself for it. You would
have it.
You are the friend of my childhood, I was brought up with you; we lived
our lives in common for a long, long while, and we are accustomed to
exchange our most secret thoughts. I can tell you, therefore, without
blushing, all the absurd things that pass through my unoccupied brain;
I will not add a word, I will not cut out a word, I have no self-love
with you. So I will be absolutely frank--even in petty, shameful
things; not before you, certainly, will I cover my nakedness.
Beneath the shroud of indifferent, depressed ennui to which I have
referred just now, there stirs sometimes a thought that is benumbed
rather than dead, and I have not always the sad and gentle tranquillity
that melancholy gives.--I have relapses and fall back into my old
attacks of agitation. Nothing in the world is so fatiguing as those
motiveless paroxysms, those aimless impulses.--On those days, although
I have no more to do than on any others, I rise very early in the
morning, before sunrise, I have such a feeling of being in a hurry, of
not having all the time I need; I dress in hot haste, as if the house
were on fire, tossing on my clothes at random and bewailing a wasted
minute.--Any one who happened to see me would think that I was going
to keep an assignation or to hunt for money.--Not at all.--I have no
idea where I shall go; but go I must, and I should think my salvation
endangered if I remained at home.--It seems to me as if somebody were
calling me outside, as if my destiny were passing through the street at
the moment and the question of my life or death were on the point of
being decided.