preciseness of a Sainte-Beuve, and with a mother's insight and sympathy.

In

Gautier is at the best and highest level of his nature in criticism. that branch of literature, which he persistently followed, although his poetical nature at times rebelled, he is always true and sincere; and his deficiency in moral sense does not affect him so injuriously there as in writings which necessitate his throwing more of himself into his work. In criticism he is a mirror that by some magic means is a spectrum as well, and divides the qualities of those whom it reflects, by hair breadths into the most exquisite of nuances.

Gautier is also a rare and refined poet, a cultivated writer of travels, and a gifted author of novels and novelettes. As in his criticism he is most serious and at his best, so in romance he is most brilliant and at his worst.

The news of his death, which took place nearly six years ago, on the 23rd of October, 1872, touched with affectionate regret many who bore the utmost objection to a large part of his writings. But the variety and charm of his artistic conceptions, and the exquisite finish of his style, had insensibly attracted them, while the gentleness of his criticism of his fellows, and his tender Greek-like ways, disarmed the harshness of judgment upon his moral deficiencies and the injuriousness of his literary influence.

Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, a few miles north of the Pyrenees. Three dates of his birth are given by one of his biographers -1808 as the really correct one; 1814 as the date usually stated, and presumably under Gautier's inspiration; and 1811 as the date which at length he came to avow as the correct one, renouncing 1814, which would have made him

fifteen only at the memorable date of the appearance of Victor Hugo's drama of " Hernani." It was the representation of this play that occasioned so fierce a strife between the old classicists and the young Romantiques, amongst the latter of which Gautier enthusiastically ranged himself, raising a more vigorous voice and shaking a more powerful fist than appertain to a boy of fifteen. Gautier came to Paris very young with his parents, and completed his studies at the Collége Charlemagne, where he met with Gérard de Nerval, afterwards a fellow-worker of his. At school the boy worked but little. Greek and Latin seemed to him to be superfluities in modern education; but, on the other hand, instead of performing his college exercises, he was wont to betake himself to the study of the older writers of France, and to employ himself in tracing out the sources and strength of the language. He was a great boy, strong and sensuous, enjoying a full supply of health and vitality, of which the due effect was produced in his after-life, in enabling his constitution to react from the peculiar morbidness which affects so many French poets of his time. A poet he became" by accident," it is said. Carelessly neglecting his studies at the "Charlemagne," he was wont to repair to the museums to study plastic art, and there would spend hours in gazing in fascination upon certain paintings, and in swoons of admiration of certain statues. His critics appear to have forgotten that while from such contemplations might be derived a poetic as well as an artistic stimulus, neither faculty could be thence derived.

The youth soon began to attend an art school; and when the literary and artistic revolution to which we have already referred

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began to announce itself, he enrolled himself as an intrepid partisan amongst the ranks of the party of revolt, and burned with the utmost ardour to make himself celebrated among them. But we are told, by the ill-natured critic known as Eugène de Mirecourt, he found it easy enough to arrange violent colours, but a very different matter to transport them adroitly to his canvas. So he said to himself, Painting with the pen is more easy than with the brush ;" and painting with the pen is the métier to which he has ever since adhered. His sketches, romances, poems— even his biographies are preeminently word-paintings. He is a true artist in all his work, and endowed with marvellous knowledge and command of colour, form, and pictorial effect. notice these powers especially when he re-tells old classical stories. Modern versions of these are generally in verse, as there is no novelty to make the matter attractive, and the composer must depend only on the charm of the style. Gautier's written pictures, however, are exquisite prose poems; every word bears its due colour to his canvas, every sentence has its due effect and relation to the whole. Those who would object to copying M. Gautier in his morals, his creed, or the matter of his poems and stories, might do well to bestow some careful study upon his manner. French storytellers, as a rule, have a more finished, if not more forcible, style than English, and Gautier, as far as regards that perfection of form and completeness, is one of the kings of French romancists and poets. As to the matter of his stories, all responsible critics are very properly careful to warn off young minds from their perusal; in this they but follow M. Gautier himself, who, in one

of his earlier productions, composes and applies to himself, and delights in applying to those literary friends who are after his own heart, the lines :

J'en previens les mères de famille, Ce que j'écris n'est pas pour les petites filles,

Dont on coupe le pain en tartines-mes

vers

Sont des vers de jeune homme.

The first critic to whom Gautier seriously submitted his poems was Sainte-Beuve. This was just half a century ago. It is quite possible that the decorous critic might not have agreed with all the sentiments expressed, though he was about that time something of an advocate of romanticism; but the strong mediæval language which the youth had learned from Ronsard, Marot, Sainte-Gelais, Malherbe, and other sixteenth-century minstrels and writers, immediately arrested his attention. He was charmed with the young man who had based his verse upon such sound traditions of language, and turn, and rhyme. "Bravo!" said he; "that is substantial poetry. Here is a man who carves in granite, and not in smoke." And he promised to introduce him the next day to Victor Hugo, who was then the leader of the Romantiques. came about Gautier's adherence to the new school, as an apostle of whose doctrines his enormous fists, as we have said, were of much service in inspiring meddling classicists with awe. These days were quite as uproarious as the days which we may remember better of the production of "Rabagas in Paris. The excitement in the latter case was political, in the former it was literary and artistic only; but the ideas involved in the contest went, perhaps, as deep into the lives of the combatants as any political feeling could penetrate. From the time we have

So

named, our young and ardent Théophile went heart and soul into the new doctrines, for which, if we are to believe the tradition that he learned at school more art than Latin, he was doubtless well fitted. As a disciple of the Romantiques, he thought it necessary to pile rhyme on rhyme, and to foster the growth upon his poll of a luxuriant forest of hair like night. Athletic admirers of Gautier may be interested in learning that this young littérateur is credited with having struck a blow upon a new "Turk's head" of five hundred and thirtytwo livres, and that he stated afterwards that it was the proudest act of his life. Such was Gautier in his ardent and vigorous boyhood.

first

Gautier published his volume of verse in 1830, at a time when the guns of the Parisians were firing daily and somewhat drowned the encouraging applause of his friends. "Albertus," his second poem, depicts the diabolic arts of Véronique, a hideous sorceress, who transforms herself into Venus, and attempts to seduce the hero, a hard-working young painter, who exasperates her by his indifference. When, after much terrible temptation by the sorceress, the youth gives way, there comes a sinister metamorphosis, and she returns to her hideous form of a depraved old crone; but Albertus is in her power, and is taken off bodily to spend his sabbath in the presence of Satan. In the midst of the horrid revelry he pronounces the name of God, when the scene vanishes, and he is found, torn and lifeless, on a lonely road near Rome. The idea here is not very new, but Gautier's forte is not the creation of ideas, but rather the making of old ones new by splendour of form and lustre of imagination. Where he cannot create, he can at least see in new and rare

aspects. He can hold a magician's wand over an old theme, and recreate it in vivid hue of life. New ideas he was wont rather to abhor than otherwise; they seemed to him over-intimately connected with something called Progress, which was to him an abomination.

Gautier's idea of life, at least in his youth, appears to have been that of a grand, but lawless, Paganism, uncontrolled by any moral feeling, and owning allegiance only to beauty, or romance, or pleasure, or riches, or caprice. He is immoral, as is said, "with a shocking candour." He certainly sneers down all moralists in a surprising fashion; reproaches them for crying so violently against poor vice, which is so good-natured, so easygoing, that it only asks leave to amuse itself, and not bother other people. "What would you do without vice ?" he asks of the preachers; "you would be reduced to mendicity to-morrow if we were to listen to you to-day." But Gautier's bark is worse than his bite; and he is rather to be termed unmoral than immoral. That is to say, if we take his whole sum of work into consideration; but at a certain stage of his career he seems to have fallen into an insane abyss of morbid voluptuousness, an unmanly helplessness in the presence of inebriating influences, that even the old poets of Rome would have shrunk from. Gautier's friends may claim for him sympathy, as a Pagan, unfortunately born among Goths; as a

Dreamer of dreams, born out of his due time.

But even Catullus kept his head and intellect cool, above the sensual surges that he permitted to flow about his pen. He said:

Nam castum esse decet pium poetam, Ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est. Catullus probably followed the

fashion of gay young poets of his time, in his verse. We, of course, do not see now how the second line of his excuse can be less stringently negatived than the first can be affirmed. Gautier follows the lead of Catullus when he says: "It is as absurd to call a man drunkard because he describes an orgy, as it is to pretend a man is virtuous because he has written a work on morals." This is very true, dramatically, but it does not afford Gautier the shield he seeks. To depict such depraved and effeminate swoonings of body, and brain, and nerve as are to be found, not in one only (or it might have been pardoned) but in almost all, one after the other, of the stories comprising the volume entitled " Nouvelles," is not to go to work dramatically. The sympathy of the author is in his demoralised conceptions he does not keep the true dramatic distance cool and clear betwixt himself and his creation. He has allowed his own soul to be fused in the heat of the fever, and to succumb to the disorder which he embodies. To bring demoralised states of soul into the open pages of a public book is to give them in some sort a real and physical existence. Depraved imaginations hotly and sympathetically materialised, without any deliberate antidote being produced to counteract them, and to show that the author's soul was clear and free of the morbid agonies that he is contemplating, can lay no claim to shelter from the dramatic cloak.

:

Like Catullus, who dwelt in evil Rome, Gautier lived in evil Paris. Puzzled and dismayed by the paradoxes and evils around him, and having at the same time to gain his bread by writing what should be suitable to the Parisian public, he was under influences, both positive and negative, which

combined to pull him in one direction, and that the direction opposite to the true sun of clear light and chaste love. Born in the wanton south, with more voluptuous marrow than steely strength in his composition, he seems at one time to have given up his soul to the evil. We would not presume to say, with some English critics, that he deliberately and calmly poisoned the wells of art. But for a period he certainly allowed himself to be under the dominion of poisonous influences. We cannot doubt that the books he wrote at this time were to a large extent a reflex of his own state, for they are SO entirely subject to one influence that it is impossible to look upon them as purely dramatic. One of his principal characters expresses the disturbance caused him by the calm serenity of a friend who loves the soul, the invisible eternal part of his betrothed, as much as or more than the palpable mortal beauty of body, before which he himself was prostrate. In such a state, we cannot doubt, was Gautier during one period of his early manhood.

Gautier owed his first real advancement in the world of letters to Balzac, whose friend he remained through life. At twentyfour the former was inhabiting two small rooms in what he describes as a desert and savage place in the centre of Paris. One morning a young man called upon him and introduced himself as Jules Sandeau; he had come from Balzac to engage the services of Gautier for the Chronique de Paris, a weekly journal which was just coming out. Gautier's novel of "Mademoiselle de Maupin "-the one which gives him at once a bad name and his chief notoriety-had gained him this invitation from Balzac, who admired its style. Dating from this time,

the pair were most intimate friends, Balzac being always a sort of genial king, Gautier an admiring but not servile subject. Such a friend as Balzac was not to be gained every day: no wonder that young Gautier was sensible of the compliment paid him. He had to pay for his friendship, however, in the oddest ways. He was one who could not resist the infection of Balzac's strange stories, and usually ended by believing, as strongly as Balzac himself believed, in the reality of the creations which peopled the latter's most remarkable imagination. This led him sometimes into strange difficulties. Once he was on the point of starting on some wild-goose chase to the absurdity of which Balzac's overpowering imagination had blinded him. On many occasions, too, was he called upon to perform superhuman tasks at the bidding of the great wizard, his friend. One day he was summoned to his friend's house in a hurry, and found Balzac dressed in his white monk's frock, and fidgeting with impatience. "There's Theo at last!" cried Balzac. "Idle, slow-footed, sluggard, sloth, make haste, will you. You should have been here an hour ago. I have to read to Harel, to-morrow, a great drama in five acts."

"And

you wish to have our advice," meekly responded Gautier, doubtless with some humorous presentiment of what might be coming, and settling himself on a footstool with a parade of being ready to listen to a long reading. Balzac noticed the attitude, and said at once, simply, “The drama is not made yet.' "The devil!" answered Gautier; "then the reading must be postponed six weeks.' This Balzac would not hear of; the drama must be done at once. Gautier, Balzac, and three others were to do an act apiece, which would be merely

some four or five hundred lines of dialogue; and so it was to be finished by the next day. Gautier did not lose his presence of mind, but merely asked to be told the subject and the plan of the projected drama, and to have a brief sketch of the characters proposed. "Ah!" replied Balzac, with an air as if he were utterly overwhelmed, "if you must be told the subject, we shall never have finished." At length his collaborateurs obtained from Balzac the faintest indication of the subject, and set to work, or pretended to, for the drama was not, as may be supposed, read or ready the next day. It was afterwards completed, but the final cast contained only a few words of the work of Gautier and the others, as might have been expected from the circumstances of its composition. There would seem to be often a certain bizarrerie attendant upon the manufacture of plays, which an author is often in a greater hurry to finish than the theatre to accept. We met a haggard author one day, who had chosen to immure himself in a cellar in order to complete his play. The cellar had the merit of being a quiet place to work in, and it was necessary to be without distraction, we were given solemnly to understand, for the play was bespoke. For all that and in spite of the hurry, it has not yet been seen above board. Play-writing, at the present day, is to literature what speculation, as a business, is to agriculture. It means a thousand pounds or nothing generally nothing; but the chance of the thousand is enough to gild a dark cellar, or to make even a Balzac lose his wits. Every Parisian littérateur seems to try his hand at a play. As for Gautier, he criticised many hundred more plays than he has composed, as for many years he