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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.

Gautier published his first 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

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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. 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,

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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. 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 Théo 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; Gautier; "then the 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

served as art and dramatic critic on the staff of one of the chief journals of Paris.

Gautier, as a writer, in spite of his physical robustness, possesses more of the poetical faculty than of a genius for the construction of sensational plots. He is a man of contemplation rather than of action. In one sense, he has the same views as the most ardent devotee of the prevailing sensuous religions, who sings languorously with respect to the earth which a kindly, Divine power has given him to dwell and grow in:

O Paradise, O Paradise,
'Tis weary waiting here.

The paradise Gautier looks to, however, is not an ineffable and prematurely realized other world; it is the domain of art, and his refuge and heaven within the common every-day routine. In the latter, at least during his morbid youth, he sees only a Sahara plain, where the traveller's foot drags heavily, and the only spot of green visible is a cypress wood sown with stones of white. "God, to give refuge in the desert of time, has given for oases the graveyards." Gautier, at the period of life when he wrote like this, would, after a course of bodily mortification, have made a very good HighChurch hymn-maker.

Gautier's love for art is something especially noteworthy. We may say, in a sense, that he gained his salvation therein. It saved him from being an absolute Pyrrhonist, with a soul entirely negative or evil. When he was quite young, he expressed himself as having exhausted all that could be gained from the bookshelf. What unhappy lovers, what persecuted woman had not passed before his eyes? From the first syllable of a romance he could at once conjure up its dénouement. The trees of the Tuileries

and of the boulevards, said he, were his only forests, the Seine his ocean, and the country he vowed openly that he detestedit was "nothing but trees, soil, and turf."

What was he to do? he asked himself. Dream?-but one cannot always have dreams. Read?— but he had read everything. What then? His friends had told him that he must think of the future, that he must do something. The future, he repeated contemptuously; what, when we are not sure of an hour! As for achieving something, was not the sole result that one got dubbed with a name in consequence, a title for all the world like the label on the bottles in the apothecary's shop? So, he tells us, he became an egotist; and, owing to this concentration of himself into the "ego," the idea came to him many a time that he was alone in the midst of the creation; that the sky, the stars, the earth, the houses, the forests, were only decorations, painted scenes, daubs of the brush, which the mysterious Machinist had disposed around him in order to hide from sight the dusty and cobwebbed walls of the theatre called the world. What astounding cynicism in a young man! But at least there is some originality in the cynicism. In this cobwebbed and moonlit theatre of his imagination all that moved round about him appeared to him as the confidant of the tragedy, who had only to say "Sir " to him, and to break up by an occasional interjection his interminable monologues.

Gautier's political opinions as expressed in the writings of his youth, and which ostensibly changed but little during his life, were somewhat peculiar for their simplicity. After profound reflections upon the overthrow of thrones, the

changes of dynasty, "I have arrived," says he, "at this-a round O."

"What is a revolution?" he asks. "Some people shoot each other in a street

this breaks a number of panes of glass; there is no one besides the glaziers who gains any profit therefrom. The wind carries away the smoke: those who remain above put the others below; the grass grows greener the following spring: a hero makes excellent manure for peas. What then? -they change for the mayor's bâton the rags they call ensigns. The guillotine, that grand prostitute, seizes by the neck with her red arms those the bullet has spared

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the first-comer snatches furtively at the crown and sits down in the empty place. None the less," adds Gautier, "does one continue to have the plague, to pay one's debts, to go to comic operas, under this régime than under that. So much for the trouble of moving so many honest paving-stones that could not help it!" We of England have seen enough in France, in the days that we hope are now quite passed away, to make us accept such scepticism as Gautier's the not unnatural offspring of circumstances. Our cynic did not live to be old, but during his lifetime there reigned two emperors and three kings, not one of whose reigns both began and ended tranquilly; there were three, if not more, serious crises of street-fighting in Paris; there were several kinds of republics, from the democratic to the conservative; and there were both prince-presidents and plebeians at the head of them. There is often more solid truth in such criticism as Gautier'sthe careless, unstudied expression of disgust than is imagined. Changes of nominal régime are mere frivolities, unworthy of serious attention unless they repre

sent some change in the people's aspirations. So long as the fevers of famine haunt as usual the slums, and the fevers of luxury the palaces; so long as the comic operas are thronged by the same gay, frivolous crowd as of old, Paris is not so appreciably improved as to oblige a sane man to go into raptures, merely on the news that the country is to be governed under a fresh title. Gautier looks on the little selfish and self-satisfied peckings at the husks of things which dub themselves reform: he is disgusted, and forthwith abjures the mockeries the world calls politics and morality. Instead of penetrating below the surface and studying interior significances-instead of purifying people's minds with a holy and chaste art-he loses interest altogether in the drama of life that is transacted before him; turns to the sensuous in art, and soon grows to look upon his callousness and debasement with pride. This is as we find him in his writings: in actual deed his friends allege that he was never otherwise than patriotic. It is recounted that when Paris was threatened with siege, he, though feeble in health, came back straightway from Switzerland, where he was staying, in order to shut himself up with the besieged, his brethren; repeating always to himself: "They are beating Mamma; I must return."

We have spoken of Gautier's Paradise as lying in the realms of art, in opposition' to those who place theirs in the mystic realms of futurity. One thing more than these does Gautier: he strives to bring his paradise into life, and not keep it at an unsatisfactory distance from everything real. For this end he even takes the trouble to write a little brochure on the fashion of every-day clothing, in which he promulgates his artistic

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