are

ideas on the subject. For some reason or other, which we unable to explain, only thirty copies were printed of this essay. Perhaps the reason was that Gautier wanted to found a sect, and not to inform the world at large of his gospel of fine raiment. "Why," he asks, "is the art of clothing abandoned entirely to the caprice of tailors and dressmakers, under a civilisation when the garment is of great importance? for, owing to both moral ideas and climate, the nude never appears in it." Gautier would doubtless, if it were not for the unfortunate matter of climate, greatly prefer the nude; but if we must have clothes, he may be imagined as saying, let us at least not be at the mercy of the taste of our tailors. A very good argument, too, we must fain allow. "We have forgotten that we are bodies, or what is their form," continues M. Gautier, "for our garments have become a sort of skin." With respect to this he makes a brilliant suggestion, which ought to fill all right-minded persons with horror

In

that in the Zoological Gardens there should be a cage reserved for two specimens representing the sexes of the genus homo, despoiled of their factitious skin, and reminding the world of what it seems likely to forget the outlines of the human form. "These specimens would be regarded with as much curiosity as the giraffe or gorilla," he adds sardonically. a higher sense, however, M. Gautier deplores the absence of the nude. The nude has become a convention: the garment is the visible form of man. There can be, by natural impulse, no more Greek sculptors or painters like Phidias, Apelles, or Zeuxis. Their "nude " natural; ours must be unnatural. Then he makes a suggestion which we have never seen cited any

was

where, but which embodies a clear insight into the characteristics of our time embodies it, too, in so perfect and picturesque a manner that it is well worth recording and remembering. "Has not our costume its signification," he argues, "miscomprehended though it be by our artists, who are imbued with the ideas of antiquity? By its simple cut and neutral tint, it gives much force to the head, the seat of intelligence, and to the hands, the implements of thought." We are thus led by our author to see that our age- -so busy as it is with both head and hands-has its characteristics unconsciously hit off in its clothing, which gives prominence to these typical members and covers all the rest, not with attractive colours or gay adornment, but with the sober hue of modern costume. The suggestion is an original and noble one, worthy even of Ruskin. The Greek, we may say, to carry out the thought, might expose his lithe, luxurious body all naked in the sun, and so declare the childlike and sensuous manner of his existence; the hard-working European must concentrate the symbols of his life in his head and hands. M. Gautier's suggestions should be taken to heart by our painters, who seem to think they can do nothing but produce, at secondhand, the distinctive excellences of a former age; or if they do condescend to make their compositions out of the life that rolls around us, either grumble at the monotony of the costume, or introduce romantic effects which are strained and unnatural. Let them think of Théophile Gautier, who will refer them to Rembrandt for a master, and point to the genius of the age -a sad-costumed being, with all its life in its head and hands.

We who look with envious eyes upon the fashion of the Parisian

lady's boot may be surprised to learn that for once Gautier has no sympathy with so-called artistic elegance. He hates the boot, and would give us sandals. For why? "We moderns, thanks to our horrible system of shoeing, which is almost as absurd as the Chinese buskin, have lost all knowledge of what a foot is like." Ladies may think of the opinion of this artistic exquisite of Paris when they are donning their high-heeled monstrosities. They are marring one of the loveliest contours in nature.

We have spoken of Gautier's detestation of rural pleasures. Once when he was leaving Paris for a tour in Spain, when we might imagine he would at least have some poetic feeling to spare for his native land which he is leaving behind, his chief observations on the districts through which he passed on the Bordeaux diligence consisted of a comparison of the fields, sown as they were with their various crops, with the specimens of trouser and waistcoat patterns, pasted side by side in a tailor's pattern-book. When a man of so artistic a nature as Gautier descends to so ignoble a comparison as this, we may be sure he does it designedly. These kinds of rural views, it seemed to him, might be productive of great pleasure to farmers, landlords, and such-like worthies," but to the enthusiastic and graphic traveller they were very weak compensation for the toils of a journey. Gautier always required the excitement of a city to feed upon.

Though he hates the country with all its natural verdure, yet he loves a flower. But it must be an exotic, and shed its fragrance over a luxurious drawing-room. Under such circumstances he will write a poem upon it full of a rare and, as it were, exotic imagery

and fragrance. Then he will pluck the flower to pieces, shred by shred, petal by petal, and write another poem, full of chill images and desolation, upon its ruins. Later in life, however, his feverous dissatisfaction with the calm and serene elements of nature appears to have vanished. We are even led inevitably to suppose that much of his expressed disgust was assumed and foreign to the feelings lying at the depths of his nature. In 1870 was published a splendid imperial-quarto volume, entitled "La Nature chez elle," full of exquisite engravings of natural beauty of wood and lake and beast and bird. It bears M. Gautier's name as author of the written matter, which is no mere sketch inspired by the blocks of the drawings, and meet for the conventional Christmas book; but an intensely beautiful and poetical essay essay on the seasons and their varied charms. Though overflowing with references to his favourite lyrists, and with bright sparkles of fancy and wit, the work is a true and lovely idyl. Exquisite metaphors abound, the idea being kept up throughout of a young and spotless maiden; the seasons being represented by her as En peignoir blanc," "à son réveil,” "en toilette d'été," putting off

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sa robefeuille morte," and so on. Throughout the volume's pages, partridges alternate with lizards, and wild flowers with toadstools; we have observations on spiders, and a treatise on the uses of snails. Dreams of Robin Hood and his merry rural life are indulged in, and many paysagistes romantiques are appreciatively quoted from. We scarcely realise the fact that we are being led through these innocent and sacred groves by the author of "Mademoiselle de Maupin," save by the unforgetable charm of style, and perhaps by the allusions

that few could make so aptly, to Rabelais and Rousseau, to Shakespeare and Scott, to Titian and Rembrandt, to Hugo and De Musset. We feel that this poetry of nature, had it come upon Gautier earlier, might have constituted his purification amid the distracting vices of Paris. In Paris, however, he lived, and he seems indeed at one period to have deemed it his mission to provide distempered palates with new and spicy flavours, with refinements of evil, and poetic poisons. We must always retain in our minds a double sense of Gautier Gautier young and Gautier old. His "expansive and luxuriant youth," with its "fantastic and charming laisser-aller,"

as

one critic puts it; in other words, that gay, reckless time of his life which affronts so much the moral sensibilities of most good people, is not to be confounded with his sager and more generous maturity. Gautier's blood did not grow feeble and thin after he had passed his prime, as that of many too prone to demoralised imaginings and excessive erotics in their youth. Such a man as Gautier would seem rightly destined to live on to years beyond the ordinary span of human existence. On reaching hoary hairs, the fever of his blood would have abated, and he have attained his true maturity. Then from his tree might chance to spring wholesome and lovely fruit, and the old man's life be pure and serene, disturbed only by the thoughts of the noxious growth that his undeveloped and unrestrained youth-tide had put forth. Perhaps in "La Nature chez elle" Gautier is but reverting to the dreams of his youth in the pleasant country regions near to Spain. He says in the work just named, "Man alienates himself each day from Nature, and the sense of Nature seems to become obliterated within him." In "Nature

at Home" he shows himself to us as a man who would occupy hours in contemplating a wayside plant, and who leaves with regret the rural asylums of peace and freshness, which form the subject of his idyl. If Gautier only gained or regained late in life this sense of calm and innocent beauty, in it is nevertheless to be found something which divides immeasurably his maturity from the dried and evil old age of the roué.

One element of his nature Gautier did not lose on arriving at his full maturity, and that is, caprice. Holding the common-place in horror, he is always striving after the bizarre. Hating conventional restraint, he does not, in his writings at least, show any evidence of being a stable law to himself, but flies always in the direction of revolt, and towards anything vagrant and unbridled. Be it civilisation, morals, or religion, he feels himself encastré therein; therefore he must escape. In the work last mentioned, we do not find him to be too old to revolt. He describes there the ideal of a garden, having for its distinctive. feature the fact that the pruningknife never enters it. There is to be all liberty there for branches or mosses to grow how and where they like. All licence is to be given for Bohemian hordes of undisciplined plants to increase and multiply. The conventional broken glass may indeed surmount the walls to remove from roving gamins any temptation to which they might be subject; but on the unpainted door are to be affixed, in menacing, huge letters, the words, "Défense aux jardiniers d'entrer ici." Our author is nothing but a big boy, even to the last.

Gautier professes the utmost contempt for anything useful or designedly good. From moralists, philanthropists, and all earnest and

enthusiastic people he holds decidedly aloof. To science he holds himself equally antagonistic; physical discoverers, economists, and statisticians may alike be deemed to be at the opposite pole of the world to his. He scorns, very rightly, the mathematically-minded monsters who, if they read a novel, inquire, with calm disdain. "What does the book prove?" His scorn of certain other classes of people may not be so righteous: but it is, we believe, in many instances much more apparent than real. He disdains ostensibly religion, philanthropy, morality; but let him be free to follow his ideal of art, and it will be found to include something of all three. But he will never avow any one of the moral qualities as his aim. Beauty is the only god he worships; if morality and other virtues should chance to be found as ministers in its train, he will not dismiss them; but they are only allowed to come near him on the distinct understanding that they shall be absolutely subservient to art. Beauty, riches, good fortune, gold, marble, purplewithout these there is no heaven for M. Gautier at least so he said; but he spent long hours in the depiction of the lives and personalities of his friends, and would lend his money to the needy, or his experience to the young. With his appreciative, tender nature, his delicate sympathies, his affectionate treatment of all whom he criticised, and his extreme care not to hurt the feelings of others, Gautier cannot be considered to have been basely enslaved by art. But if he scrupulously refrained from wounding, he loved always to startle. Those paradoxes and smart, brilliant sentences of his that were so offensive to many weaker brethren-those epigrams that do so flagrantly transgress the limits of meetness and decency, were, we believe, the

offspring of this bizarre love of startling, the fruits of a reckless, boyish ambition to say something that should seem dreadful even in blasé Paris. With this end in view, in "Mademoiselle de Maupin" he was completely successful. The journalists were taken aback; the book was styled 66 one of the strongest eccentricities of an epoch fertile in eccentricities." It made a scandal in an era when people were not scandalised for a trifle." If his sayings can be taken in the spirit in which we imagine he said them, many of them may be rendered harmless. When he tells us that "nothing is more moral and sacred under heaven than kisses of man and woman, when both are beautiful and young," we only feel inclined to smile at a bit of poetical truth, rather absurdly rendered. Careful mothers and celibate priests of Paris, however, might perhaps take it more seriously; and still more so such a saying as the following: "Virginity, mysticism, and melancholy, three unknown words in the ancient world, are three new maladies brought in by Christ." When we come to such sayings as "Qu'on est fidèle avec des régrets de l'être"- Je regrettai en la voyant ainsi, d'être son amant, et de n'avoir pas à le devenir," as from the mouth of a man, or to such speeches as "Etre avec son mari, c'est être seule," from a woman, or when we are told that jealousy on the part of a man is "Gothic prejudice," we feel that we are in the presence of the demoralised, but that the feelings are as likely to be assumed as real. It is not so, however, with all the contents of "Mademoiselle de Maupin." There are therein depictions quite unworthy of Gautier, and suitable only to such grosser natures as Paul de Kock. It was well said in Fraser some years ago, with reference to Mr. Swinburne, that on the

physical side of love silence is the safest policy, and that a man is not necessarily an anchoret because he does not babble. Some of Gautier's characters do not only babble; they boast, which is not only puerile, but disgusting. Gautier's belief in art, for art's sake, ran away with him. It is sustainable as a creed up to a certain point, and in a limited sense; but when we come to such sayings as the following: "There is nothing truly beautiful save that which can be of no use; all that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need; and those of man are infirm and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature," we feel the repulsiveness of the doctrine, in spite of the plausibility of the argument; and we feel at the same time that Gautier, when he made it, was at his lowest depth of moral degradation and want of faith. The argument is as nearly demoniacal as any we have ever seen, and is the worst of Gautier's morbid expressions that we know. How such a doctrine could consist with a jocund Paganism it is difficult to understand; it is merely the evidence of disease. That Gautier's nature was at one period polluted, and deprived of its natural purity, we are convinced. It is one thing to state boldly, and without fear, what is healthful upon subjects even generally tabooed, but quite another thing to put forward wanton evidences of abnormal disorders and unhealthy moods of passion. Gautier appears to have begun his revolt against goodness and order by a reaction against conventional shams.

"The goal at which the most monstrously virtuous have arrived," he informs us, "is to think one thing and say another." If he had done nothing beyond reversing this state of things he might have done well. Unfortunately, he went a step farther, and,

to show that he was not afraid of speaking out, chose rather, and too often, to speak what was unnecessary, and unworthy of being put into speech. Thus his paradoxes and startling sayings increased and multiplied. Baudelaire, friend of Gautier, and himself one of the most paradoxical and morbid of men, says with truth, "What the mouth becomes accustomed to say, the heart learns to believe." That Gautier, as he grew older, abandoned the vagaries, and to a great extent recovered from the disorders of his youth-that his mouth ceased to say and his heart to believe his evil paradoxes of old, and that, therefore, so great a literary and artistic power as his was finally turned into more healthful channels, all Frenchmen ought to be truly grateful.

Gautier is often spoken of as having conquered "that strange disease of modern life," the deeprooted ennui which seems to have been born in France, but which can be traced in Byron in England, Poe in America, and in many a morbid poetaster in the several countries, and is now reappearing as German Pessimism. Chateaubriand was always feeding his mind upon the study of his soul's anatomy. Baudelaire lived in a sort of hopeless spirituality. These influences may be traced in their action upon Gautier. At one time we find him endeavouring to shake them off. In one of his books ("Fortunio"), he tells us, will be found few wailings over souls not mated, over lost illusions, over soul-melancholies, and other pretentious platitudes, which, produced over and over again to satiety, are a source of enervation. "It is time to have done with literary maladies," says he; "the reign of the phthisical is over." But in the memoir which he wrote upon the death of one of his most intimate friends, even so