Gautier, THÉOPHILE

Gautier, THÉOPHILE, one of the most accomplished of recent French poets and prose-writers, was born at Tarbes, August 31, 1811, and educated at the grammar-school of his native town, and afterwards at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris. He applied himself at first, but without much success, to painting, turned to literature, and attracted the notice of Sainte-Beuve at eighteen by the style of several essays, the results of his studies in the earlier French literature. He soon attached himself to the school of Victor Hugo, and outdid all the other romanticists in the extravagance of his admiration and partisanship. His belief in the 'poet of the wind, the sea, and the sky' was the one serious belief of his life. In 1830 he published his first long poem, Albertus, an extravagantly picturesque legend, full of the promise of his later flexibility of diction, followed in 1832 by the striking Comédie de la Mort. But his poetry did not reach its highest point till the Émaux et Camées (1856). In 1835 appeared his celebrated novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, with its defiant preface, which was taken seriously by the critics, instead of being regarded as merely the escapade of an unscrupulously clever youth, and the advertisement of a publisher who wanted a 'sensational' novel. He wrote many other novels and shorter stories, the chief being Les Jeune-France (1833), Fortunio (1838), Une Larme du Diable (1839), Militona (1847), La Peau de Tigre (1852), Jettatura (1857), Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), La Belle Jenny (1865), and Spirite (1866). Mérémé alone contests with him the palm as the prince of writers of short stories. He was drawn early to the lucrative task of feuilleton writing, and for more than thirty years contributed to the Paris newspapers criticisms on the theatre and on the salon. The first half of his theatrical criticisms were collected in 1859 in 6 volumes, under the ambitious title of L'Histoire de l'Art Dramatique en France; his accounts of the Salon, which have yet to be republished, form perhaps the best history, if the least didactic, of the French art of his day. His leisure he devoted to travels in Spain, Holland, Turkey, England, Algeria, and Russia, of which he published characteristic accounts in his Caprices et Zigzags, Constantinople, Voyage en Russie, and Voyage en Espagne, admirable feats of description, relating solely to the look of the countries visited, not at all to their institutions, yet forming perhaps the most delightful books of travel in existence. Gautier died in Paris, October 23, 1872. Other works were an enlarged edition of his inimitable Émaux et Camées (1872); Les Grotesques (1844), on the writers of the 16th and 17th centuries; Honoré de Balzac (1858); Ménagerie Intime (1869), a kind of informal autobiography; Histoire du Romantisme (1872); and the posthumous works, Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires (1875), and L'Orient (1877). Gautier's name has become a kind of watchword and battle-cry. Writers with more enthusiasm than good sense have made him an idol, and elevated the paradoxes of his scepticism into a theory of life, while the sturdy moralists of the press use his name as a synonym for everything in art that is effeminate, and for all the affectations of the boudoir poetaster. The truth is that Gautier was nothing greater or less than a consummate artist in prose and verse. He is neither moral nor immoral; has absolutely no fixed faith of any sort, except in the pleasantness of pleasant impressions, holding even his æsthetic principles with good-humoured laxity. His whole philosophy is a philosophy of paradox, his ideal of life hardly more than a picturesque viciousness. His besetting sin was a childish desire to say something clever and wicked to shock the Philistines. He himself never expected his lewd romance to be taken seriously, to be adopted as the gospel of a school, and characterised with grave absurdity as 'the golden book of spirit and sense.' See collections of reminiscences by Feydeau (1874) and Bergerat (1878); Henry James's French Poets and Novelists (1878); and the monograph by Maxime du Camp (1890).