GAUTIER AND THE EAST
The East as a means of expression.
The East is an invention of the nineteenth century. We have only to look at the works of Voltaire or of Goldsmith to see that the Orient did not exist before the time of the Romantic movement. To early writers it meant nothing but polygamy, moguls, elephants, and 'bonzes,' and the eighteenth-century translation of the Arabian Nights did little more than supply an entertaining form to an ironical philosopher. Even when it became the fashion to make imaginary Orientals expose the follies of the West, the East had not yet become alive for us. We find scarcely a hint in the hundred and twenty letters of The Citizen of the World that it meant more than a dialectical expression for topsy-turvydom, a place to which you could refer as to Lilliput or to Brobdingnag, useful like the x of algebra in illustrating the properties of other things. The first glimmerings of discovery are in Beckford's Vathek, an extravagant book, belittled by a schoolboyish humour—as when the Caliph plays football with the rotund figure of the Indian Magician—but written by a man to whom the East did really mean some sort of gorgeous dream.
For the East is not an expression of philosophy, or of geography, but of temperament; it is a dream that has led many to leave their people for its people, their homes for desert tents, in the effort to turn its conventions into realities of life. Men have fallen in love with it, as they have fallen in love with statues or with the beautiful women of pictures. It means more than itself, like a man whom time has lifted into Godhead. It has been given the compelling power of a religion. I believe it was an invention made possible by the discovery of local colour. With the emphasis of local colour came an emphasised difference in places. Minds only mildly preferring one place to another when both were vague, most vigorously preferred one or other place when both were realised in vivid detail, and could be readily compared. Fastidious minds seeking the stage-properties of expression could choose them in the booths of all the world. Men who did not care for the settings of their own lives were able to fill out their dim Arcadias with detail, and vein their phantom goddesses with blood.
The East, when Gautier was growing up in the rich tastes of the Romantic movement, was ready to supply the most delicious conventions. Goethe had shown its possibilities. It was there like a many-coloured curtain behind which he could build a world less entangled, less unmanageable than his own. Its newness must not be forgotten in considering his use of it, and in thinking of his use of Antiquity we must remember that it was as novel as the East.
The Antique.
Now the Antique was one of the cudgels with which the Classicists tried to beat the heads of the Romanticists in the battles of that time. It did not mean to Gautier what it meant to them. Its metamorphosis was simultaneous with the birth of the East, and had almost the same cause. Insisting on local colour in places, the Romanticists insisted also on local colour in humanity. Cromwell was to be allowed to say that he had the parliament in his bag and the king in his pocket. Cæsar was to be allowed to talk like a man and even to be one. So that for Gautier Antiquity meant not a cold inhumanity that had been beautiful, but a warm, full-blooded life that worshipped simple, energetic gods, and found expression in a thousand ways other than the speech of blank verse and heroic actions that had been so often represented in pictures of an annoying timidity of colouring. The East and the Antique together had been touched as if by magic, and turned from the abstract into the concrete, from the heroic into the human, and so into the very material for personal expression.