THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
Gautier the man.
But it is too easy to construct a man out of his work. It is more interesting to compare the man of this world with the man he would have liked to be, and the man he chose to express. Gautier was not pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was as far from the world of Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of London or Dublin, he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality hung a veil of dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest memories was a blow that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on an automatic instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of gory mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. He was a Porthos, and the Gautier of his stories, that gorgeous barbaric figure, was his boast, cherished as Porthos cherished his dignity. The traits he loved in himself were those that gave colour to his fiction. His olive skin, his strength, his vitality, his scorn of the religion of sacrifice—these were the details he caressed. He was never tired of insisting on everything that helped in this Oriental and Antique projection of himself. His hero in Mademoiselle de Maupin exclaims: 'I am a man of the Homeric times; the world where I live does not belong to me, and I do not understand the society about me. Christ has not yet come for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias.... I find the earth as beautiful as heaven, and I think that perfection of form is virtue. I love a statue better than a phantom, and full noon better than twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, splendour, solidity, colour.' When a reviewer described him as a being, 'fat, jovial, and sanguinary,' he quotes the description with gratitude, and explains gleefully that it refers to his taste for bull-fights. He begins a book: 'People have often caricatured us, dressed like a Turk, cross-legged on cushions.... The caricature is only an exaggeration of the truth.' That was how he liked to think of himself, and how he would like to be imagined. It is interesting to know that he was a kindly bear of a man, who was always called by his Christian name, and delighted in astonishing his friends with outbursts of genius served up in a joyous obscenity.
He was not a man of wealth as his work suggests; but an extremely industrious journalist. Like Balzac, he was proud of his prodigious activity. He confesses that he wrote about three hundred volumes: but that is the estimate of Porthos; his biographer puts the number at sixty. From his twenty-fifth year he was an artist on a treadmill, and only at every hundredth, or two hundredth, or three hundredth turn of the wheel could he escape for a little and try to satisfy himself. That is why his poems and shorter stories are the most perfect specimens of his later work. He needed things that could be roughed out in a sitting and carried about without risk until the time when he could work on them again. He was able to hurry out of sight his dozen sheets for the Presse or the Figaro, sit down on his cushions, let his fingers run through the long hair of a Persian cat, and turn over again and again one of the minute Enamels or Cameos of his poetry. In so small a space he could afford to be fastidious. He could take up the little thing a week later, and a month after that, and file and polish it to his content. It was the same with the stories. The story-telling Gautier was a Gautier on holiday.
He was a complete man, and could, in active life, have twisted the present if he had chosen. But he did not choose. As for politics, 'what does it matter whether one is ruled by a sabre, a sprinkler of holy-water, or an umbrella?' He has been censured for this, but the censure means no more than to say he was a perfect artist unfortunately not interested in local government. One does not ask a shoemaker if his soles and uppers are Socialist or only gentle Liberal. As for his own life, he worked hard, brought up his children, but found his emotions too intricate to please him. He had to separate them, and translate them into terms of another time and place. Modernity rattled past him, like the chariots of the king past the potter, who would not look up from his wheel lest an ugly curve should throw awry the vessel he was shaping. Gautier did his duty by this world and left it, discovering for others what Baudelaire called 'the consolation of the arts,' and finding peace himself in the less encumbered simplicity of his Ancient and Oriental Arcadia.
The flowers of the white narcissus.
His work was the construction of a paradise for himself in which other people are allowed to walk. His stories are a substitute for opium and haschisch, and take us into a world like that of old romance and myth, where we meet our own souls walking in strange clothes. 'Art,' says Santayana, 'so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to be a disappointment.' We leave a volume of Gautier as we leave the Mabinogion, or the Morte Darthur, or the Volsunga Saga, or a book of fairy-tales. We have to readjust ourselves before meeting the difficulties of life. But opposite Santayana's sentence we may set one from Mahomet. 'If any man have two loaves, let him sell one, and buy flowers of the white narcissus; for the one is food for the body and the other is food for the soul.' And perhaps this art, where the world is simplified into the conventions of a tapestry, by its intense appeal to primitive emotions, may help us like a touchstone to distinguish between the things to which more than lip-service is slavery, and the things to which less than life-service is death.