In the part of Paris where he lodged he had long been noted for his eccentricities. In every possible way he bade scornful defiance to the ordinary bourgeois, that personage detested above all others by the young Romanticists. He usually wore a black velvet jacket and yellow shoes, and went about bareheaded, with a parasol or an umbrella, his long, dark brown hair, which suited his olive complexion admirably, hanging down almost to his waist. Cigar in mouth, erect and youthfully dignified, he strolled along, utterly regardless of the contemptuous glances of the scandalised citizens or the jeers of the street boys.
But on the occasion of the first performance of Hernani, he felt it incumbent on him to prepare something more striking. He ordered "the red waistcoat," that waistcoat which was to become a historic garment. Its red was not the red which the revolutionists chose as their symbol, and which politicians think of when the colour is named; no, it was the flaming red which emblematised the hatred of the young artists of the period for grey. The colour tones of a particular piece of scarlet satin had fascinated the young painter and poet. He looked at it in the way we can imagine Veronese looking at a piece of silken stuff. When he had obtained possession of the treasure, he sent for his tailor and explained to him that of this material a waistcoat was to be made—yes, a waistcoat. It was to be shaped like a cuirass, to be full across the chest, and fasten at the back. "If," writes Gautier, "you were to pick out from a set of school drawing copies, representing the different expressions of the human countenance, one of those labelled Amazement, you would have an idea of the look upon the horror-stricken tailor's face." "But such a waistcoat is not fashionable, sir." "It will be—as soon as I have worn it." "But it is a style I know nothing about; it is more like a part of a theatrical costume than of a gentleman's ordinary dress; I am afraid of spoiling the stuff." "I shall give you a linen pattern, designed, cut out, and tacked together by myself." The waistcoat was made; and on that famous and stormy evening at the theatre, Gautier displayed perfect dignity and indifference when the philistines pointed him out to each other, and made him the target of all their opera-glasses. His name became inextricably connected with the legend of the red waistcoat, although he only wore it that one evening. For long little was known about him beyond the fact that he had worn it (I, myself, when in Paris in 1867, met people who believed that he wore it still); and it shines to this day in the history of French literature, a naïve symbol of the love of brightness and colour in life which distinguished that enthusiastic group of youths.
But the essentially luminous and flamboyant was art, pure art; and seldom has the boundless love of art as art taken such entire possession of a heart as it did of Gautier's. He was animated by it all his life, but in his youth he felt it with all the pleasures it brings, all the admiration it arouses, all the courage it imparts, and all the hatred it inspires.
It was this love which made the man who was himself a master, a sincerely, nobly modest admirer of other artists. He was Hugo's servant, Balzac's self-sacrificing friend. He was a poet, but admiration made him a critic; and to no one did a well-constructed line, a luminous word, a picturesque expression, or a bold flight of imagination give more pleasure. He was a painter before he became an author; and no one meted out such ample recognition as he to the powerful, if somewhat blundering, originality which produced that glory of colour in Delacroix's pictures, which blinds one to their deficiencies in the matter of drawing. With what passionate disapproval he fell upon Scribe's platitudes and Delavigne's cautious improvements, upon stupid vaudevilles and passionless tragedies—this man who worshipped style, and who infinitely preferred a performance at the circus to a bourgeois comedy at the Gymnase Theatre! At the circus, where they only shouted Hop! and Hé! they could not possibly commit all Scribe's sins against syntax and metre. With what fury he fell upon Delaroche when the latter (whose real talent developed late) charmed the half-educated with his laboured, highly finished representations of mediæval subjects, and taught them to prefer his Middle Ages to the Middle Ages of Hugo and Delacroix! To rank cautious talent above reckless, alarming genius was true sacrilege in Gautier's eyes; and the favour which these men of mere talent found in the eyes of the public roused in him a perfectly tiger-like fury. He confessed at a later period that he could have eaten Delaroche raw with the greatest of pleasure.
Art for art's sake! Art as its own end and aim! L'art pour l'art! This was Gautier's motto. And that he loved art for its own sake means (as it would mean in the case of anything else) that he loved it without any regard to its so-called morality or immorality, patriotic or unpatriotic tendency, utility or inutility.
Gautier's worship of art indicates an onward step in the development of Romanticism. In its first stage the literary renaissance was devotion to Catholicism and the old monarchy. When the movement, with Hugo at its head, made its second great advance, it undoubtedly entered upon the stage of enthusiasm for art as art; but in the case of the majority the step was an unconscious one; their enthusiasm for art concealed itself under enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, or for the sixteenth century, or for strength of passion, or for local colouring. Gautier alone was fully conscious of the principle which underlay all these manifestations; hence his name is synonymous with that phase of the Romantic movement during which poetry asserts its rights. If we were to judge by certain of Victor Hugo's prefaces (the preface to Les Orientales, for instance), it might seem as if Hugo's poetry, neglecting every other ideal, had no aim but the attainment of perfect liberty for itself; but Hugo was far too much of the agitator by nature to regard this struggle, this endeavour, as more than a preliminary step. It was reserved for the disciple whom the master loved best, to regard this stage as the final one. To Gautier, as to the German Romanticists, the combat of Romanticism with utilitarianism was equivalent to a proclamation of the absolute independence of art.
Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, in the south of France, on the 30th of August 1811. He came of a family of good standing and pronounced Royalist principles. Like Hugo and Dumas, he was descended from a brave officer. Hugo's father, as major in Napoleon's army in Italy, fought with Fra Diavolo, and as general and governor of a Spanish province under Joseph, with the brave Spanish rebels. Dumas' father was an athlete, who, according to tradition (strictly speaking, according to the younger Dumas), could crush a horse to death between his legs and bite through a helmet, and who held the bridge of Brixen alone against an advanced guard of twenty men. Gautier's grandfather won renown by being the first in the attack on Bergen-op-Zoom. He was a man of colossal strength and gigantic proportions, who lived in the open air, hunted every day, and was never seen without his gun, which he would fire into the air again and again if anything put him into specially good spirits. He lived to be a hundred. Théophile's father, who also lived to a great age, displayed his inherited vigour chiefly in intellectual matters. He was a well-educated man of many and varied acquirements. It speaks well for his literary taste and his freedom from prejudice, that he greatly admired the preface to Cromwell, and that he approved of his son's poetic tendencies; indeed, he was so delighted with the latter's audacious novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, that, whilst the book was being written, he often locked the young man into his room with the words: "You don't come out until you have written some pages of Maupin." Théophile's mother, a stately beauty, who is said to have had Bourbon blood in her veins, united with his father in spoiling and worshipping the son whom nature had so bountifully endowed. He was one of those beings who are created to be admired and beloved, not only by their relatives and friends, but by every one—one of those on whom a pet-name is bestowed by a whole generation; for he was a great artist and a great child. How significant is the abbreviation, Théo, by which he is alluded to hundreds of times in contemporary literature! It was the familiarity of admiration which thus shortened his name.
To the particulars of his pedigree which seem to explain his character, another must be added, namely, that there was undoubtedly some Eastern blood in the family. This is interesting because, like the negro strain which accounts for much of the violence and force in the writings of Dumas the elder and of Pushkin, it is a physiological explanation of the Oriental impress which became observable in Gautier's personality and works as years went on. He was intended by nature to wear a fez or a turban, and to move slowly and with dignity, and it was natural that he should end by displaying as little emotion as possible in his works.
Théophile Gautier left the south of France and came to live in Paris as quite a child. It is a sign of the early development of his character, that at school he preferred the authors who wrote before or after the so-called Golden Age of their literatures to the classic and correct writers. In French literature his favourite authors were Villon and Rabelais; Corneille and Racine made little impression on him. In Latin literature he read with eager enjoyment only the poets and prose authors of the decadence—Claudian, Martial, Petronius, and Apuleius; these he imitated in his Latin verses in every possible metre; upon Cicero and Quintilian he looked down with perfect indifference. This attitude was due in the first place to the artist's love of a picturesque, exuberant style, and in the second place to the youth's aversion for all the imposing general truths and fine sentiments inevitably met with in the writings of every author whom we call classic. A Frenchman who was as wild and mad as Villon, or as exuberant and rich in colour as Rabelais, had in Gautier's eyes the inestimable advantage of being unaffected by the general polish of the great century; a Roman who had African blood in his veins, like Apuleius, or was of Egyptian origin, like Claudius, was necessarily more to his liking than the more tasteful orators and poets of the Augustan age; for he loved the peculiar, the piquant, the disconcerting, and was not repelled by artificiality and mannerism if any charm accompanied them; he liked his literature, so to speak, a little "high." The mature man retained the love of the boy for the authors of the Silver Age. To it we owe the excellent collection of criticisms which he published under the title of Les Grotesques, the aim of which was the rehabilitation of the whole group of minor poets whom Boileau had disgraced and dismissed in his L'Art poétique in order to make more room for the great authors who had observed the rules of Aristotle and the laws of taste. The poor fellows lay unread in the charnel-house of literature with a line of Boileau's upon their foreheads. Gautier, as the sworn enemy of everything regular and commonplace, undertook their defence. His love of the plastic and picturesque found no satisfaction in the study of the dignified authors who had sat writing with periwigs on their heads and lace ruffles at their wrists; but it gave him real pleasure to seek out all those forgotten, curious poets with the strange countenances and grimaces, in whose pages, for the most part sadly remarkable for their bad taste, there are nevertheless to be found many an amusing oddity, many a gleam of originality, many a witty or picturesque line, nay, whole poems as full of life as are the best of François Villon's and Théophile de Viau's. Though their muse was no beauty, there might nevertheless be said of her what Gautier wrote of an attractive woman:
"Elle a dans sa laideur piquante
Un grain de sel de cette mer
D'où jaillit nue et provocante
L'âcre Vénus du gouffre amer."