For a vivid, spirited picture of the young Bohemian Romanticist group which rallied round Hugo, a picture distinguished by its wanton self-caricature, we have only to turn to Théophile Gautier's Les Jeunes-France. The author intended his work to satirise Romanticism in much the same manner as Les Précieuses Ridicules had satirised the literary fantasticality of an earlier period; but unfortunately Les Jeunes-France is only the frolicsome effusion of a talented boy, whilst Les Précieuses is a mature work of enduring value. Les Jeunes-France was written almost immediately after Gautier's admission into the Romantic camp, and it, like the poetry of Petrus Borel and Philothée O'Neddy, gives us a good idea of the Bohemian camaraderie of the talented young men of the day. Gautier was the very man to write such a book; for not only then, but to the end of his life, he was the real artist—Bohemian; always more or less at variance with society and its notions of respectability; living in his youth, as painter, poet, journalist, and traveller, a Bohemian life in the general acceptation of the word, and in his later years settling down to live with his sisters and his children without a thought of marriage. Of his many liaisons, that with Ernesta Grisi, the mother of his daughters Judith and Estella, lasted longest. He was also for a long time passionately attached to her sister Carlotta. It was for Carlotta that he wrote his ballets. Though he was inconstant as a lover, he was an extremely affectionate brother and father. He gave his daughters a model education. One of his excellent ideas was to have them taught such languages as Japanese and Chinese, proficiency in which was so rare that it provided a woman who required to earn her living with the means of doing so. His daughter Judith reaped the benefit of his foresight.
But the book which gives us the best, completest impression of young Gautier's inner life is not Les Jeunes-France, but Mademoiselle de Maupin, the novel which he wrote immediately after that work (1836). In Mademoiselle de Maupin the champagne-froth of his youth seethes. It is a perfectly pagan and at times a perfectly indecent book—as indecent as a dialogue of Crébillon fils—but there is power in it; and though Swinburne exaggerates considerably when he calls it "the golden book of beauty," there is no doubt that it displays an extraordinary sense of beauty. It was an outlet for the young man's redundant vigour.
Théophile Gautier was originally very slightly built, and swimming was the only physical exercise in which he excelled; but he was bent on becoming an athlete, athletes and prize-fighters being above all other mortals the objects of his admiration. For several years he took fencing and boxing, riding and rowing lessons, until his physical condition was entirely changed, and he had the unutterable satisfaction on the day the Château Rouge was opened, of giving a perfectly new "Turk's head" a blow of 532 pounds weight, which has become historical. "This," he says with amiable vanity in his autobiographical sketch, "is the deed of my life of which I am proudest." And he is evidently quite sincere in his assertion; for even when he was an old man he used, when his friends were disputing his paradoxes and all contradicting him together, to command silence by shouting with his hoarse voice: "Moi, je suis fort; j'amène 530 sur une tête de Turc et je fais des métaphores qui se suivent. Tout est là." In Mademoiselle de Maupin we are conscious at one and the same time of the young dandy who can give the tremendous blow and the artist whose "metaphors hang together," that is to say, whose sentences shape themselves into pictures before our eyes. But what we are still more sensible of is the genuinely antique, plastic nature which distinguishes Gautier from all the other men of that gifted generation. He has painted himself in a passage in which he makes the hero describe his own character:
"I am a man of the Homeric age; the world in which I live is not my world, and I do not understand the society by which I am surrounded. Christ has not lived for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. I have never gathered passion-flowers on Mount Golgotha, and the deep stream which flows from the side of the crucified one and encircles the world with a girdle of red has not laved me in its waves. My rebellious body refuses to recognise the supremacy of the soul; my flesh refuses to be mortified. To me this earth is as beautiful as heaven; and in my eyes perfection of form is virtue. Spirituality is not to my mind; I prefer a statue to a phantom, midday to twilight. Three things give me pleasure—gold, marble, and scarlet; brilliancy, solidity, colour. These are the things I dream of, and all my castles in the air are built of them.... I never imagine mist or vapour, or anything floating and uncertain. My sky has no clouds, or if it happen to have any, they are solid, chiselled out of the fragments of marble fallen from the statue of Jupiter ... for I love to be able to touch with my finger what I have seen, and to trace the contours into their most elusive folds.... This has always been my character. I look on women with the eyes of a sculptor and not of a lover. All my life the shape of the flask has interested me, not the quality of its contents. I believe that, if I had had Pandora's casket in my hands, I should not have opened it."
Théophile Gautier is one of the few French Romanticists who present a distinct parallel to the German. His story Fortunio, with its glorification of pleasure and idleness, is the French counterpart of Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde; and he recalls the German Romanticists by his contempt for the distinctively poetic in poetry. He once said to Taine, who was comparing De Musset with Victor Hugo to the disadvantage of the latter: "Taine, I verily believe you are degenerating into bourgeois imbecility. Sentiment in poetry ... that is not the main thing. Radiant, resplendent words, rhythm, and melody—these are poetry. Poetry proves nothing and tells nothing. Take the beginning of Hugo's Ratbert, for instance; there is no poetry in the world like that; it is the very summit of the Himalayas. All Italy with its medieval heraldry is there—and nothing but words." Gautier resembles Tieck in his love of the poetry of pure form, guiltless of ideas; but there is this marked difference between them, that whereas Tieck aimed at volatilising words into tones, at diluting poetry into simple mood, into music, Gautier, the good Latin, aimed at making words produce light and colour, at condensing poetry into word-painting, word-sculpture.
He harmonised completely with the German Romanticists in his hatred of utilitarianism. His watchword, L'art pour l'art, was the outcome of this aversion. And, regarded from a certain standpoint, this principle of his, so eloquently propounded in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, is absolutely incontestable.
It is incontestable when taken in the sense that art is not subject to the same laws of propriety as those which justly rule life, much less to those which rule it unjustly. It is, for instance, perfectly proper that a statue should stand naked in a crowd, though it offends our sense of the proper that a man or woman should do so—life and art stand in entirely different relations to morality. It was Gautier's constant endeavour to free art from subjection to moralising criticism. In the youthfully violent preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin he bursts out, addressing the utilitarian critics: "Non, imbéciles, non, crétins et goîtreux que vous êtes, un livre ne fait pas de la soupe à la gélatine;—un roman n'est pas une paire de bottes sans couture; un sonnet une seringue à jet continu; un drame n'est pas un chemin de fer, toutes choses essentiellement civilisantes." Of the perpetually scandalised critics, he says: "If there is nudity anywhere in a book or a picture, they make as straight for it as a sow for the mire," ... and with an allusion to Tartuffe, he continues: "Dorine, the pretty waiting-woman, is at perfect liberty to display her charms as far as I am concerned; I shall certainly not take my handkerchief from my pocket to cover that bosom which ought not to be seen. I look at it as I look at her face, and if it is white and shapely it gives me pleasure." And, defending himself against his critics' reiterated accusations of immorality, he writes: "An extremely curious variety of the so-called moral journalist is the journalist with female relations.... To set up as a journalist of this species a man must provide himself with a certain number of necessary utensils, such as two or three legitimate wives, some mothers, as many sisters as possible, a complete assortment of daughters, and innumerable cousins. The next requisites are a play or novel, a pen, ink, paper, and a printer.... Then he writes: It is impossible to take one's wife to see this play; or: It is a book which a man could not possibly put into the hands of a woman whom he respects.... The wife hides her blushes behind her fan, the sister, the cousin, &c. (The titles of relationship may be varied; all that is necessary is that the relatives should be female.)" Though Gautier's practice is not always defensible, he was right in theory. Poetry has its own morality, the morality which springs from that love of beauty and of truth, which, however indistinctly and indirectly it may be expressed, is its very nature; but it refuses to be bound by the conventions of society. Poetry is in itself a moral power, exactly as science is—such a science, for example, as physiology, which certainly does not confine itself to subjects that are considered fit topics of conversation in polite society. There are immoral poets as there are immoral surgeons, but their immorality has no connection with that regardlessness of convention which the aim of both art and science entails, and which is inherent in the nature of both.
A man of a plastic and artistic temperament like Gautier, who could not have satisfied the demands made of poetry in the name of morality without sacrificing his special talent, was peculiarly fitted to enforce this truth. His special gift is the reproducing of sensuous impressions in words. He was the first to show in the grand style that the doctrine propounded in Lessing's Laokoon is not the whole truth, for he has described much that Lessing regarded as indescribable. There was nothing for which Gautier lacked words—the beauty of a woman, the appearance of a town, nay, the taste of a dish, or the sound of a voice—he was equal to them all. "Since we have him," said Sainte-Beuve once, "the word inexpressible no longer exists in the French language." He had the usual Romantic-Classic aversion for new words, but he enriched modern French with a store of fifteenth and sixteenth century words which had undeservedly fallen into disuse, and with a host of accurately suggestive technical expressions. French dictionaries were his favourite reading. Undoubtedly his was a mind entirely concentrated upon externals; but great intensity and much artistic fervour go to the making of such externality as Gautier's. It was certainly not the aim of his art to touch feeling hearts; but even Goethe had moods in which he wrote:
"Ach, die zärtlichen Herzen! Ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu rühren;
Sei es mein einziges Glück, dich zu berühren, Natur!"
Le Capitaine Fracasse, a novel which Gautier planned in his youth, but did not write until well on in life, gives the best idea of his prose. We see its personages as we see people in real life—their figures, their dress, their movements, their background of buildings or landscape.