And the passion of it.
But the audacity of infatuation need not stop here. I should claim for La Morte Amoureuse, and for Gautier as the author of it, more than this. It appears to me to be one of the very few expressions in French prose of really passionate love. It is, with Manon Lescaut and Julie, the most consummate utterance that I at least know, in that division of literature, of the union of sensual with transcendental enamourment. Why this is so rare in French is a question fitter for treatment in a History of the French Temperament than in one of the French Novel. That it is so I believe to be a simple fact, and simple facts require little talking about. No prose literature has so much love-making in it as French, and none so much about different species of love: amour de tête and amour des sens especially, but also not unfrequently amour de cœur, and even amour d'âme. But of the combination that we call "passionate love"—that fills our own late sixteenth, early seventeenth, and whole nineteenth century literature, and that requires love of the heart and the head, the soul and the senses, together—it has (outside poetry of course)[202] only the three books just mentioned and a few passages such as Atala's dying speech, Adolphe's, alas! too soon obliterated reflections on his first success with Ellénore, perhaps one or two more before La Morte Amoureuse, and even since its day not many. Maupassant (v. inf.) could manage the combination, but too often confined himself to exhibitions of the separate and imperfect divisions, whereof, no doubt, the number is endless.
That Gautier always or often maintained himself at this pitch, either of what we may call power of projecting live personages or of exhibition of great passions, it would be idle and uncritical to contend; that he did so here, and thereby put himself at once and for ever on the higher, nay, highest level of literature, I do, after fifty years' study of the thing and of endless other things, impenitently and impavidly affirm.
Other short stories.
What is more, in his shorter productions he was often not far below it, save in respect of intensity. If I do not admire Fortunio quite so much as some people do, it is not so much because of its comparative heartlessness—a thing rare in Gautier—as because for once, and I think once only in pieces of its scale, the malt of the description does get above the meal of the personal interest, though that personal interest exists. But Jettatura, with its combination of romantic and tragical appeal; Avatar, with its extraordinary mixture of romance, again, with humour, its "excitingness," and its delicacy of taste; the equally extraordinary felicity of the dealings with that too often unmanageable implement the "classical dictionary" in Arria Marcella, Une Nuit de Cléopâtre, and perhaps especially Le Roi Candaule; the tiny sketches—half-nouvelle and half-"middle" article—of Le Pied de la Momie, La Pipe d'Opium, and Le Club des Haschischins,—what marvellous consummateness in the various specifications and conditions do these afford us!
Sometimes, however, I have thought that just as La Morte Amoureuse is almost or quite sufficient text for vindicating the greatness or greaterness of "Théo," so his earliest book of prose fiction, Les Jeune-France, will serve the same purpose for another side of him, lesser if anybody likes, but exceptionally "complementary." In particular it possesses a quality which up to his time was very rare in France, has not been extraordinarily common there even since, and is still, even in its ancestral home with ourselves, sometimes inconceivably blundered about—the quality of Humour.[203]
Gautier's humour—Les Jeune-France.
For wit, France can, of course, challenge the world; nay, she can do more, she can say to the world, "I have taught you this; and you are no match for your teacher." But in Humour the case is notoriously altered. None of the Latin nations, except Spain, the least purely Latin of them, has ever achieved it, as the original or unoriginal Latins themselves never did, with the exception of the lighter forms of it in Catullus, of the grimmer in Lucretius—those greatest and most un-Roman of Roman poets.[204] In all the wide and splendid literature of French before the nineteenth century only Rabelais and Molière[205] can lay claim to it. Romanticism brings humour in its train, as Classicism brings wit; but it is curious how slow was the Romanticisation of French in this respect, with one exception. There is no real humour in Hugo, Vigny, George Sand, Balzac, scarcely even in Musset. Dumas, though showing decidedly good gifts of possibility in his novels, does not usually require it there; the absence of it in his dramas need hardly be dwelt on. Mérimée, one cannot but think, might have had it if he had chosen; but Mérimée did not choose to have so many things! If Gérard de Nerval's failure of a great genius had failed in the comic instead of the romantic-tragical direction, he would have had some too—in fact he had it in the embryonic and unachieved fashion in which the author of Gaspard de la Nuit, and Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine have had it since in verse and prose. But Gautier has it plump and plain, and without any help from the strange counterfeiting fantasy of verse which sometimes confers it. He has it always; at all times of his life; in the hackwork which made abortion of so much greater literature, and in his actually great literature, poems, novels, travels—what not. But he never has it more strongly, vividly, and originally than in Les Jeune-France, a coming-of-age book almost as old as mil-huit-cent-trente, written in part no doubt in the immortal gilet rouge itself, if only as kept for study wear like Diderot's old dressing-gown.
There are two dangers lying in wait for the reader of the book. One is the ordinary and quite respectable putting-out-of-the-lip at its juvenile improprieties; the other, a little more subtle, is the notion that the things, improper or not (and some of them are quite not), are mere juvenilia—clever undergraduate work. The first requires no special counterblast; the old monition, "Don't like it for its impropriety, but also don't let its impropriety hide its merits from you if it has any," will suffice. The other is, as has been said, more insidious. I can only say that I have read much undergraduate or but slightly post-graduate literature of many generations—before the day of Les Jeune-France, about its date, between that day and my own season of passing through those "sweet hours and the fleetest of time," and since that season till the present moment. But many equals of this book I have not read.
It is of course necessary to remember that it is expressly subtitled "Romans Goguenards," thereby preparing the reader for the reverse of seriousness. That reverse, especially in young hands, is a difficult thing to manage. "Guffaw" and "yawn" are two words which have actually two letters in common; y and g are notoriously interchangeable in some dialects and circumstances, while n and u are the despair of the copyist or the student of copies. There remain only "ff"—the lightest of literals. We need not cite nominatim (indeed it might be rash) the endless examples in French and English where the guffaw of the writer excites the yawn of the reader. But this is hardly ever the case, at least as I find it, with Gautier.