“Now,” said she, “we can go on.”
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, LOVER OF BEAUTY
While one is reading the tales of Gautier, he feels himself to be in a playhouse, confronted by a bewildering array of stage-settings, incredibly correct in detail and grouping, oppressively rich in appointment, and colorful—always colorful. At times characters are felt to be subordinated to background, yet these surroundings are so picturesque—or better, perhaps, so pictorial—that they furnish contrasts and harmonies which bring out rather than overpower the people who move amidst this very forest of accessory riches.
An examination of Gautier the man, both temperamentally and as his life was lived—if, indeed, there can be such a distinction—at once provides an explanation of this pervading love for setting: he was a passionate lover of the beautiful, and he was a persistent traveller in quest of things beautiful to look upon.
To speak of an artist, whether in pigments, marbles, or words, as a lover of the beautiful will at once suggest to the “practical” reader a deep-eyed dreamer with soulful, upturned look, devoid of humour, and affecting a Bunthorne stride. Not so Gautier. Robust of body, almost coarse of physiognomy, and bubbling with life, he could mix his colors with humor, tone his admirations with censure, charge his prodigious memory with endless detail, and train his observation to the minutest accuracy. There was something sensual as well as sensuous in his mind, and he was saved from grovelling only by the dominance of that subtle perception and admiration for the beautiful in all its phases, which challenges continual comment in any consideration of the man and his work. Gautier was esthetic without being an esthete, witty yet not a wit, sentient but not sentimental, sensual though not gross.
A journey to the heart of Gautier leads by way of his outward life.
Tarbes, in the south of France, Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, was the place of his birth, August 31, 1811. Jean-Pierre Gautier, his father, was in the revenue service, and an ardent royalist. He hailed from the Avignon of the Popes that Alphonse Daudet has chronicled so delightfully. Our author’s mother, Adélaïde-Antoinette Cocard, was a tailor’s daughter, and a noted beauty, whose sister had married into the nobility.
When Théophile was only three years old, his parents removed to Paris, but even at that elastic age the lad retained his love for the South, and, like his father, often repined for its warmth and color. He was a precocious youngster, beginning at five to devour books—Paul and Virginia and Robinson Crusoe among others.
The inevitable Lycée Louis-le-Grand was his academy, and by no means a happy prison it proved for the impressionable child, so poetic in temperament. Fortunately, his father soon took him home and entered him as a day-pupil elsewhere.