At the age of twenty-four Gautier published a novel, “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” which might be described as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” rewritten by the devil. A young lady of beauty and fashion goes wandering in the costume of a man, and this affords endless possibilities of sexual titillation; women fall in love with her, thinking she is a man, and men fall in love with her by instinct, as it were; the orgies thus postponed are especially thrilling when they finally occur.
Some men have written this kind of depravity at twenty-four, and learned something better as they grew older; but Gautier learned absolutely nothing. To the end of his long life he continued to produce novels and tales of which the sole purpose is to glorify the orgy, to make it romantic and thrilling by the elaborate squandering of wealth, the heaping mountain high of the apparatus of luxury. The device fails, for the simple reason that the senses are limited. When you are hungry a dinner interests you, but ten thousand dinners appall; and the same thing applies to coition. The men and women in these orgies remind us of people in a besieged castle, living in deadly terror of an enemy who never fails to get them in the end. The French have made a word for that victorious enemy: ennui.
It should hardly need to be said that the art of Théophile Gautier is a leisure-class art. These orgies are possible only in a slave civilization; they presuppose the fact that the masses shall toil to heap up wealth for a privileged few to destroy in a night of riot. At the very opening of “Mademoiselle de Maupin” the author portrays his hero, living at ease with a valet to serve him, and nothing to do but be discontented. “My idle passions growl dully in my heart, and prey upon themselves for lack of other food.” He is consumed with imaginings—all, needless to say, having to do with pleasures which he does not mean to earn. “I wait for the heavens to open, and an angel to descend with a revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and a throne to be given me, for one of Raphael’s virgins to leave the canvas and come to embrace me, for relations, whom I do not possess, to die and leave me what will enable me to sail my fancy on a river of gold,” etc.
His dream finally takes the form of a woman, and he spends many pages in detailing her qualities. Needless to say, she belongs to the rioting classes. “I consider beauty a diamond which should be mounted and set in gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful woman without a carriage, horses, serving-men, and all that belongs to an income of a hundred thousand a year; there is harmony between beauty and wealth.” Of course this dream-woman must be entirely subject to the sensual desires of man. “I consider woman, after the manner of the ancients, as a beautiful slave designed for our pleasure.”
Victor Hugo was exiled by Louis Napoleon; while Gautier, having “no political opinions,” remained in Paris and accepted financial favors from the tyrant. What he considered his master work was published at the age of forty-five, a volume of verse whose title explains its character, “Enamels and Cameos.” The art of poetry has become identical with that of the goldsmith; words are tiny jewels, fitted together with precise and meticulous care. Words have beauty, quite apart from their meaning, and the proper study for mankind is the dictionary. Poetry should have neither feeling nor ideas; while as for the subject, the more unlikely and unsuitable it is, the greater the triumph of the poet. This is not an effort to caricature Gautier’s doctrine, it is his own statement, the theme of one of his poems. But on no account are you to take this poem for propaganda!
You see how the proposition demonstrates its own absurdity. Théophile Gautier was during his entire lifetime a fanatical preacher, a propagandist of sensuality and materialism, a glorified barber and tailor, a publicity man for the Association of Merchants of Tapestries, Furniture and Jewelry. When he writes a poem on the subject of a rose-colored dress, he asks you to believe that he is really interested in the rose-colored dress, but you may be sure that he is no such fool; he writes about the rose-colored dress as an act of social defiance. He says: There are imbeciles in the world who believe in religion, in moral sense, in virtue, self-restraint and idealism, subjects which bore me to extinction; in order to show my contempt for such imbeciles, I proceed to prove that the greatest poem in the world can be written on a rose-colored dress or on a roof, or on my watch, or on smoke, or on whatever unlikely subject crosses my mind; I consecrate myself to this task, I become a moral anti-moralist, a propagandist of no-propaganda.
What are the products of nature bearing most resemblance to enamels and cameos? They are certain kinds of insects, beautiful, hard, shiny, brilliantly colored, repulsive, cruel, and poisonous. Such is the art of Théophile Gautier and his successors, who have made French literature a curse for a hundred years. This literature possesses prestige because of its perfection of form; therefore it is important to get clear in our minds the fact that the ability to fit words together in intricate patterns is a thing ranking very low in the scale of human faculties. The feats of the art-for-art-sakers are precisely as important as those of the man on the stage who balances three billiard-balls on the end of his nose. The piano-gymnast who leaped to world fame by his ability to wiggle his fingers more rapidly than any other living man has been definitely put out of date by the mechanical piano-player; and some day mankind will adopt a universal language, and forget all the enamels and cameos in the old useless tongues.
Get it clear in your mind that external beauty is entirely compatible with deadly cruelty of intellect and spirit. A tiger is a marvelous product, from the esthetic point of view, and offers a superb theme to poets, as William Blake has shown us. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”—but who wants this gold-striped glory in his garden? In exactly the same way, there is a mass of what is called literature, possessing the graces of form—music and glamor, elegance, passion, energy—and using all these virtues, precisely as the tiger uses his teeth and claws, to rend and destroy human life. Literary criticism which fails to take account of such vicious qualities in art works is just exactly as sensible and trustworthy as the merchant who would sell you a cobra de capello, with a gorgeous black and white striped hood, for a boudoir ornament and pet.
CHAPTER LXIII
THE CHILD OF HIS AGE
The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it failed again in 1830 and in 1848, and cruelty and greed and corruption seemed to be the final destiny of civilization. A few strong spirits kept the faith, but the weaker ones drifted away and drowned their sorrows in debauchery and drink.