A History of French Literature Part 17

Among the romantic poets who made themselves known between 1820 and 1830, ALFRED DE VIGNY is distinguished by the special character of his genius, and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derived from his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at a later date, Musset, found models or suggestions in his writings. He, though for a time closely connected with the romantic school, really stands apart and alone. Born in 1797, he followed the profession of his father, that of arms, and knew the hopes, the illusions, and the disappointments of military service at the time of the fall of the Empire and the Bourbon restoration. He read eagerly in Greek literature, in the Old Testament, and among eighteenth-century philosophers. As early as 1815 he wrote his admirable poem _La Dryade_, in which, before Andre Chenier's verse had appeared, Chenier's fresh and delicate feeling for antiquity was antic.i.p.ated. In 1822 his first volume, _Poemes_, was published, including the _Helena_, afterwards suppressed, and groups of pieces cla.s.sified as _Antiques_, _Judaques_, and _Modernes_. Already his _Mose_, majestic in its sobriety, was written, though it waited four years for publication in the volume of _Poemes Antiques et Modernes_ (1826). Moses climbing the slopes of Nebo personifies the solitude and the heavy burden of genius; his one aspiration now is for the sleep of death; and it is the lesser leader Joshua who will conduct the people into the promised land.

The same volume included _Eloa_, a romance of love which abandons joy through an impulse of divine pity: the radiant spirit Eloa, born from a tear of Christ, resigns the happiness of heaven to bring consolation to the great lost angel suffering under the malediction of G.o.d. Other pieces were inspired by Spain, with its southern violence of pa.s.sion, and by the pa.s.s of Roncesvalles, with its chivalric a.s.sociations.

The novel of _Cinq-Mars_, which had a great success, is a free treatment of history; but Vigny's best work is rather the embodiment of ideas than the rendering of historical matter. His _Stello_ in its conception has something of kins.h.i.+p with _Mose_; in three prose tales relating the sufferings of Chatterton, Chenier, and Gilbert, it ill.u.s.trates the sorrows of the possessors of genius. Vigny's military experience suggested another group of tales, the _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires_; the soldier in accepting servitude finds his consolation in the duty at all costs of strenuous obedience.

In 1827 Vigny quitted the army, and next year took place his marriage--one not unhappy, but of imperfect sympathy--to an English lady, Lydia Bunbury. His interest in English literature was shown by translations of _Oth.e.l.lo_ and the _Merchant of Venice_. The former was acted with the applause of the young romanticists, who wors.h.i.+pped Shakespeare ardently if not wisely, and who bore the shock of hearing the uncla.s.sical word _mouchoir_ valiantly p.r.o.nounced on the French stage. The triumph of his drama of _Chatterton_ (1835) was overwhelming, though its glory to-day seems in excess of its deserts.

Ten years later Vigny was admitted to the Academy. But with the representation of _Chatterton_, and at the moment of his highest fame, he suddenly ceased from creative activity. Never was his mind more energetic, never was his power as an artist so mature; but, except a few wonderful poems contributed to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and posthumously collected, nothing was given by him to the world from 1835 to 1863, the year of his death.

He had always been a secluded spirit; external companions.h.i.+p left him inwardly solitary; secret--so Sainte-Beuve puts it--in his "tower of ivory"; touching some mountain-summit for a moment--so Dumas describes him--if he folded his wings, as a concession to humanity. A great disillusion of pa.s.sion had befallen him; but, apart from this, he must have retreated into his own sphere of ideas and of images, which seemed to him to be almost wronged by an attempt at literary expression. He looked upon the world with a disenchanted eye; he despaired of the possibilities of life for himself and for all men; without declamation or display, he resigned himself to a silent and stoical acceptance of the lot of man; but out of this calm despair arose a pa.s.sionate pity for his fellows, a pity even for things evil, such as his Eloa felt for the lost angel. _La Colere de Samson_ gives majestic utterance to his despair of human love; his _Mont des Oliviers_, where Jesus seeks G.o.d in vain, and where Judas lurks near, expresses his religious despair. Nature, the benevolent mother, says Vigny, is no mother, but a tomb. Yet he would not clamour against the heavens or the earth; he would meet death silently when it comes, like the dying wolf of his poem (_La Mort du Loup_), suffering but voiceless. Wealth and versatility of imagination were not Vigny's gifts. His dominant ideas were few, but he lived in them; for them he found apt imagery or symbol; and in verse which has the dignity of reserve and of pa.s.sion controlled to sobriety, he let them as it were involuntarily escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is the thinker among the poets of his time, and when splendours of colour and opulence of sound have pa.s.sed away, the idea remains. In fragments from his papers, published in 1867, with the t.i.tle _Journal d'un Poete_, the inner history of Vigny's spirit can be traced.

IV

To present VICTOR HUGO in a few pages is to carve a colossus on a cherry-stone. His work dominates half a century. In the years of exile he began a new and greater career. During the closing ten years his powers had waned, but still they were extraordinary. Even with death he did not retire; posthumous publications astonished and perhaps fatigued the world.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born at Besancon on February 26, 1802, son of a distinguished military officer--

"_Mon pere vieux soldat, ma mere Vendeenne._"

Mother and children followed Commandant Hugo to Italy in 1807; in Spain they halted at Ernani and at Torquemada--names remembered by the poet; at Madrid a Spanish Quasimodo, their school servant, alarmed the brothers Eugene and Victor. A schoolboy in Paris, Victor Hugo rhymed his chivalric epic, his tragedy, his melodrama--"les betises que je faisais avant ma naissance." In 1816 he wrote in his ma.n.u.script book the words, "I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing." At fifteen he was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the "enfant sublime" of Chateaubriand's or of Soumet's praise.

Founder, with his brothers, of the _Conservateur Litteraire_, he entered into the society of those young aspirants who hoped to renew the literature of France. In 1822 he published his _Odes et Poesies Diverses_, and, obtaining a pension from Louis XVIII., he married his early playfellow Adele Foucher. Romances, lyrics, dramas followed in swift succession. Hugo, by virtue of his genius, his domineering temper, his incessant activity, became the acknowledged leader of the romantic school. In 1841 he was a member of the Academy; four years later he was created a peer. Elected deputy of Paris in 1848, the year of revolution, he sat on the Right in the Const.i.tuant, on the Left in the Legislative a.s.sembly, tending more and more towards socialistic democracy. The Empire drove him into exile--exile first at Brussels, then in Jersey, finally in Guernsey, where Hugo, in his own imagination, was the martyred but unsubdued demi-G.o.d on his sea-beaten rock. In 1870, on the fall of the Empire, he returned to Paris, witnessed the siege, was elected to the National a.s.sembly, urged a continuance of the war, spoke in favour of recognising Garibaldi's election, and being tumultuously interrupted by the Right, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels in the interests of his orphaned grandchildren, he was requested to leave, on the ground of his zeal on behalf of the fallen Communists; he returned to Paris, and pleaded in the _Rappel_ for amnesty. In 1875 he was elected a senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with enthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor Hugo died.

His funeral pomps were such that one might suppose the genius of France itself was about to be received at the Pantheon.

In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast force of will operated amid inferior faculties. His character was less eminent than his genius. If it is vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for one's self and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, never was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied than his. He was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, and did not perceive when the sublime became the ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him, charitable to universal humanity, he was capable of pa.s.sionate vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem; and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman.

His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination.

Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pa.s.s with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images.

The voice of his pa.s.sions was leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His laughter was rather boisterous than fine. He is a poet who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtle psychology of lovers' hearts; there was in him a vein of robust sensuality. Children were dear to him, and he knew their pretty ways; a cynical critic might allege that he exploited overmuch the tender domesticities. His eye seized every form, vast or minute, defined or vague; his feeling for colour was rather strong than delicate; his vision was obsessed by the ant.i.thesis of light and shade; his ear was awake to every utterance of wind or wave; phantoms of sound attacked his imagination; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, his own sentiments, to material objects; he took and gave back the soul of things. Words for him were living powers; language was a moving ma.s.s of significant myths, from which he chose and which he aggrandised; sensations created images and words, and images and words created ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; now a solitary breather through pipe or flute; more often the conductor of an orchestra.

To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France is to say too little; the claim that he was the greatest lyric poet of all literature might be urged. The power and magnitude of his song result from the fact that in it what is personal and what is impersonal are fused in one; his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature and of humanity--

"_Son ame aux mille voix, que le Dieu qu'il adore Mit au centre de tout comme un echo sonore._"

And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own ideas, it becomes great as a reverberation of the sensations, the pa.s.sions, and the thoughts of the world. He did not soar tranquilly aloft and alone; he was always a combatant in the world and wave of men, or borne joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius was a long process. The _Odes_ of 1822 and 1824, the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826, Catholic and royalist in their feeling, show in their form a struggling originality oppressed by the literary methods of his predecessors--J.-B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. This originality a.s.serts itself chiefly in the _Ballades_. His early prose romances, _Han d'Islande_ (1823) and _Bug-Jargal_ (1826)--the one a tale of the seventeenth-century man-beast of Norway, the other a tale of the generous St. Domingo slave--are challenges of youthful and extravagant romanticism. _Le Dernier Jour d'un Cond.a.m.ne_ (1829) is a prose study in the pathology of pa.s.sion. The same year which saw the publication of the last of these is also the year of _Les Orientales_. These poems are also studies--amazing studies in colour, in form, in all the secrets of poetic art. The East was popular--Hugo was ever pa.s.sionate for popularity--and Spain, which he had seen, is half-Oriental. But of what concern is the East? he had seen a sunset last summer, and the fancy took him; the East becomes an occasion for marvellous combinations of harmony and l.u.s.trous tinctures; art for its own sake is precious.

From 1827, when _Cromwell_ appeared, to 1843, when the epic in drama _Les Burgraves_ failed, Hugo was a writer for the stage, diverting tragedy from its true direction towards lyrical melodrama.[1] In the operatic libretto _La Esmeralda_ (1836) his lyrical virtuosity was free to display itself in an appropriate dramatic form. The libretto was founded on his own romance _Notre-Dame de Paris_ (1831), an evocation, more imaginative than historical, of the old city of the fifteenth century, its tragic pa.s.sions, its strangeness, its horrors, and its beauty; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black and white; things live in it more truly than persons; the cathedral, by its tyrannous power and intenser life, seems to overshadow the other actors. The tale is a juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an ant.i.thesis of darkness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted humanity appeals for pity.

[Footnote 1: See section VII, this chapter.]

In the volume of verse which followed _Les Orientales_ after an interval of two years, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_ (1831), Hugo is a master of his instrument, and does not need to display his miracles of skill; he is freer from faults than in the poetry of later years, but not therefore more to be admired. His n.o.blest triumphs were almost inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his audacity. Here the lyrism is that of memory and of the heart--intimate, tender, grave, with a feeling for the hearth and home, a sensibility to the tranquillising influences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a faith in G.o.d, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in the epilogue, the spirit of public indignation breaks forth--

"_Et j'ajoute a ma lyre une corde d'airain._"

The spirit of the _Chants du Crespuscule_ (1835) is one of doubt, trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the bourgeois monarchy is already waning; he is a satirist of the present; he sees two things that are majestic--the figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular flood-tide in the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings.

But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness of weltering mist. _Les Voix Interieures_ (1837) resumes the tendencies of the two preceding volumes; the dead Charles X. is reverently saluted; the legendary Napoleon is magnified; the faith in the people grows clearer; the inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear; the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry; Nature, in the symbolic _La Vache_, is the mother and the exuberant nurse of all living things. In _Les Rayons et les...o...b..es_ (1840), Nature is not only the nurse, but the instructress and inspirer of the soul, mingling spirit with spirit. Lamartine's _Le Lac_ and Musset's _Souvenir_ find a companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies, in the _Tristesse d'Olympio_; reminiscences of childhood are magically preserved in the poem of the _Feuillantines_.

From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. Like Lamartine, he had concerned himself with politics. A private grief oppressed his spirits. In 1843 his daughter Leopoldine and her husband of a few short months were drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much to magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination was the exile who launched his prose invective _Napoleon le Pet.i.t_. A year later appeared _Les Chatiments_, in which satire, with some loss of critical discernment, is infused with a pa.s.sionate lyrical quality, unsurpa.s.sed in literature, and is touched at times with epic grandeur.

The Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, restored him to himself with all his superb power and all his violences and errors of genius.

The volumes of _Les Contemplations_ (1856) mark the culmination of Hugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The earlier pieces are of the past, from 1830 to 1843, and resemble the poems of the past. A group of poems, sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which beauty and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling faith in humanity, in nature, and in G.o.d. The concluding pieces are in a greater manner.

The visionary Hugo lives and moves amid a drama of darkness and of light; gloom is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom; and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in song.

But a further development lay before him. The great lyric poet was to carry all his lyric pa.s.sion into an epic presentation, in detached scenes, of the life of humanity. The first part of _La Legende des Siecles_ was published in 1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From the birth of Eve to the trumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and events unrolls before us; gracious episodes relieve the gloom; beauty and sublimity go hand in hand; in the shadow the great criminals are pursued by the great avengers. The spirit of _Les Chatiments_ is conveyed into a view of universal history; if kings are tyrants and priests are knaves, the people is a n.o.ble epic hero. This poem is the epopee of democratic pa.s.sions.

The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's romance _Les Miserables_ (1862). The subject now is modern; the book is rather the chaos of a prose epic than a novel; the hero is the high-souled outcast of society; everything presses into the pages; they are turn by turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical (with such philosophy as Hugo has to offer), humanitarian, lyrical, dramatic, at times realistic; a vast invention, beautiful, incredible, sublime, absurd, absorbing in its interest, a nightmare in its tedium.

We have pa.s.sed beyond the mid-century, but Hugo is not to be presented as a torso. In the tale _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ (1866) the choral voices of the sea cover the thinness and strain of the human voices; if the writer's genius is present in _L'Homme qui Rit_ (1869), it often chooses to display its most preposterous att.i.tudes; the better scenes of _Quatre-vingt Treize_ (1874) beguile our judgment into the generous concessions necessary to secure an undisturbed delight.

These are Hugo's later poems in prose. In verse he revived the feelings of youth with a difference, and performed happy caprices of style in the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois_ (1865); sang the incidents and emotions of his country's sorrow and glory in _L'Annee Terrible_ (1872), and--strange contrast--the poetry of babyland in _L'Art d'etre Grandpere_ (1877). Volume still followed volume--_Le Pape_, _La Pitie Supreme_, _Religions et Religion_, _L'ane_, _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, the drama _Torquemada_. The best pages in these volumes are perhaps equal to the best in any of their author's writings; the pages which force ant.i.thesis, pile up synonyms, develop commonplaces in endless variations, the pages which are hieratic, prophetic, apocalyptic, put a strain upon the loyalty of our admiration. The last legend of Hugo's imagination was the Hugo legend: if theism was his faith, autotheism was his superst.i.tion. Yet it is easy to restore our loyalty, and to rediscover the greatest lyric poet, the greatest master of poetic counterpoint that France has known.

V

ALFRED DE MUSSET has been reproached with having isolated himself from the general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth or love, and the young of two generations were his advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, the void left by the pa.s.sing away of religious faiths. One thing was new and living--poetry. Chenier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine had opened the avenues for the imagination; Byron was dead, but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. Musset, born a poet, was ready for imaginative ventures; he had been introduced, while still a boy, to the Cenacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of romance; at nineteen he published his first collection of poems, _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_, and--an adolescent Cherubin-Don Juan of song--found himself famous.

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather with the light effrontery of youth than with depth of conviction; he was impertinent, ironical, incredulous, blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant Byron minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of the pieces were well composed; all had the "form and feature of blown youth"; the echoes of southern lands had the fidelity and strangeness of echoes tossed from Paris backwards; certain pa.s.sages and lines had a cla.s.sic grace; it might even be questioned whether the _Ballade a la Lune_ was a challenge to the school of tradition, or a jest at the expense of his own a.s.sociates.

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. Musset was not disposed to play the part of the small drummer-boy inciting the romantic battalion to the double-quick. He began to be aware of his own independence. He was romantic, but he had wit and a certain intellectual good-sense; he honoured Racine together with Hugo; he could not merge his individuality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity characteristic of him, Musset was discouraged. It was not in him to write great poetry of an impersonal kind; his _Nuit Venitienne_ had been hissed at the Odeon; and what had he to sing out of his own heart?

He resolved to make the experiment. Three years after his first volume a second appeared, which announced by its t.i.tle that, while still a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage; the _Spectacle dans un Fauteuil_ declared that, though his gla.s.s was small, it was from his own gla.s.s that he would drink.

The gla.s.s contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosser potion. In the drama _La Coupe et les Levres_ he exhibited libertine pa.s.sion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable of attaining self-recovery; in _Namouna_, hastily written to fit the volume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love as conducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; the comedy _a quoi revent les jeunes Filles_, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good prose of wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emanc.i.p.ated himself from the Cenacle, and would neither appeal to the eye with an overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious rhymes. Next year (1833) in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ appeared _Rolla_, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love; through pa.s.sion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of death.

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In _Les Nuits_--two of these (_Mai_, _Octobre_) inspired by the Italian joy and pain--he speaks simply and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, shall be his consolers--

"_Apres avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore; Il faut aimer sans cesse, apres avoir aime._"

Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the _Lettre a Lamartine_, the _Espoir en Dieu_, the _Souvenir_, the elegy _a la Malibran_, the later stanzas _Apres une Lecture_ (1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset--the Musset who will live.

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind; but the years were years of la.s.situde. His patriotic song, _Le Rhin Allemand_, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died.

Pa.s.sion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, _esprit_, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse--these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's pa.s.sion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, has borne the lapse of time ill.

"J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. _Pierre et Camille_, with its deaf-and-dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relenting grandfather "Bonjour, papa," has a pretty innocence. _Le Fils de t.i.tien_ returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence.

_Frederic et Bernerette_ and _Mimi Pinson_ may be said to have created the poetic literature of the grisette--gay and good, or erring and despairful--making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories of Paul de k.o.c.k as a weed.

Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset's best _Comedies_ and _Proverbes_ (proverbial sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented _Un Caprice_ and _Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermee_ at St. Petersburg.

The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy, _Lorenzaccio_, was an effort beyond the province and the powers of Musset. His _Andre del Sarto_, a tragic representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of romance, a world of suns.h.i.+ne and of perpetual spring, as _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_, _Les Caprices de Marianne_, _Le Chandelier_, _Il ne faut jurer de rien_, that Musset showed how romantic art could become in a high sense cla.s.sic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and pa.s.sion. The graces of the age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love; sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approaches the beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest of our own great enchanter.

VI

Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset.

Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand that moulds and colours--that is all. A child of the South, born at Tarbes in 1811, THeOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gerard de Nerval having summoned him to take part in the battle of _Hernani_, he swore by the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter.

His first volume, _Poesies_, appeared in 1830, and was followed in two years by _Albertus_, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The _Comedie de la Mort_ evokes the ill.u.s.trious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The _Orientales_ was his poetic gospel; but the _Orientales_ is precisely the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured with vivid pigments.

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like fas.h.i.+on, seeking rather to communicate impressions than to p.r.o.nounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century poets--Theophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others--published in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the t.i.tle _Les Grotesques_, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on _Les Progres de la Poesie Francaise depuis 1830_. A reader of that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and s.h.i.+fted as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of life or as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of a Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collection of gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skill and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in one of his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, and found that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; on the faith of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ he had loved the old cathedrals; "the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, which with me was never very severe."

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonis.h.i.+ng the bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on all subjects except art had less value than those of the philistine.

_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ has lost any pretensions it possessed to supereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth; such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty.

In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness--the sense of mystery he did not in truth possess--on a basis of exactly carved and exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days of Louis XIII., _Le Capitaine Fraca.s.se_, suggested doubtless by Scarron's _Roman Comique_, and patiently retouched during a quarter of a century.