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.

In his boyhood Théophile became a worshiper of that master romanticist, Victor Hugo, whom he was permitted to meet while yet a youth of nineteen, and who graciously encouraged the boy to publish his verses. Though Gautier afterward laughed delightedly and delightfully at the extremes of the earlier romantic school, and though both in his historical work on romanticism and in his papers on contemporaneous writers, his biting satire searched out its weaknesses, he never ceased to feel its influence and cherish a reverence for its anointed apostle, the creator of Les Misérables.

In those formative days the young man was physically slight and almost frail—remote as yet from the massive giant of flashing black eye and dark leonine mane, whose physique enabled him to sustain many a bout with the wine cup and rejoice in pleasures of table, until, his natural powers otherwise unabated, and but sixty-one years of age, he succumbed to an enlarged heart and died at Paris, October 23, 1872.

Gautier, like many another man of letters, presents some contradictions of temperament and production, but for the most part his work is infused with his own strong individuality.

Like Loti, he knew the life of many lands and wrote sympathetically of Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, and the alluring East. A painter turned art critic and journalist—and so indefatigable a journalist that he himself has estimated that it would require three hundred volumes to compass his collected writings—he pursued a painter’s methods in his literary work. A poet of charm and attainment, and a dramatic critic of secure place, he informed both verse and criticism with the melodious spirit which issued from his love for music. In faithful description the precursor of the realists, he still adhered to his romanticist ideals. Word-connoisseur, and stylist of the first order, he loved perfection of literary form because such harmonies were the outward limbs of beauty.

Here was an aggressive, positive, individual man, strong in love as in loathing, tender to all animals, living, like Balzac, joyously a life of struggle against debt, and at last winning a place greater than the forbidden seat in the Academy—a place among the most distinguished romanticists that France ever gave to the world.

Gautier’s worship of beauty is not easy to formulate. M. de Sumichrast has termed it “not immoral, but unmoral.” The presence or the absence of virtue or of vice made no difference to him if only the person were beautiful. He no more demanded moral qualities in his characters than he did in the lovely lines of a hill crest. Beauty was the final flame for the adoration of this sensuous acolyte. In all life, at home and widely journeying abroad, he sought it, and when he found it, whether in human form, in relics of ancient art, in modern picture and marble, or in the unrivalled symmetry of nature, his whole being throbbed with delight.

As a youth he fell in love with the robust, fleshy women that Rubens had painted for the Louvre, and straightway pilgrimaged to Belgium to find the originals. His experiences were laughable—perhaps a trifle pathetic. The one slattern whose generous bulk met his Rubenic ideals was scrubbing. But out of this boyish episode grew that exquisite tale, “The Fleece of Gold”—a modern covering which, unlike Jason’s, was a woman’s wealth of blonde hair.

As the story runs, Tiburce, a young dilettante painter, had always found more beauty in the feminine creations of the great painters than in the most lovely flesh-and-blood women he ever met, so he spent much time in contemplating these exquisite creations of art. At length, from having studied certain Flemish pictures, he decided to go into Belgium “in search of the blonde”—he would love a Fleming.

In Brussels and in Laeken the quest of this new Jason was unsuccessful, so he went to Antwerp, where he was as diligent as before—and equally without reward. At length he saw in the Cathedral Rubens’ masterpiece, “The Descent from the Cross,” and was stricken dumb by the beauty of the Magdalen in this remarkable picture. “The sight of that face was to Tiburce a revelation from on high; scales fell from his eyes, he found himself face to face with his secret dream, with his unavowed hope; the intangible image which he had pursued with all the ardor of an amorous imagination, and of which he had been able to espy only the profile or the ravishing fold of a dress; the capricious and untamed chimera, always ready to unfold its restless wings, was there before him, fleeing no more, motionless in the splendor of its beauty.”

Then followed daily visits to the Cathedral, rapt, dazed, worshiping.

One day on the street Tiburce catches sight of a woman who bears—a striking resemblance to the Magdalen! Her—Gretchen—he eventually meets, and to her he reluctantly gives his love. Yet, though Gretchen comes to love Tiburce, she cannot evoke in him quite the same feelings he knows in the presence of Rubens’ beautiful woman—the Magdalen is still his ideal. Even when he christens the girl with the name of the Penitent, the transformation is not complete. At length Gretchen, hidden behind a pillar, overhears Tiburce sighing out his worship toward the woman of the painting: “How I would love thee to-morrow if thou wert living!”—and realizes that she is loved only vicariously.

By and by they go to Paris, where the artist feels his love for the absent Magdalen grow instead of wane, and Gretchen can bear her jealous unhappiness no longer. She breaks out into a tender eloquence of reproach: “You are ambitious to love; you are deceived concerning yourself, you will never love. You must have perfection, the ideal and poesy—all those things which do not exist. Instead of loving in a woman the love that she has for you, of being grateful to her for her devotion and for the gift of her heart, you look to see if she resembles that plaster Venus in your study.... You are not a lover, poor Tiburce, you are simply a painter.”

And so she goes on, uncovering to him his foolish delusion, ending in a passion of abandonment, of “sublime immodesty,” by appearing before him like Aphrodite rising from the sea.

Swept by all this nobility of her discerning spirit, and all the ravishing charm of her beauty, Tiburce seizes his brushes and does master work—and then begs his new-found love to name the day for the crying of their banns.

Perhaps it needs no word here to emphasize one phase of Gautier’s nature—he knew himself to be a beauty-lover, and he knew all the limitations of character that this cult rendered inevitable.

A second force in Gautier’s life was his orientalism. In this he was not only conscious of the strain of eastern blood that pulsed through both body and temperament, but he was, by reason of long application, constant travel, and the varied opportunities of a critic’s life, a savant on matters oriental, particularly Pompeian and Egyptian.

Here, again, “The Romance of a Mummy,” a long tale, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” a short tale, and “The Mummy’s Foot,” which follows in translation, display the savant in his work. The movement of life in ancient Egypt in the time of the Hebrew bondage, and all that highly colored, picturesque civilization, afford him the always coveted background which he valued as much for itself as for its use as a setting.

In another of his shorter stories, “Arria Marcella,” the savant is also evident. The familiar but terrible theme of the vampire woman is set in an idealized reconstruction of Pompeian life; just as that one perfect short-story from the pen of Gautier, “The Dead Leman” (La Morte Amoureuse), marvellously made to live again the mediæval spirit in the poignantly pitiful mistress whose end is the heart-break of selfish passion; and “The Thousand-and-Second Night” evokes anew the indistinct, subtle, alluring odors of the Arabian Nights.

The three best-known longer tales of Gautier—technically they are not precisely novels—are Mademoiselle de Maupin, a prose-song to beauty—immoral, daring, and beautiful; Captain Fracasse, whose smash-’em-up, picaroon hero leads us through abundant adventures; and Spirite, a notable contrast to the materialism displayed—almost flaunted—in his other work. Spirite is a story of fantasy; but it is more: with a tender delicacy and spiritual subtlety which well may surprise his public, Gautier presents the contrasting love-lure of Lavinia d’Audefini, a disembodied woman, and the very real but—here is the remarkable part—less attractive charms of Mme. d’Ymbercourt, a red-ripe woman indeed. We are indebted to Gautier for this one story as a demonstration that, while his tales are mostly as unmoral as the pigments of his literary palette, he can at will delineate the ethereal, and in so doing disclose a fine understanding of spiritual values.