[In the following essay, Bishop discusses the use of a complex, romantic irony which Gautier employed for humorous effect and for the fuller treatment of serious themes.]

No French author has better epitomized the romantic dilemma than Théophile Gautier. His lifelong yearning for the ideal was accompanied by a career-long pessimism that told him his frantic search was futile. He suffered the agonizing dual awareness that, on the one hand, the human condition was intolerable and, on the other, transcendence was impossible. One tries to spread one's wings, says the heroine of Mademoiselle de Maupin, but they are weighed down by slime, the corrupt body anchors the soul to earth. Critics have spoken of Gautier's Gnostic and Manichaean dualism, of his view of the universe as a battleground upon which the forces of good and evil fight for dominance. But for this unbeliever, orthodox Christianity—especially its analysis of man's dualism—provided the central text, and Gautier found it eloquently expressed in Hugo's preface to Cromwell, which "shone in our eyes," says Gautier of himself and his fellow romantics of 1827, "like the Tables of the Law on Sinai."

Gautier's aesthetic was likewise dualistic. He never fully abandoned his romantic belief in the relativity of taste and the importance of the artist's private vision, his individual genius, imagination, and inspiration, but even during the days of the Petit Cénacle he also thought of art in terms of craftsmanship, hard work, and the universality of the classical ideal. Even as late as Emaux et camées (first published in 1852) Gautier combines impassive and impersonal texts inspired by the doctrine of art for art's sake with other texts expressing an intense personal lyricism.

Johanna Richardson (Théophile Gautier) and James Smith ("Gautier") have shown that Gautier's belief that everything useful is ugly, that only those things having no purpose can be beautiful, had to cohabit with a conflicting doctrine: that art and artists must be practical. "Nowadays," says Gautier, "Benvenuto Cellini would not refuse to make tops for … canes and paperweights." Gautier was capable both of railing against the railroads and against the ugliness of industrial progress in general and of praising with genuine enthusiasm the inauguration of new railway lines.

Gautier's aesthetic was indeed elastic enough to include objectivity and subjectivity, discipline and caprice. Caprice could even take the extreme form of preciosity: 'The most exquisite preciosity pushes right and left its capricious tendrils and its bizarre flowers with their intoxicating perfumes—preciosity, that beautiful French flower." And his conception of the well-wrought artifact does not preclude what Friedrich von Schlegel had boldly touted: buffoonery and the baroque arabesque.

Beyond the compositions that can be called classical … there exists a genre for which the name "arabesque" would be appropriate, in which, without great concern for linear purity, the pencil engages in a thousand baroque fantasies.

We believe that one can admit these comic caprices into poetry just as one admits arabesques into painting.

Two of Gautier's major themes are the impermanence of life and of love and the uncertainty of "reality." Short stories like "Une Nuit de Cléopâtre" (1883) and "Le roman de la momie" (1857) treat of impossible love while Gautier's report on his extensive travels in Spain speaks of the inevitable decay and destruction even of great civilizations and religions. Georges Poulet has noted (Etudes) that Gautier's visual power made him more painfully aware than other writers of the perishable nature of things:

The object appears simultaneously as beautiful—and beauty seems invested with eternity or atemporality—and as already corroded by time. Nothing must have seemed more intolerable to Gautier than this simultaneous apperception of "eternal beauty" and of the eternal work of dissolution that accompanies its presence. The sensible object was seen, simultaneously, at the very same time, as eternal and ephemeral, as unalterable and deteriorating. (Emphasis added) To take a single example:

Marble, pearl, rose, dove,
Everything is dissolved, everything is destroyed;
The pearl melts, the marble falls,
The flower fades and the bird flies away.
("Affinités secrètes" in Poésies Complètes)

The futility of everything is the major theme of Gautier's ironic romance, Le Capitaine Fracasse (1861), and the uncertainty of everything underlies the plot of La Morte amoureuse (1836). In the latter work ontological uncertainty is joined with moral ambiguity. As Richard Grant (Gautier) sums up: "It is not only hard to know who one is but also who one ought to be."

Gautier was an admirer of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hoff mann's direct influence can be seen in works like Onuphrius Wphly (1832) and Deux acteurs pour un rôle (1841). The fantastique, of which Gautier was not only a great admirer but a prolific producer, has been related by critics such as Hubert Juin, Roger Caillois, and Tzvetan Todorov to what can be called an uncertainty principle. Caillois, for instance, defines the fantastic as "a break in the recognizable order of things, the eruption of the unacceptable in the midst of the unchanging daily legality." The main source of terror in the fantastic, says Richard Grant (Gautier), is the sudden discovery that what was thought to be an orderly, rational world breaks down, "one can no longer be certain of the rules of the game." Gautier, the visual poet for whom the external world exists, is also a poet possessed by a "feeling for the invisible world" (Italia). Michael Riffaterre ("Rêve et réalité") has shown that even in Gautier's most objective and realistic descriptions, as in the récit de voyage, there are sudden eruptions of the supernatural or the fantastic.

Mobility is conferred on that which in real life is immobile, animation on that which is inert: movement surrealizes, so to speak, the real.

Solids dissolve, lines are displaced, landmarks change, in short, every certainty of the real is called into question once again.

Gautier only half-believed many of his most cherished convictions. Even his belief in the divinity of art was tempered at times by the gnawing thought that art is an illusory good. Beginning his career as one of the most excessively ardent romantics, as his history of romanticism vividly tells us, he soon became an ardent critic of romantic excesses, including his own. He and Musset were among the first romantics to criticize romanticism in general as well as their own romanticism, that is, to indulge in selfirony and self-parody. The key texts for Gautier in this regard are Albertus (1832), Les Jeunes-France (1833), and the vaudeville, Un voyage en Espagne (1843), first published under the title of Tra los montes. Even as late as Spirite (1865) we witness an author who warns his readers to beware of unreliable authors and their narrators and who deliberately deflates a theme—the problem of reality versus ideality—that he obviously takes seriously. It is not surprising, then, to find Gautier indulging in parabasis and the destruction of artistic illusion in a play like Une Larme du diable (1839) in which the author appears as one of the characters and speaks directly to the audience about the inadequacy of the play's structure. In a somewhat similar vein the hero of Le Capitaine Fracasse, who has joined a wandering theatrical troupe, varies the tone of his voice within the same scene and wears only a half-mask so that the audience can see both the actor and the real man.

…. .

Albertus and d'Albert, both of whom are autobiographical figures, tell us much of the author's most intimate feelings during his early, romantic period. The entire first section (chapters 1-5) of Mademoiselle de Maupin is devoted not to the heroine but to the hero, who gives us a lyrical confession in the enfant du siècle mode, although the siècle is displaced for the sake of historical accuracy to the turn of the eighteenth century. The main components of d'Albert's psyche are ones we would expect to find in a romantic hero: boredom, melancholy, misanthropy, cynicism, solitude, and the vague élans sans but, yearnings prompted by no precise object. Such yearnings are also felt by the heroine, who is an alter ego of d'Albert and the author as well as the incarnation of their ideal (i.e., perfection symbolized by the heroine's bisexuality and by her obsession with hermaphroditism, which represents completeness and perfection through the [impossible] harmony of opposites).

Mademoiselle de Maupin begins exactly like Senancour's Obermann, with the hero writing to a friend not of the events of his life, since there aren't any, but of his ideas and feelings. The language is identical: "But, since you insist that I write to you, then I must tell you what I think and what I feel, and I must tell you the story of my ideas, for lack of events and actions." A passive hero, he spends his life, like Obermann, "waiting." For what? He does not know. He is tormented by the same vague desires and passions as René; like Rene's, one of the objects of these desires is an ideal woman; but another component is latent homosexuality.

Like Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, d'Albert is supremely indifferent to everything around him and, like him, enjoys a lukewarm affection for a mistress he soon wants to be rid of. The hero's indecisiveness in this regard is finely analyzed and is worthy of the pen of Constant: "I am almost angry at her for the very sincerity of her passion, which is one more shackle, and which makes a breaking of our relations more difficult or less excusable." Like Adolphe, d'Albert speaks to his mistress of love for fear of speaking of its disappearance.

When he describes for us his heroic otherness, d'Albert gives us an almost direct translation from Manfred: "My heart beats for none of the things that make most men's heart beat.—My sorrows and my joys are not those of my fellow beings." Manfred had proclaimed,

At times d'Albert is a stranger even to himself: "The meaning of my existence escapes me completely. The sound of my own voice surprises me to an unimaginable degree, and I would be tempted at times to take it for the voice of another"—a disconcerting sensation that will be retold by Malraux in La Condition humaine.

The hero describes himself as a romantic puer senex.

Is it not strange that I, who am still in the blondest months of adolescence, I have reached that degree of satiety as to be no longer tickled by anything except by the bizarre or the difficult…?

I am stricken by that malady that attacks whole populations and powerful men in their old age:—the impossible.

He is explicitly called by Rosette a beau ténébreux, a hero wrapped in Byronic gloom, and he calls himself a marked man, a fated and fatal hero: "Everyone is born with a black or white seal. Apparently mine is black."

However, we are not allowed to take d'Albert's problems, which are real and grave, with tragic seriousness. The novel is frequently interrupted by allusions to the fact that this is a novel, a "glorious novel," an "illustrious novel," a "truly French novel," and so on. The author tells us that it is boring to write a novel and even more boring to read one. In one place the author will apologize for an awkward simile; in another the narrator will bemoan the inordinate length of a really fine and sincere burst of lyricism: "Ouf! there's a tirade of interminable length, almost straight out of the epistolary style.—What a long-winded passage!" And at another point the author tells us that he cannot go on with his story; his idea of perfection makes him feel nothing but disgust for this inferior novel he is writing.

The story proper is framed with ironic detachment. Here is the beginning:

At this point in the story, if the debonair reader is willing to allow us, we are going for a time to leave to his reveries the worthy character who up to now has occupied stage center all by himself and speaks for himself, and return to the ordinary form of the novel, without however forbidding ourselves to assume later on the dramatic form, if the need arises, and reserving for ourselves the right to dip again into that kind of epistolary confession that the aforesaid young man was addressing to his friend, persuaded as we are that, however penetrating and sagacious we may be, we surely ought to know less about these things than he himself.

And here is the ending, the moment when d'Albert finally receives Madeleine's nocturnal visit, which is both the climax of the "plot" and the beginning of the dénouement: "Who was surprised?" says the narrator to the reader. "It's neither you nor I, for you and I have been prepared for this visit for quite a while now." Thus, d'Albert's great moment is deflated more cruelly than Stendhal would ever have done to Julien. The reader is not allowed to share the hero's excitement vicariously: "He uttered a little cry of surprise midway between oh! and ah! However I have every reason to believe that it was closer to ah! than oh!" The novel's sad ending is punctured by a final ironic intervention:

At the end of the week, the unhappy, disappointed lover received a letter from Théodore [Madeleine], which we are going to transcribe. I do fear that it may not satisfy either my male or my female readers; but, in all truth, the letter was such and not otherwise, and this glorious novel will have no other conclusion.

…. .

Not only is Gautier's Albertus still another incarnation of the romantic hero, but the author seems to go to some pains to ensure that he is a stereotypical one. A number of critics have condemned the lack of originality in the poem, but I don't believe that the presentation of a unique hero is really one of the author's or, better, the work's intentions. At any rate Albertus is indeed a stereotype of the romantic hero. He has, for instance, the regard de lion of the Hugoesque hero—

His lion's stare and the wild spark
That leaped at times from his eyes
Made you shiver and pale despite yourself.

—a reminiscence, too, of the Byronic hero whose cold stare dazzles but also "chills" the vulgar heart. Albertus's lip is "severe" and forms the mocking smile of the Giaour. But his principal expression, the narrator tells us, is a "great disdain" for everything and everyone. He is a sad, bored, solitary misanthrope; "his door is closed to all." He is, inevitably, a puer senex:

—Having always inquired, ever since his birth,
About the why and wherefore, he was pessimistic
As is a man grown old.

—A great knowledge is a great scourge;
It turns a child into an old man….
…. .

As soon as the cause is seen, one already knows the effect.
Existence weighs down upon you and everything seems insipid.

…. .

Love is now but a spasm, and glory an empty word,
Like a squeezed lemon the heart becomes arid.
—Don Juan arrives after Werther.

Driven by a Faustian urge to obtain divine omniscience and omnipotence, he learns all of human knowledge that one can learn and, possessing that, promptly wants to die. Only fear deters his suicidal hand. But at twenty he is already ripe for death.

Like Musset's Hassan, Albertus does not believe in true love and settles for a quantitative ethic in which repeated superficial pleasures serve as opiate to his anguish.

… What does it matter, after all, if the cause
Be sad, provided the effect produced be sweet?
—Let's enjoy ourselves, let's make for ourselves a superficial bliss;
A beautiful mask is better than an ugly face.

Although good-hearted at bottom, he believes in neither worldly nor otherworldly values and proposes for his life no lofty goals: "He let his life go at random."

In a second Faustian impulse, he sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for a brief moment of love with the beautiful witch, Véronique. Although he knows perfectly well that the love won't last, he is still greatly shocked when the beautiful maiden at midnight (the conventional hour should warn us not to take with excessive gravity the conventionality of the hero) turns into the old hag once again, and the Devil, after an orgy in which all the inhabitants of hell participate, comes to claim him for his own.

A sad career indeed, but the tale is not told, of course, in the lugubrious tone that my résumé suggests. We are advised in the Preface that the tale is only "semi-diabolique"; it is also "semi-fashionable"; the latter, significantly, is the most prominent adjective in the poem and tells us at once that the clichés and plagiarisms are meant to be ironically transparent and the hero something less than heroic. The poem is half-serious and half-ironic, the mixture producing romantic irony since the ironic does not simply cohabit with the serious, it invades it. We need not linger over the devices used to produce this irony; we have seen them before: authorial intrusions, some of which disparage the very poem in progress, digressions (i.e., structural irony), asides to the reader, and especially a constant short-circuiting of the narrative in favor of allusions to the composition of the narrative. In stanza 59, to take a single example, the poet tells us that it is "now time to get back to the subject" of this rambling and disconnected tale; then, instead of simply introducing us to the hero, he tells us that "before going further, it might be a good idea to sketch his physical portrait." The portrait itself is done with a certain playfulness and désinvolture.

—His hair, thrown into disorder by his fingers,
Fell around a brow that Gall, in ecstasy,
Would have examined for six months and used as source
For a dozen treatises.

Gautier, then, uses most of the basic strategies of the romantic ironist. Rather than give a detailed rehearsal of them, it would seem more profitable at this point to explore the serious implications of the irony in both works, especially since this is still largely unexplored territory. As late as 1975 a critic [Tennant] can wonder whether Albertus can be interpreted at all, and another critic considers the poem unsuccessful because "the style continually distracts from the subject" [Richardson]. Similarly, Maupin has been condemned by a good number of critics for its incoherent structure. In my view the style of the poem and the novel, especially their romantic irony, is both the foundation of their subject matter and the key to their interpretation. I also believe that Gautier, as much as any other French or German writer, gives us many insights into the mainsprings of romantic irony.

Consider first the concluding stanza of Albertus.

—This heroic and unequaled poem
Offers an admirable and profound allegory;
But, in order to suck the marrow, one must break the bone,
…. .
—I could have clearly explained every detail,
Nailed a learned commentary to every word.—
I believe, dear reader, that you are intelligent enough

To understand me.—So, goodnight.—Close the door,
Give me a kiss goodnight, and tell them to bring me
A volume of Pantagruel.

Despite the cavalier, tongue-in-cheek tonality, there is a half-serious Rabelaisian invitation to find the "substantific marrow" within the bone, to find serious subject matter despite the playful treatment. The invitation is convincingly reinforced by the fact that roughly 50 percent of Albertus and 95 percent of Maupin are dead serious.

A serious theme running throughout the poem that can be considered its chief one is the instability of human sentiments. In one of his digressions the narrator tells us about his own love life, which was an ecstatic but evanescent affair.

All that happiness is no more. Who would have thought it?
We are as strangers to one another; all men
Are thus;—their "forever" does not last six months.

Their "forever" does not last six months—this antithesis catches one of the moods behind romantic irony. A philosopher-critic who has captured the mood well is Vladimir Jankélévitch.

Our feelings are ephemeral and our beliefs unstable …. the passion will end, despite all our pledges; we swear to heaven that the loved person is irreplaceable and, when we have replaced her, we envisage, not without a smile, that disappointing absolute which is always eternal during the occurrence and provisional afterwards. Attrition or conversion—a feeling is eternal only until further notice! A definitive vow is definitive only until Easter! What creature here below can say Forever?

Even the witch Véronique recognizes this sad truth:

Man loves as he lives: one day.

The romantic ironist presents us with sudden shifts of tone or mood that are playful on the surface, but if one looks beneath this surface, one sees the dangerous undertow. In Mademoiselle de Maupin, for instance, the author shows us how the romantic vague des passions can lead to cynicism, then to emotional aridity, and finally to self-irony. For lack of the right nourishment the passions feed on each other and become internecine:

All my unoccupied passions are quietly snarling in my heart, and devour each other for lack of any other nourishment.

Tossing and turning within me are vague desires that fuse together and give birth to others which then devour them.

Nothing is so tiring as those motiveless whirlwinds of desire and those yearnings without an object…. I laugh in my own face.

Even when a man's heart is not filled with vague passions, it is filled with "absurdities," irreconcilable "contradictions" that prevent him from ever being more than "half-happy" or half-sad, half-moral or half-immoral, half-serious or half-ironic. Romantic irony is the science of the half rather than the whole. Not only do human sentiments keep changing, they change with such alarming rapidity that one's actions cannot keep up with them.

Whenever I write a sentence, the thought that it renders is already as far from me as if a century had passed instead of a second, and I often mix with it, in spite of myself, something of the thought that has replaced it in my mind.

That is why I would never be able to discover how to live,—either as a poet or as a lover.—I cannot render the ideas that I no longer have;—I possess women only when I have forgotten them and when I am in love with others; … how could I express my will, since, no matter how much I hasten, I no longer have the feeling that corresponds to what I am doing, (emphasis added)

How, then, can one measure the moral worth of others or even of oneself at any particular moment? "There are moments when I recognize only God above me, and other moments when I judge myself to be the equal of the bug under the rock or the mollusc on its sandbank." Romantic irony expresses a moral agnosticism ("I have completely lost the knowledge of good and evil") based partly on the fact that human sentiments are contradictory and fleeting and also on the conviction that there are no absolute standards. The heroic mode, under these conditions, seems "silly"; the mock-heroic is the best defense against disillusion; self-mockery is a protection against self-deception. All this can be read on Albertus's face:

The peculiar tension produced by romantic irony also reflects the unbridgeable gap between reality and ideality. In Albertus we catch a fleeting view of the gap in the following lines:

Benevolent reader, this is my entire story
Faithfully told, as well as my memory,
A disorganized register, has been able to remind me
Of those nothings that were everything, of which
Love is composed and of which later one makes fun.

—Excuse this pause: The bubble I enjoyed
Blowing and which floated in the air, multicolored,
Has suddenly collapsed into a drop of water;
It broke on the corner of a pointed roof.
—Because it knocked against the Real, my pleasant
Chimera broke….

And in Maupin we have a vivid image of this romantic dilemma:

I can neither walk nor fly; the sky attracts me when I am on the ground, the earth when I am in the sky; above, the North wind pulls off my feathers; below, the pebbles offend my feet. The soles of my feet are too tender to walk on the broken glass of reality; my wingspread too narrow to soar above things.

Romantic heroes, even those not treated with romantic irony, all share this predicament. In each one the idealist is restrained by the cynical realist, and the latter is restrained by the idéaliste malgré lui. Since he has a home in neither world, he yearns for the one while immersed in the other, or when presented from the viewpoint of romantic irony, he shuttles—playfully and painfully—between the two.

In Maupin the hero describes his life in terms of this shuttle but also as "an absurd treadmill." And when the narrator of Albertus speaks of "this silly story," both the general and the immediate context make the epithet polyvalent: it applies simultaneously to the poem in progress, to the hero's entire career, and to life in general. It is an intimation of the Absurd.

Before the romantic period, with the notable exceptions of Sterne and Diderot, the narrator's attitude toward his hero or his story, or the hero's attitude toward himself in firstperson narratives, was usually unequivocal: it was either positive or negative. Or if it was ambivalent, the ambivalence was clearly stated and explained; or if it was ironic, the irony was transparent, since it was almost always a form of antiphrasis, the narrator obviously blaming the person or thing he was pretending to praise, or vice versa. With the romantic period the narrative point of view begins to become more and more problematic; we cannot measure the exact dosage of antipathy or sympathy, of authorial identification or alienation in works informed by romantic irony. We can only feel the tensions, observe the shuttlings and oscillations, admire the complexities and, finally, puzzle at the paradoxes.