In the happy youth of Romanticism, Gautier, like many another enthusiast, madly worshipped those painters in whom the gift of color oft outweighed the sense of form. He was an adorer of the most glowing palettes, and the Venetians on the one hand and Rubens on the other won his constant praise. It so happened that the Museum of the Louvre was well provided with masterpieces of the one and the other school, and there it was that Gautier made his first acquaintance with the beauty and splendor of color that, it must be owned, was sadly lacking in the works of the school of David and his successors.

Then, though he was later on to become one of the most persistent globetrotters that France has ever turned out, he had not begun to travel when he felt the fascination of Rubens. That charm he has described time and again in his various articles and books; it held him fast; it compelled him to a quest as important in his eyes, at that time, as that of Jason or Sir Galahad. So he started for Belgium in the belief that it was a land filled to overflowing with splendid creatures golden-haired, blue-eyed, and voluptuously formed. "The notion," he says in his account of the trip, "came into my mind in the Louvre Museum, as I was walking through the Rubens Gallery. The sight of his handsome women, with full forms, of those lovely and healthy bodies, of those mountains of rosy flesh with their wealth of golden hair, filled me with the desire to compare them with their living prototypes. .. . I was on my way to the North in quest of the fair-haired female."

On that trip the one and only Rubens he beheld was "a stout kitchen-wench, with huge hips and amazingly large breasts, who was quietly sweeping the gutter, never for an instant suspecting that she constituted a most authentic Rubens. This find aroused in me hopes that proved subsequently absolutely deceitful."

It is on this disappointing experience that Gautier built up the pretty tale of "The Fleece of Gold" (1839), in which the hero is, naturally enough, a painter in search of just the same rarity, and, like Gautier, finds one specimen only. To have made the heroine of the tale a mere blowsy kitchen-wench would not, however, have suited the author's temperament. Gautier above all things was an artist, a lover of the Beautiful in its most refined and most exquisite form; quite capable, therefore, of idealizing the somewhat gross type he had come upon in Valenciennes into the ethereal and delicate maiden engaged in the congenial and appropriate occupation of making lace instead of sweeping the gutter. Beyond this, [the] real object of ["The Fleece of Gold"] is to afford opportunity for the writer to talk upon art, and Rubens in particular; to develop his views upon color in painting, and to indulge his taste for the description of a quaint old place such as Antwerp has not altogether ceased to be. The love story is merely subordinate to this principal purpose, just as at times in Balzac's novels one wonders whether the conflict of human passions and greed has not been introduced merely as a sop to a reader whom the prolonged descriptions of things might otherwise repel.

The human element, indeed, in Gautier* s tales is never very masterful. It is apparently indispensable to the satisfaction of the public, and, writing for that unsatisfactory public, Gautier yields the point, but his heart is less in that part of the work than in the one which gives him scope for the exposition of his most cherished beliefs, and especially of his diatribes against civilization and the unspeakable bourgeois, whom he abominated as heartily as did Flaubert. He consequently introduces some other element of interest: the search for what does not exist, or exists only in rare cases, as in "The Fleece of Gold"; the mysterious and fanciful, as in "The Dead Leman" (1836); the profound delight of music and its strange consequences, as in "The Nest of Nightingales" (1833), or picturesqueness, in some form or other, as in "Militona," "The Quartette," Fortunio, and many another tale and novel.

Nor is "Arria Marcella" (1852) any exception to the rule. At first glance it may appear to be a love tale, pure and simple, but it quickly becomes plain that the real delight Gautier takes in his subject is the evocation of a past that strikes him as far superior as an embodiment of Beauty to the utterly commonplace civilization of the nineteenth century in which, he might almost say, it was his misfortune, as it was Célestin Nanteuil's, to be condemned to live.

Besides, it was the fashion, in those Romanticist times, to indulge in evocations of the past. The fashion had been set by Chateaubriand in his "Martyrs," which inspired Augustin Thierry to become an historian and to delve into the archives of France. Flaubert, ere long, though a realist in the more important part of his work, followed the same path and gave to the public Salammbô and Herodias. Gautier, therefore, was merely pleasing the readers of his works and obeying a widespread impulse when he composed "Arria Marcella" and The Romance of a Mummy, recalling Pompeii in the one and ancient Egypt in the other.

There was, however, still another cause; the influence of [E. T. A.] Hoffmann, the author of fantastic tales, exceedingly popular in those days and by no means forgotten even now. Gautier studied Hoffmann to some purpose, and appreciated the skilful manner in which the German writer produced the impression of the strange and the mysterious by the use of absolutely legitimate means. "Hoffmann's use of the marvellous," he says in an article upon the "Tales," "is not quite analogous to the use of it in fairy tales; he always keeps in touch with the world of reality, and rarely does one come across a palace of carbuncles with diamond turrets in his works, while he makes no use whatever of the wands and talismans of 'The Thousand and One Nights.' The supernatural elements to which he commonly has recourse are occult sympathy and antipathy, curious forms of mania, visions, magnetism, and the mysterious and malignant influence of a vaguely indicated principle of evil. It is the positive and plausible side of the fantastic; and in truth Hoffmann's tales should be called tales of caprice of fancy rather than fantastic tales."

It is plainly Hoffmann's method that Gautier has adopted in the composition of "Arria Marcella," and of "The Nest of Nightingales," as also in "The Dead Leman." The reader is puzzled to know whether the adventures of Octavian, the young priest, and the maidens twain are real or fanciful; whether the two former dreamed dreams or actually experienced the astounding delights, at once bewildering and hideous, which the novelist relates so seriously. This is where the story-teller's art plays its part to perfection.

"The Nest of Nightingales," nevertheless, should not be classed with the other two tales of mystery or fancy. It is more an idealization of music; an attempt to symbolize the genius of that art and the effect upon its devotees. It is one of the most exquisite tales Gantier ever wrote, and has ever remained deservedly popular. It exhibits all his grace, all his lightness of touch, all his deep sense of Beauty.

For, with him, it is always to Beauty, ideal, abstract Beauty, that one returns. Beauty was the one cult of his life; the deity to which he was never for an instant unfaithful. He believed in it; he strove after it; he endeavored to make men feel it; he was roused to wrath by the incapacity of the greater number of his readers to conceive even what it really is, and many of his exaggerations in the Romanticist line are due simply to the irritation aroused in him by the dulness and slow-wittedness of the profanum vulgus, whom he despised as cordially as did Horace, and whom he detested even more than did the Roman singer.