SOURCE: Afterward in Theophile Gautier: His Life & Times, Max Reinhardt, 1958, pp. 278-90.

[In the excerpt below, Richardson maintains that since Gautier "was an artist and a poet, not a conventional journalist or critic . . . he gave journalism a new significance and a new status" by making his criticism "a work of literary art."]

Gautier's criticism is indeed (in Brunet's phrase) an organ of revivification; and it not only revivifies the drama, art and literature of the past but, as Gautier anticipated, it is a vast source of information about the arts, celebrities and events of the nineteenth century. Gautier's dramatic criticism reflects the French theatre from Marie Dorval to Sarah Bernhardt, from Hugo to Sardou. His music criticism embraces the performances of Chopin and of Liszt, the struggles of Berlioz and Wagner, the early work of Verdi. His criticism of art begins at a time when artists are still reacting from the neo-classicism of David, and it discusses the full flush of Realism. Gautier's literary criticism covers French literature from Béranger to Mistral. His topical reporting records, among much else, the great exhibitions of mid-century, the growing understanding between England and France, the coming of the railways, the interest in air travel, the Siege of Paris. And his journalism, taken as an all-embracing whole, is a source of information for any study of aesthetic thought in nineteenth-century France, for a study of almost any figure in the contemporary French artistic world.

It helps, more particularly, to refute Emile Montégut's strange statement that Gautier declined as a poet when he established himself in journalism. No student of Emaux et Camées would maintain that these poems, nearly all of them written in mid-career or late in life, were inferior in technique to the poet's early work; while if journalism imposed life-long frustration on Gautier, poetry is born of sorrow, weariness and anger as well as joy, and a study of his career confirms that his regrets brought new elements into his work. Besides, some of Gautier's verse was in all probability inspired by his prose; and growing ideas for poems, and echoes of poems completed, may be found in his journalism. It is also quite possible that frequent descriptive practice helped to change Gautier's poetry: that his critical work helped to make this determined Romantic the master of the Realists of the Second Empire. And he himself was not unaware of such benefits. When Murger, after years as a journalist, won instant fame with la Vie de Bohême, Gautier wrote: 'Let Murger not repent this broadcast scattering of the intellect from which, whatever people say, the poet gains more than he loses. . . . Journalism has this advantage, that it mingles you with the crowd, and saves you from the stupidities of solitary pride; it is fencing which breaks you in and makes you supple.'²

Gautier's journalism is not only a guide to some of his poetry; it is also a precious source of information for a study of his character and career. It is, in the first place, abundantly clear from his aesthetic sympathies and dislikes, from his attitude to life itself, that he was no Parnassian. He was, instead, and unmistakably, a born Romantic of 1830. Whatever he told the Goncourts about repressing himself in his work, whatever he told Engénie Fort about his impersonality, it proved impossible, naturally enough, to conceal himself from his readers for some forty years; nor did Gautier desire to do so. Repeatedly he chose, in Romantic fashion, to express his own unhappiness and frustration; inevitably he revealed his hopes and his pleasures. And he published, in his journalism, a considerable amount of autobiography, both open and concealed.

And here it may be remarked that Gautier's business correspondence does much to destroy Flaubert's contention that Gautier was the victim of his editors. 'Make it quite clear,' Flaubert advises Feydeau, who is about to write a biography, 'make it quite clear that he was exploited and victimized in all the papers he wrote for; Girardin, Turgan and Dalloz were torturers to the poor man. . . . When you write the biography of a friend, you should do it from the point of view of his vengeance. . . . Be serious, be pitiless.'³ It is clear from Gautier's journalism that he knew financial hardship, felt himself oppressed by editors and by the discipline of his profession. It also seems evident that the editors and publishers suffered considerably from Gautier's lack of discipline, his recurrent vagaries, his frank, indeed publicized distaste for much of his work.

And it is this very distaste for journalism that explains Gautier's distinction and achievement as a journalist and critic. He did not consider himself a man of letters; he considered himself an artist.⁴ It was to his early training in Rioult's studio that he claimed to owe his taste for art and his feeling for beauty; and all his life, regretting that he had abandoned painting, he transposed it into literature. 'Anch'io son pittore!' he said in 1867. 'I've regretted all my life I abandoned my first career. Since then I've done nothing but make transpositions of art.'⁵

In his Pages de Critique et de Doctrine Paul Bourget indicates, perceptively, the connection between the Gautier of Mademoiselle de Maupin and the Gautier of this three-dimensional journalism, quoting the words of d'Albert: 'My pictures are only coloured bas-reliefs. For I like to touch what I've seen and to follow the curves of contours into their most hidden folds. I consider everything from every aspect, and I turn about it, a light in my hand.' Here again is Gautier the artist; here again is a key to his journalism. For Gautier the critic confirms Bourget's suggestion that Gautier makes, with words, the gesture of d'Albert. To write is, for him, 'to follow the curves of contours into their most hidden folds.'⁶

So it is that Gautier, the pupil of Rioult, sets out as a dramatic critic not only to criticize but to produce 'a daguerrotype of the theatre'; and in his dramatic criticism, at its best, we are given not only aesthetic considerations, but three-dimensional figures re-enacting their parts. It has been suggested that Gautier's plastic criticism of the theatre is defective; that he has painted the scenery instead of analysing the plays. Plastic criticism, if exclusive, might indeed be inadequate; but in Gautier's work it lends charm to ephemeral performances, preserves (as he had hoped) many fine ones, and both explains and enhances his literary considerations. Gautier himself told Lovenjoul that he considered this plastic criticism highly important.⁷ He went further: he considered it a philosophy.⁸

Gautier's devotion to the visual arts inspired not only his writing on the theatre but his happiest writing about music: the portraits of Liszt at the piano, the imaginative commentary on Weber; and it inspired, most significant of all, his brilliant, constant, influential use of correspondences. Gautier sought to create the plastic criticism of music, and his chief contribution to music criticism was happily indicated by Ernest Reyer: 'He spoke about it like a poet, translated the pleasure it had given him into language rich with imagery.'⁹

The artist who wrote plastic criticism of the theatre and music achieved his highest successes as a writer on literature when he recreated, visually, his great and lesser contemporaries, or revivified, in visual language that sometimes touched the height of a prose-poem, the impressions that poetry had made upon him.

And, naturally and deliberately, Gautier created the plastic criticism of art. And here one might recall the perceptive appreciation with which he declared himself so satisfied: 'Art criticism, the manner in which he practises and understands it, is one of the innovations and special gifts of Théophile Gautier [wrote Sainte-Beuve in 1863]. . . . Every painting and fresco seems to appear in the light in which he describes it, and one sees not only its project and disposition, but its effect, its tone and line. Gautier's system of description is a system of transposition, an exact, equivalent reduction rather than a translation. Just as a symphony is reduced for piano, so he reduces a picture to an article. It is not ink he uses, but lines and colours; he has a palette and pencils. . . . These accounts speak and live. In art, perhaps the most useful form of criticism is to show rather than judge.'¹⁰ And the words of Sainte-Beuve are confirmed and enhanced by those of an artist, Baudry: 'The description of my pictures enchants me. No writer performs or will perform, like you, this miracle of transposition and crystallization, as Stendhal called it (though Stendhal only applied the term to love). It is true you love painting as men love women. . . . When time has faded my paintings something at least will remain in the magnificent veil you cast about them. It is the story of the mummies of which, when life is gone, the body almost vanished, only perfumes remain. . . .'¹¹

'They often call me fanciful,' said Gautier to Sainte-Beuve, 'and yet, all my life, I have only tried to see properly, to study nature, draw, did interpret, paint it, if I could, just as I saw it.'¹² He not merely observe outward appearances; yet throughout his work one finds the constant preoccupation with the visual, the plastic and the three-dimensional, and time and time again one recalls his comment to the Goncourts: 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists.'¹³

Gautier was not, however, only an artist. He was also a poet; and he constantly reminded his readers of the 'poor poet diverted from his art'. They were reminded more happily of his vocation by the germs of poetry scattered throughout his work, by the poems published in and out of articles, and by the echoes of poems resounding in his criticism. They were reminded of his poetry, too, in numerous improvisations and asides; for the journalist, so he told them blandly, 'is a hybrid animal, half critic and half improviser'.¹⁴ A comment on the farewell of Taglioni, on the transience of dramatic art, on the funeral of Decamps, may lift his prose to the level of a prose-poem; a sterile week in the theatre will allow him to improvise engagingly on the winter or the spring.

It is at such moments that Gautier's poetry touches his prose. Gautier's poetic (and Romantic) feeling is found in his love of colour and history, his affection for the exotic: the Spanish, Egyptian, Chinese and Japanese; it is found in his veneration for all religions and for the supernatural, even for superstition, it is found in his eager interest in the prospects of ballooning, in the prosaic notes he made on the undiscovered world of astronomy. It is found in the experiments with hashish, recalled in "le Club des Hachichins,"¹⁵ in which he attempted to discover new dimensions of experience. And Gautier the poet is reflected not only in his love of the remote and strange. He is reflected (and here the poet and the artist meet) in the principle which guides his work, indeed his very life: in his evident and abiding search for beauty

'I adore above all things the beauty of form,' he had written in Mademoiselle de Maupin. 'Beauty, for me, is visible divinity, it is palpable happiness, heaven descended on earth. . . . Who could not kneel before thee, pure personification of the thought of God?' And again: 'I ask only for beauty, it is true, but it must be so perfect, that I shall probably never encounter it.' Those few sentences hold much of the philosophy that informed his work.

One finds there what René Lauret defined as the Romantic longing for the impossible.¹⁶ Yet if, as Lauret suggests, 'the thirst for the impossible is the mark of powerlessness,' it is still this very striving after the unattainable, this very regret of human inadequacy, that gives dignity to Gautier's philosophy, and to the criticism it inspires. 'The delights for which he yearns,' writes Lauret of Gautier, 'are esthetic; he wants them so fervently, his love of beauty is so candid that it ennobles his very insensibility, and sets him above the lovers of nameless beauty.' A study of Gautier underlines the contradiction: Gautier cannot be both fervent and insensible. Nor is he (as Lauret implies) a superior dilettante; nor can he be dismissed (as Lauret dismisses him) for 'his too ardent need of beauty'. The need of beauty cannot be too ardent; the religion of beauty, which Gautier professed, raises him far above the amateur of art, and gives him not only his fervour as poet and as artist but his distinction as a critic. Antoine-Orliac much more nearly understands Gautier's philosophy¹⁷ when he sees it as the Platonic cult of beauty and relates it to 'the Greek dream which moves towards the divine through beauty of form'.

Yet Antoine-Orliac sees Gautier's plastic ideal, his worship of form, as his consolation for 'metaphysical disquietude'; and Gabriel Brunet reaches much the same conclusion: 'Gautier discovered the balm for every grief: consolation by the contemplation of appearance.'¹⁸ Gautier may indeed have consoled himself for the disappointments of life by the contemplation of beauty in art and nature. But it must be emphasized yet again (and his writing makes it abundantly clear) that though he could not, to his sorrow, accept all the tenets of Catholicism, he was a devoted pantheist. When he declares in Mademoiselle de Maupin: 'Christ did not die for me. I am as pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias', he is declaring himself a pantheist as much as a pagan. He worships beauty, so he tells us himself in his novel and throughout his work, as the visible form of divinity. He worships the beauty of nature and the beauty of art. As he wrote once, himself, of Diderot: 'If he did not see God at a particular place in the heavens, he saw Him everywhere in the beauty of the universe."¹⁹ And as Emile Montégut so well expressed it: 'The pleasures of dilettantism, usually so superficial, attain, in Gautier, the power and nobility of the pleasures of mystic ecstasy. His eyes turn towards the sun of art with the same burning desire as the eyes of a Christian monk who seeks the invisible sun of morality; his whole being is absorbed in the contemplation of beauty, undistracted by any preoccupation foreign to the vision that possesses him, and never was Brahmin, lost in his search for the place occupied by intelligence, more separate from earth than Théophile Gautier by the ravishment into which he is thrown by a Renaissance canvas and a fragment of Greek art.'²⁰

So it is that Gautier recognizes the work of an artist as an act of devotion; so it is he maintains what all critics should maintain: the ideal purpose and unattainable standards, the sovereign independence and sacred nature of art. So it is that Gautier professes his belief in Art for Art's Sake from his earliest criticism, from the moment he writes so nobly, so sincerely: 'In art we have no religion but the religion of art itself.'²¹

Critics have long indicated one of the obvious distinc-tions of Gautier's journalism. Victor Fournel observed that 'criticism for him was only a pretext for pictures, and, frankly, he was not asked for anything else'.²² 'Nostalgia for the picturesque,' added Pontmartin, 'dominates his talent and his life.'²³ And Zola rightly confirmed: 'His constant effort was to reduce written thought to the material nature of the painted form. Théophile Gautier had, in brief, a painter's eye, and that was his dominant quality.'²⁴ Hugo indicated the other major characteristic of Gautier's criticism when he thanked him for an article on Ruy Blas. 'What a master you are, dear Théophile! What poetic prose! . . . Your criticism has the power of creation.'²⁵ Yet none of these critics remarked that Gautier's distinction came from his dual nature: from the fact that he was artist and poet together. It is Sainte-Beuve who touches the heart and sums the significance of Gautier's criticism when he writes: 'After all, he is only a displaced artist and poet.'²⁶

Here lie both the weakness and the extraordinary strength of Gautier's work for the Press. His love of art and poetry, it is true, often led him to be undisciplined, to indulge in his own prose-pictures, his own imaginings, instead of critical comment; to delegate the tasks he found unrewarding; to permit occasional plagiary; to be, throughout his career of some forty years, the desperation of is punctual editors. Artist and poet born, he must have been one of the most rebellious, least predictable contributors to any paper since journalism began. And there is, perhaps, another weakness in Gautier's love of art and poetry: an inherent weakness which he recognized. We cannot look to him for academic judgments, we cannot look to him for reasoned surveys, documented explanations. We must not expect him to explore a problem deeply, bring a vast weight of erudition to his theme. For Gautier is not an intellectual; he is, perhaps, by nature, the least critical of critics. He had written, once, of Diderot: 'He thinks with his heart as much as with his head.'²⁷ He himself appreciates the arts with his heart and soul rather than his intellect.

And yet, is this a weakness? When all is said, the arts, in their purest form, are inspired by emotion rather than intellect, and it is through the heart that they should be comprehended, and with the heart that they should be loved and described. It is, perhaps, the distinction of Gautier the critic, not his weakness, that he approached the arts in a loving, not an academic, spirit. His devotion to art and poetry may explain some of his failings; but it gave him, also, an intimate and unusual understanding. It gave him a broad and lofty conception of the arts and a superlative visual style: made his writing, at its best, a living record and a work of literature. Gautier tried, persistently, throughout his long career of some forty years, to make his daily work embrace both art and poetry, both the vocations he felt he had abandoned. And as we consider his journalism we often recall the theory he expressed in the early years of his career: 'Every art has its weakness, whence derives a part of its beauty. The measureless struggles of the poet who lacks a plastic form, the artist who lacks a succession of ideas, the sculptor who lacks movement, the composer who lacks words, have produced the most wondrous works of the human spirit.'²⁸

Gautier's journalism suggests one surely inescapable conclusion: that Gautier was an artist and a poet, not a conventional journalist or critic; and precisely because he was far more than a journalist or critic, he gave journalism a new significance and a new status. He made it, at its best, when poet and artist took over the common task, a work of literary art. And he did more: he wrote it with the eagle-eyed view of his time, the religion of art, the ideal and constant standards that alone can give criticism its value and its permanence. In an age when superficial values were too readily accepted and public taste was too frequently gratified, he maintained in his criticism the importance of the ideal, the permanent values of civilization. Coppée described him as 'the great and exquisite poet who has consented, in the interest of the Cause of Art, to become the first of contemporary critics'.²⁹ If Gautier's journalism and criticism are given their distinction by his artistic and poetic nature, they are also given their dignity by his militant, unswerving, religious devotion to art and beauty. It was with truth that he wrote to Sainte-Beuve: 'If I had possessed the least personal fortune I should have devoted myself entirely to the love of the green laurel; but in the prose into which I have fallen, I have always defended the interests of art and proclaimed the name of the sacred masters with my whole heart and soul.'³⁰

Notes

¹le Moniteur universel, 6 March 1865

²La Presse, 26 November 1846

³ Flaubert: Corr., VI, 448/9

⁴L'Artiste,14 December 1856

⁵ Primoli, op. cit., p. 345

⁶Bourget: Pages de Critique et de Doctrine, I, 66 sqq.

⁷ Lovenjoul: Histoire,I, 124

⁸ Sarcey: Quarante Ans de Théâtre,91 sqq.

⁹ Reyer: Notes de Musique, 408 sqq.

¹⁰Le Constitutionnel, 30 November 1863

¹¹ Chantilly: C 491 ff. 322/3

¹²Causeries du Lundi,XIV, 73

¹³ Goncourt Journal, 141/2

¹⁴La Presse,12 May 1851

¹⁵ Reprinted in Romans et Contes

¹⁶Mercure de France, 16 May 1911

¹⁷ Ibid, 15 August 1928

¹⁸ Ibid, 15 October 1922

¹⁹le Moniteur universel, 7 January 1854

²⁰le Moniteur universel,17 January 1865

²¹Le Cabinet de Lecture,19 March 1836

²² Fournel: Figures d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui, 47

²³ Pontmartin: Causeries littéraires,303

²⁴ Zola: Documents littéraires,140

²⁵ Hugo: Corr. gén.,III, 306

²⁶Le Constitutionnel, 30 November 1863

²⁷le Moniteur universel,7 January 1854

²⁸La Musique,262

²⁹ Chantilly: C 492 ff. 582/3

³⁰ Lovenjoul, op. cit., I, xix/xx

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