GAUTIER, THEOPHILE A noted French poet, critic, and novelist. Born at Tarbes, August 31, 1811, he went as a child to Paris, and was educated there. He showed special interest in the Latin of the Decadence and the French of the Renaissance, being attracted less by the normal than by the primitive or the over-refined. He became a painter, then a 'flamboyant' Roman ticist, joining as a leader in the 'Battle of Hernani' (see Huno), defying conventionality by his flowing hair and far-famed scarlet waist coat. His poems of this period, Premieres poisies (1830), and Albertus (1832), show a highly developed technic and a minute power of descrip tion. Then followed Les (1832), stories of nonchalant irony, mocking alike ro mantic liberty and classic restraint. Gautier's next book, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), a curious attempt at self-analysis, was a frank ex pression of hedonism. Its art is fascinating, but it treats the fundamental postulates of morality with a contempt that closed the Academy to him for life. Fortunio (1837) is also frankly pagan. In 1836 Gautier put on the harness of journalis tic criticism, embracing art and the drama, and his later works were, perforce, less offensive to the moralists. "They have made me a kennel," he writes in a poem of this time, "where I watch, pressed down in the feuilleton of a newspaper, like a crouching dog." The best of the short stories printed in 1845, La morte amoureuse, bears the date of 1836. The deadening effect of this hack work wore off in the fifties. He pro duced during this decade the masterful short stories, Atria Marcella; Jettatura: and Avatar; and the curiously antiquarian Roman de la momie. But none of these approaches in in terest Le eapitaine Fracasse, which had been announced in 1836 and appeared in 1861 and 1863 (2 vols.), as "a bill drawn in my youth and redeemed in middle life." It is a true classic of Romanticism, illustrating a minute knowledge of the epoch of Louis XIII. such as Gautier had already been showing in a series of literary studies, Les grotesques ( 1844 ) . Several of his short stories had reflected a preoccupation with phantom love, and this was the subject of Spirite (1865), his last and least interesting novel.
In literary criticism Gautier's most significant works are his Ilistoirc du Romantistne (1854), and his essays on Baudelaire and Lamartine. An important event in his life was his change from the staff of La Pressc (1836-54) to the Mon iteur (later the official journal of the Second Empire). Until his death lie was a critic of authority in Paris, and exceptional for the charm of his paragraphs. These articles were assembled in Histoire de Part dramatique en France (6 vols., Paris, 1858-59). In these he inveighed against the classic and the bourgeois drama. Gautier was a great traveler for his time, and described his journeys in many books—Voyage en Espagne (1843); Zigzags (1845); Italia (1852) ; Con stantinople (1854) ; Loin de Paris (1864) ; Quand on. voyage ( 1865) ; La Russie (1866) , etc.
Some of these volumes—those on Italy and Spain, for instance—are still widely read, owing to his graceful, limpid language, and his fond ness for discovering artistic effects.
His particular claim to fame, however, lies in his unique gifts as a poet as represented by his masterpiece, Emaux et Camees —a rather small collection of poems written between about 1850 and 1865. They are nearly all in geometrical stanzas of four lines and eight feet, and are dis tinguished for their impeccable daintiness, exhib iting Gautier's love of miniature effects and his adoration for the sculptural and for the color white. The volume is Parnassian rather than Romantic. In its pages there is no flesh and blood; life appears merely as plastic form and picturesque hue. The Pasies may be thought of perhaps as a French pendant to the little poems of Heine, and quite as exquisite' in their way. Likely the most famous of them, and certainly as characteristic as any, is the one' entitled Symphonic en blanc majeur. It celebrates the author's worship of the white, cold divinity of the passionless nude which forever torments him with its mute, sphinx-like messages of inert beauty.
Gautier was a connecting link between the Ro mantic and the Parnassian in France, uniting in his pages the pictorial exotic with the pagan plastic, in accordance with his celebrated saying: "I am one for whom the visible world exists." In treating his soulless images he employed with the accuracy of a true artist a vocabulary famed for its rich resources. For forty years he was one of the interesting and conspicuous figures of the Paris literary and art world. A somewhat grotesque personality, he wore by preference the mask of a grave stoic in a sort of relaxed hopeless attitude toward his impecunious destiny. He detested the necessities and ordinary duties of life. When he spoke, it was to give utterance to some memorable remark or resigned witticism, or to indulge in a droll monologue composed of the sublime and the absurd. He was a cos mopolitan, remarkably open for a Frenchman to foreign influences. Loving and extolling the beautiful wherever he observed it, he was the champion of all unknown persons or newcomers who had anything pleasing to offer the Parisian public. He died in Paris, October 23, 1872.
Consult: The Works of Gautier as edited in English by Sumichrast (24 vols., Boston, 1900 et seq.) ; the monographs by Baudelaire (Paris, 1859 ) ; Feydeau ( ib., 1874 ) ; Bergerat ( ib., 1878) ; Du Camp (ib., 1890) ; and Richet (ib., 1893) ; also Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis (ib., 1863-72) ; Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Histoire des oeuvres de Theophile Gautier (ib., 1887) ; Bru netiere, Evolution de la poesie lyrique (ib., 1894), and Faguet, XIXe siecle (ib., 1894).