Théophile Gautier

Théophile Gautier: Everything Useful Is Ugly

At the première of Victor Hugo's *Hernani* in 1830, the young Romantics packed the house to shout down the classicists, and one eighteen-year-old made himself the most visible object in the theatre by turning up in an anachronistic scarlet doublet. The waistcoat entered French literary legend before its wearer had published anything of consequence. Within five years he had written a preface that would outlive Romanticism, the movement he had dressed up to defend.

Tarbes to the Marais

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrénées on 30 August 1811, son of Jean-Pierre Gautier, a cultivated minor official, and Antoinette-Adelaïde Cocard. The family moved to Paris in 1814 and settled in the Marais. Illness cut short his time at the Collège Louis-le-Grand; he finished at the Collège Charlemagne, and took most of his real education, Latin included, from his father. At school he met Gérard de Nerval, who became the friend of his life and who introduced him to Hugo.

He meant to be a painter, and trained as one. The eye never left him: everything he later wrote about art, dance, cities and women is the work of somebody who had learned to look at surfaces professionally before he learned to describe them.

The Scarlet Doublet

He began writing verse in 1826 and published *Poésies* — forty-two poems, composed at eighteen — in 1830, only to withdraw the book in the chaos of the July Revolution. It reappeared in 1832 with twenty more poems and a long narrative title piece, *Albertus*, whose 122 stanzas parody the Romantic manner Gautier was supposedly championing. *Les Jeunes-France* (1833) mocked the movement outright. He was never quite inside anything, including the club whose uniform he wore.

Everything Useful Is Ugly

*Mademoiselle de Maupin* (1835) is a historical romance about an opera singer moving through the world in men's clothes, and it is remembered less for its story than for the preface bolted to the front of it. There Gautier severed art from moral and social utility in the flattest possible terms: everything useful is ugly. It is the founding statement of art for art's sake in French, and it ran on, through the Parnassians and the Symbolists and the Decadents, all the way to Oscar Wilde.

His fiction of the period did something else that mattered. *La Morte amoureuse* (1836), the tale of a priest visited nightly by a beautiful revenant, gave literature one of its earliest female vampires and fused the German ghost story with the French erotic tradition. Richard Holmes reads these *fantômes* as Gautier's most serious work: seductive machines for arguing that love might resurrect the dead.

Thirty Years of Copy

From 1831 he wrote art criticism, and in 1836 Émile de Girardin hired him for *La Presse*, beginning three decades in harness. He later moved to the official *Le Moniteur universel*, directed the *Revue de Paris* from 1851 to 1856, and took over the influential *L'Artiste* in 1856, where he preached his aesthetic doctrines in editorials. In 1848 alone he produced nearly a hundred articles in nine months. He found the treadmill of regular journalism unbearable and humiliating, and never got off it.

The criticism was not filler. He was the first to recognise Verlaine, and he coined the term *poète maudit*. His essay on François Villon was the key to that poet's revival. He wrote monographs on Nerval, Balzac and Baudelaire, and in 1862 chaired the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts alongside Delacroix, Manet, Doré and Puvis de Chavannes.

Giselle, and the Ghosts

In 1841 he wrote the scenario for *Giselle*, still the central work of the Romantic ballet, for the dancer Carlotta Grisi — the great love of his life, conducted largely by letter over thirty years while he lived domestically with her sister, the singer Ernesta Grisi, who bore his daughters Judith and Estelle. He supplied further scenarios in *La Péri* (1843), *Pâquerette* and *Gemma* (1851). The dance critic Edwin Denby judged him simply a great dance writer, and choreographers still read him. He travelled hard and wrote it up: *Voyage en Espagne* (1843), the poems of *España* (1845), Constantinople in 1853, Russia in 1867.

Enamels and Cameos

*Émaux et Camées* (1852) is the book his reputation rests on. Eighteen poems at first, forty-eight by the final edition of 1872, it abandons the Romantic ambition to say everything in favour of small, hard, worked objects — the title is the whole programme. The verse is chiselled rather than confessed. It was the model the Parnassians took up, and it is why Baudelaire dedicated *Les Fleurs du mal* to him.

The establishment declined to notice. The Académie française rejected him in 1867, 1868 and 1869. He got a sinecure as Princess Mathilde's librarian in 1868, returned to Paris when the Prussians advanced, sat out the invasion and the Commune with his family, and died of long-standing heart disease at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 23 October 1872. His friends published *Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier* the next year, with poems by Hugo, Swinburne and Anatole France.

Why Théophile Is Called a Genius

Baudelaire, dedicating *Les Fleurs du mal* to him, called Gautier "the irreproachable poet, perfect magician of French literature," and the list of writers who took him seriously — Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, James, Proust, Wilde, Pound, Eliot — is hard to wave away. The faculty in question is verbal, not intellectual: an ability to treat French as a physical material, to cut and set it. Richard Holmes calls it "rapid, mandarin brilliance"; Gautier put it himself: "It's all a question of good syntax. I throw my sentences into the air, and like cats I know they will always land on their feet." One sentence in one preface gave four literary movements their licence.

The counter-case is brutal and has largely won. Émile Faguet's verdict is the standard one: Gautier "entered into our literature absolutely without having anything to say to us." The charge is that the surfaces are all there is — no psychological insight, no real interest in the human heart — and that a doctrine forbidding art to be useful is convenient for a writer with nothing to argue. He spent thirty years producing journalism he despised, and it shows in the unevenness of the output. He was refused by the Académie three times and did not enter the Pléiade until 2002. The honest verdict is that Gautier was a genius of style and of slogan, which is a narrower thing than a genius of literature.

Legacy

Gautier lost the argument about his own poems and won the argument about art. Aestheticism, Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and a good deal of modernism all trace back through him to a preface written at twenty-three, and every dancer who performs *Giselle* is working from his scenario. "Le bon Théo," as his friends called him, was loved by better writers than himself, which is its own kind of achievement, and quoted by all of them.

Achievements

• Officer of the Legion of Honour