charming verses they are every man of taste and culture is ready to attest), but he wandered north, south, east, and west, with no more irksome guide than his own erratic fancy; wrote delightful gossiping books about his travels; worked very hard occasionally, and occasionally did not work at all-in fact, had things generally very much his own way, like the spoiled creature that he was. A devoted worshiper of beauty, whether animate or inanimate, he was free to follow the undulations of a mantilla or the flutterings of a fan, as the graceful madrileña glided by him on the Prada, a poem in petticoats. The red rose of tradition nestling in her lustrous tresses, the warm southern blood petulant in her clear, dark cheek, love lying in ambush under the heavy fringes of her long, curved eyelids, or to while away a summer's afternoon in that dreamy old Italian palace where "stands the statue which enchants the world." The Nevsky Prospect, the snow, the sledges, the comfortable caftans, the stupid, high-booted moujiks, were as familiar to him as the Bay of Naples and the red-bonneted lazzaroni, and the donkeys laden with peaches and pomegranates, and melons as big as cartwheels. He had floated as often in a gondola or felucca or caique as in a Seine steamboat, and this is saying a great deal of a Parisian, who is perhaps the most untraveled individual in the universe-it may be for the very good reason that, having perfection at home, he has no need to go abroad and look for it elsewhere.

M. Théophile Gautier, art-critic, romancist, and poet-cosmopolitan, was the very last person under the sun whom you would have accused of being a petted child of the Muses, had you met him accidentally some sunny afternoon taking his walks abroad upon the boulevards. If your cicerone had told you that the queer figure, recognized by some, stared after with blank astonishment by others, saluted everywhere by smiles either of derision or kindliness, according as the passer-by happened to be a stranger or a friend, was that of a great poet, a great writer, a subtile appreciator of art, and a man destined to immortality, you would have been as much surprised as your good-breeding would have permitted you to be.

Imagine to yourself a tall, massively framed individual, who treads the asphalte with appalling composure, attired in yellow leather slippers and a black velvet waistcoat; his long, dark hair waving over his shoulders down to his waist, like Charlemagne or a pet of the ballet; his bare head shaded by a broad umbrella, and this at the most fashionable hour of the day, on the most fashionable promenade of Europe! Imagine to yourself, also, that this singular personage has a magnificent head, a majestic presence, and an air

of simple good-nature, which is quite captivating

that being both grandiose and affable, he does not disdain to pass the time of day either with blouse or cotton bonnet-that he stands and stares at the shop-fronts with a manifest curiosity and enjoyment, as though he were some overgrown baby, and you have the portrait of Théophile Gautier, the cherished "Theo of Balzac, the intimate friend of Delphine Gay and Delacroix and Louis Boulanger, and a host of other great names, the disciple and the contemporary of Victor Hugo.

At Tarbes, the old druidical city, and the birthplace of the conventionnel Barrère, Théophile Gautier first saw the light in 1808. He came to Paris with his family when very young, and completed his studies at the Collége Charlemagne, where he had for companion and bosom friend the ill-starred Gérard de Nerval-one of the most elegant writers that ever held a pen; one of the most wretched beings that ever drew the breath of life.

Like Honoré de Balzac, Master Théophile was an idle, good-for-nothing scholar, always at the bottom of the class; always being sneered and sniggered at by the good little dull boys who had got their lessons by heart; always making the professor's hair stand on end by his blunders and his fearfully false quantities. He was in very truth a deplorable scapegrace, who hated Homer and Virgil and Cicero with a malignant hatred, and would have jumped for joy if he could have made a bonfire of every classical volume that was ever printed. And no doubt he would have witnessed the auto da fé with as much holy delight as Torquemada took in watching the flames curl and crackle about the miserable heretics whose bodies he burned for the good of their souls.

When Gautier finally quitted the unloved groves of Acadême, and bade adieu for ever to the cane and the class-room, he took to dreaming away his days in the public museums and picture-galleries. There, motionless for hours before this chef-d'œuvre of painting, or that marvel of sculpture, his innate love of beauty— the sensuous beauty of form and color-insensibly grew from an untutored instinct into a veritable passion. All the ideas, dreams, desires, aspirations of the young man narrowed themselves into one groove-a frenzied adoration of the beautiful good, evil, vice, virtue, religion, impiety-these were comprised in, and extenuated by, the possession of a perfect outward and visible shape, a perfection which was material and palpable, which could be seen and touched. He recognized neither the beauty of mind nor the beauty of soul nor the comeliness of chastity. These were abstract things, which could not be

touched or beheld, and might therefore be said to be non-existent. Corporeal loveliness, and that alone, was the mother of all the virtues, and Venus was a greater saint than Veronica. The smiling, seductive Aphrodite, flaxen-haired, vermilion-lipped, prone in a pearly sea-shell, surrounded by adoring amorini, was more than St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, missals and all-the sweet, serious brow and the voluptuous waving lip of a Greek Antinous were worth all the good actions and the noble deeds that had ever been achieved since the days of the "bon roi Dagobert."

The boyish enthusiast burned with an everincreasing ardor to give his sublime visions of beauty a concrete form. Stimulated by the example of the great old masters, whose works he might be said to have lived upon, men who in their day must have dreamed dreams akin to his, and been visited in the watches of the night by shapes as beautiful and as indistinct-he, too, resolved to become a painter. It was high time to choose a profession, if he ever meant to have one. Other youths might make themselves doctors, lawyers, soldiers, bankers, what-not; but Théophile Gautier has made up his mind to be an artist!

Ardent, impetuous, hopeful, this embryo Raphael enters the studio of Rioult with the airs of a conqueror. But, alas! once there, he is not long in finding out that to dream you are an artist and to prove yourself one are two very different things. Monsieur Théophile is forced to allow that the mere knowledge of blue and yellow making green when mixed together is hardly sufficient to qualify for the "Prix de Rome," or give any serious uneasiness to Horace Vernet. The visions of bewildering beauty that glided before his mind's eye come out anything but visions of bewildering beauty when they have passed by a hog's-hair brush and a tube of oilpaint. Disgusted with the difficulties which lie before him, too eager and too impatient to contemplate sacrificing years to mastering the rudiments of his profession, he throws away the mahl-stick, and turns the canvas with its face to the wall. In despair he owns to himself that many a better painter than he can ever hope to be is glad to copy pictures in the Louvre for forty francs a square yard. Those first moments of anger at his own incapacity must have been very humiliating and painful to this ardent spirit.

But after a while he bethinks himself that there is more than one road to Rome. To fail in art may be to succeed in literature. It does not follow as a matter of course that a bad draughtsman must be a witless writer. He feels that there is something within him which must come out, no matter how. The "Beauty Arts" VOL. VIII.-16

have turned their backs on him. Soit. It remains to knock at the door of the "Belles-Lettres," and see what sort of reception awaits him there.

Now the pen takes the place of the pencil; incessant study of the old French classical writers the place of dreamy communion with the shade of a Phidias or a Guercino. Dictionaries multiply upon his book-shelves, for, animated by the example of Victor Hugo, the unfledged littérateur seeks to create a style of his own. With this object he rescues from oblivion all the obsolete words he can hit upon, drags them up into the light of day, and rehabilitates them, as it were. He fills his vocabulary with hundreds of quaint bizarre expressions, which, manipulated with peculiar skill, give an original, unhackneyed turn to his outpoured thoughts. He writes poetry after a while, and pleases himself so well that he determines to emerge from his shell, and see what success he has in pleasing other people.

So this young effronté, with all the audacity of his twenty years, knocks at the door of no less sanctified a study than that of the great Sainte-Beuve, the prince of critics, both past, present, and to come.

Hat in hand, Monsieur Théophile Gautier begs leave to introduce himself to the notice of Monsieur de Sainte-Beuve, and craves permission to read him a little manuscript poem entitled "La Tête de Mort."

"Oh, oh," murmurs the illustrious presence, "a very somber title! N'importe. Let us hear it!" and the kindly listener settles down in his easy-chair, keenly regarding the young lion with his long, tawny mane and intelligent, dark eyes, summing up the total of that strong, satyr-like physiognomy, favorably impressed by it, doubtless, as all were.

At the third strophe the critic makes a gesture of arrestation.

"Who has been your model?" he asks. “It is not by studying Lamartine that you have written such verses." Lamartine was to the young French rhymers what Byron was to the English. "You must have read Clément, Marat, SaintGelais, and Ronsard."

"Yes," replies the poet roundly, “and if you have no objection you may add Baïf, Desportes, Passerat, Bertaut, Duperron, and Malherbe!"

great personage), embraces the young poet, and cries out rapturously:

"Excellent! Very good! Courage-this is true poetry! I have found a man who carves in granite, and not in smoke. To-morrow I shall present you to Victor Hugo!"

Happy Théophile! At that moment he must have been the proudest man in France. What joyous emotions must have overwhelmed his anxious heart! How his hands must have trembled as he returned the precious manuscript to his breast-pocket! How difficult it must perhaps have been to keep the tears back! Somehow this little anecdote about Monsieur de SainteBeuve fills us with respectful love and admiration for his character. Greatness and generosity are not so often found hand-in-hand as one might imagine them to be.

Théophile Gautier's first book of poems appeared without any great éclat. It had the misfortune to make its début when all Paris was convulsed by grave political events, and men thought more of priming a musket than commenting upon a felicitous dithyramb. So the applause with which it was hailed was drowned in the thunder of cannon and the rattle of the rifle, and the poet remained comparatively unknown.

In 1835 (the poet by this time is nearly twenty-seven years old) we find him living in the impasse of the Doyenné, in a house which has now ceased altogether to exist. Ah, that everto-be-remembered house in the blind alley of the Doyenné, with its harum-scarum, devil-maycare lodgers, who were at once the terror and the admiration of the quartier! Never were there so many choice spirits brought together under one roof, since the days of "Little Alsatia," and the merry masquerades of his graceless Majesty, Charles Stuart ! It was Bohemia in miniature—swarming from loft to cellar with embryonic poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, authors, and other lawless profligates. There was Edouard Ourliac and Arsène Houssaye, Camille Rogier and Murilhat, Camille Roqueplan and Célestin Nanteuil, Laurent Jan and Gérard de Nerval-all young, enthusiastic, with unlimited confidence in the golden future, hardworking-utterly reckless! What jovial scenes must the old walls of that rickety tenement have been a witness to! With what boisterous peals of laughter they must have reechoed! To what vows of eternal brotherly love must they have listened unmoved! To what prodigalities of wit! To what outbreaks of cynical wisdom from smooth lips upon which the down had not yet come! The landlord, honest soul, dared not set foot in this pandemonium to collect his rents. Once, and once only, he had the indelicacy to appear in the impasse, receipt in hand-when he

was hustled and jostled into one of the principal salons by a gang of his indignant lodgers. "See," they cried, pointing to the old wooden panels which were freshly covered with superb paintings by one of the wild fraternity—" see these frescoes! Some day they will make your fortune. It is you who owe us money!" And the poor man, amazed at the beauty of the pictures, retired without further ado, murmuring as he went, “It is just!" And thenceforward the landlord was as a legend in the alley of Doyenné, for he came back no more, whereat the Bohemians rejoiced exceedingly.

It is during the time that he occupies two little closets of rooms in this select mansion that Théophile Gautier writes "Mademoiselle de Maupin." The success of this work is prodigious and immediate, falling, as it does, like a thunderbolt in the midst of Parisian society. Everybody is shocked, in consternation, scandalized-enchanted. The preface is about the most audacious déclaration de foi that ever issued from the press. The book itself is an olla podrida of all the seven capital crimes mixed up together, and spiced by a cynical profligacy, compared to which the experiences of the Emperor Nero were but those of a lisping babethe whole impressed with the stamp of an exquisite genius, and written in such an incomparably enchanting manner that it is next to impossible to prevent one's self being beguiled by the charm of the magician, and applauding à chaudes mains where one should turn aside with a cry of indignation. The public who judges this remarkable romance is a French public-and a French public pardons everything in a man excepting stupidity—so Monsieur Théophile Gautier, who is not only not stupid, but a creature of most rare gifts, wakes up one fine morning and finds, like Lord Byron, that he has become famous.

It

Soon after the publication of "Mademoiselle de Maupin" a young and elegant stranger makes his appearance in the territory of Bohemia. is Jules Sandeau, the sprightly cher ami of Georges Sand, who comes as an emissary from Monsieur de Balzac to retain the new writer for "La Chronique de Paris." The great author, now in the brilliant morning of his fame, has read with delight the work of Monsieur Gautier, whose acquaintance he desires to make, and whom he begs will breakfast with him-Rue Cassini, près l'Observatoire.

M. Gautier is a little nervous about this first visit to so distinguished a host. He remembers Heine and his interview with Goethe, and how the sweet song-writer could find nothing more interesting to say than that "the pears fallen down on the road between Jena and Weimar are

very good for thirst." However, it is to be supposed that he acquitted himself a little better than this, and aired his conversational powers to the full satisfaction of his entertainer, for from this first interview dates a friendship which was destined only to be sundered by death.

That breakfast was a thing to be remembered ever afterward. The marvelous spontaneous wit of De Balzac, his bursts of boisterous laughter, his unflagging gayety, his extreme kindliness of manner, made an uneffaceable impression upon his wondering guest. Their intimacy henceforth became close and continuous. The white dressing-gown fraternized with the yellow babouches. It was a friendship between two crowned heads, for these were a royal pair.

In his "Souvenirs" of Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, writing in a spirit of reverential love, gives us some admirably graphic pictures of that eccentric genius. He exults in showing us what a charming companion he was, what a jovial host, what a splendid boon companion-how well the monk-like robe of white cashmere became him (not whiter, though, than the massive throat, pure colored as Carrara marble)-how, although habitually the most abstemious of men, he did not object from time to time to a "tronçon de chière lie," and could polish off four bottles of the white wine of Vouvray as though it were Vichy water. And does it not betray the whole nature of the man to sit down to a banquet supplied by Chevet, and worthy to be graced by the presence of Apicius or BrillatSavarin, at which there was actually no bread? All this intimate detail, this delightful gossip of one great man about another, how piquant it is, how full of charm and interest!

Théophile Gautier has only to say open sesame," and backward flies the door of every salon in Paris. Great ladies caress him, and duchesses rap him familiarly with their fans. He is a more honored personage than the fieldmarshal whose breast is hung with medals, or the minister whose black coat is blazing with diamond stars. For he is one of the elect, a child of genius, the possessor of the "sacred fire."

Into one of these salons he carries us, and we are more proud of entering there with him than if we were taken into the presence of royalty itself-royalty, with the pear-shaped head and the plum-colored coat, and the stupid tradesman-like air, taking snuff in the Tuileries over yonder. There are only three personages present, but one is called Madame de Girardin, another Honoré de Balzac, and the third-Théophile Gautier.

M. de Balzac is searching in his mind for proverbs which he can transpose for "Léon de Lora —a sort of masculine Mrs. Malaprop

such as "Les bons comtes font les bons tamis," "Il est comme un âne en plaine."

"A discovery of this sort," writes Gautier, "puts him in such high good humor that he makes playful gambols like an amiable elephant, all round the drawing-room furniture. On her side Madame de Girardin is searching after witty sayings for her famous 'Dame aux sept petites chaises.' . . . If a stranger had come in, to see this beautiful Delphine combing the waves of her golden hair with her white fingers, taking a profoundly abstracted air; Balzac, his head buried in his shoulders, sitting in a big arm-chair in which Monsieur de Girardin usually took his nap, his hands doubled up in his wristbands, his waistcoat pushed up over his stomach, shaking one leg with a monotonous rhythm, betraying by the contracted muscles of his brow an extraordinary preoccupation of mind; we ourselves doubled up between two cushions of the divan, like a theriaki in a state of hallucination-verily he would have been at a loss to know what we were all about. . . . What

happy evenings, that will come back no more! We

ful woman carved in pure antique marble, that rowere far from foreseeing that that stately and beautibust, vivacious man who united in himself the vigor

of the bull and the wild boar, half Hercules, half a satyr, made to outlive a hundred years-would so soon pass away out of sight, one to Père La Chaise, the other to Montmartre."

The name of Théophile Gautier after a while became indissolubly linked with journalism. All the time that he was writing plays, ballets, poems, and romances, he was keeping up his contributions to the papers, and must have found it a very profitable concern, now that his name was a tower of strength among the literati. From "La Presse" alone he received twelve thousand francs a year for sixty articles, either of musical, dramatic, or fine-art criticism. His contributions to literature were of the most miscellaneous character, from a glowing description of Fanny Elssler turning the heads of all Paris as she danced the cachucha in a crimson satin petticoat, to an elaborate treatise on the art of engraving. He supplied the text to a collection of Gavarni's inimitable caricatures; he went into raptures over Victor Hugo's weird little landscapes and machicolated castles of the middle ages, which the poet used to make out of drops of ink on the blotting-pad, as he chatted idly with his friends; in fact, he wrote about everything and everybody that was worthy of admiration. And then, when he was tired of hard work, he would go off to the Continent-to Spain, where he would don a sombrero and a capa; or to Russia, where he would come out in a fur pelisse and high jack-boats, as good a boyard as anybody.

It was Stamboul, however, and the barbaric luxury and enervating habits of the East that