form, quite as surely as by the searching out of ideas and the formulation of theories of beauty. This method, moreover, will have the great advantage of economy of effort, for the very facility of the means, given an equivalent final value, will determine its choice. The choice of plastic art to be expressed in words, by a form as nearly plastic as possible, implies then, in the author who makes it, no necessarily great amount of energy at the service of his desire for plastic creation, but rather a comparatively great verbal facility and the possibility of substitution-through a process of self-justification no doubt largely dependent on this very facility-of ideal attainment in one line for that in another. Montégut's analysis of Gautier's accomplishments seems, from the point of view of energetic equilibrium, to be a just one: "Chose curieuse, ce talent, que beaucoup regardent comme un produit de l'art et du travail, me frappe au contraire par ses qualités naïves. Gautier est tel que la nature l'a formé, et l'art ne lui a rien donné, si ce n'est le don d'exprimer sa pensée avec une sûreté et une correction admirables. Docilement il a obéi à sa nature, sans lui proposer de buts ambitieux ou l'engager dans de fausses directions, par suite de quelques-uns de ces malencontreux partipris de la volonté, qui sont si fréquents chez les artistes. Il a fait ce que cet instinct, dont les conseils sont toujours infaillibles, l'invitait à faire: il s'est adonné aux genres qui s'accordaient naturellement avec la forme de son esprit, la poésie de dilettantisme et de fantaisie, les descriptions de voyage, les caprices et les contes de courte haleine, la critique d'art. Il n'a pas cherché, et même il ne semble pas avoir désiré les facultés qu'il n'avait pas. Aussi toutes ses qualités portent-elles cette marque du tempérament que nous appelons naïve" (15). 1. Des originaux et des copies ", dans le Cabinet de l'amateur et de l'antiquaire, I, 16. 2. KARL GROOs, "Die Anfänge der Kunst und die Theorie Darwins" in Beiträge zur Aesthetik, I. 3. MÜLLER-FREIENFELS, Psychologie der Kunst, II, 124. 4. Ibid., II, 123. 5. Cf. BULLOUGH, The Relations of Esthetics to Psychology, on as an æsthetic factor. "distance" 6. MÜLLER-FREIENFELS, article on the Psychologie der Kunst, p. 294. 7. BINET ET PASSY, Auteurs dramatiques, p. 116. 8. Cf. as noted above, the correspondence between Heine's interests and Gautier's, the use of Victor Hugo's material, etc. 9. That exterior pressure was at times an even greater factor in the equilibrium can be noted from Judith Gautier's account of the composition of the Capitaine Fracasse, for which the editor Charpentier demanded a happy ending. "Enfin il suppliait l'auteur de revenir sur sa décision et de renoncer à un dénouement qui désolerait les âmes sensibles. . the "Librairie des bibliophiles,” 1884, pp. iii-iv. 10. ROSENTHAL, La Peinture sous la monarchie de juillet. 11. Letter to Sainte-Beuve of November, 1863, cited by Sp. de Lovenjoul, Histoire des œuvres I, 106. 12. FEYDEAU, Souvenirs, pp. 141, 143. 13. The question of the essential plasticity of Gautier's achievement is not involved here; in it must be considered many factors from his whole composition, and no decision can be reached on the subject before such consideration is made. That Gautier planned, however, to reproduce plastic art in literature, and tried to do this through formal means, is undoubted. 14. "Salon de 1846", La Presse, 8 avril 1846. THE QUESTION OF PLASTICITY Théophile Gautier, who was a literary theorist as well as a writer, who had occupied himself with art criticism and also with painting, who, from the time of Mademoiselle de Maupin onward, had analyzed his own position in regard to the combination of literature and plastic art in both theory and practice, came to the conclusion that he himself was more plastic than literary: Balzac préférait de beaucoup, à la Vénus de Milo, une Parisienne élégante, fine, coquette, moulée dans son long cachemire. Cela a bien son charme, quoique, pour notre goût, nous aimions davantage la Vénus de Milo; mais cela tient à ce que, par suite d'une première éducation et d'un sens particulier, nous sommes plus plastique que littéraire” (1). In this statement the author speaks of his preferences and not necessarily of his production, although he advances this judgment of himself as the explanation of his literary interest in the antique beauty rather than in modern civilizations. By his critics, however, from Feydeau to such recent writers as Küchler and Luitz, the distinction made by Gautier has been applied in particular to his actual accomplishment in literature, and has been made the basis for many affirmations as to his creative imagination. It is an interesting question, and one of great importance for the definition of his mental habits: how far was Gautier plastic, to what extent did plasticity characterize him and his work? (2). Where did his particular imagination differ from that of the ordinary literary artist? Not until some conclusion is reached here will it be possible to discover the bearing of this “première éducation," of this "sens particulier," on the formation of his talent, for the talent itself must first be defined, and this is the question of Gautier's creative imagination. In attempting to answer it, a confusion of thought is easily made: Gautier's love for the plastic arts and his preoccupation with them has been taken to mean a plastic literature; the orientation of his interests toward the plastic has been considered the equivalent of a plastic method in his own writing. It is claimed that he is the exact transposition of the plastic artist into another field of creation: that because his tastes are those of the plastic artist, his method of creation, even though resulting in written work, is not literary, but plastic. This assumption does not seem justified a priori. It is very possible that a man whose ideal accomplishment is at the end of one line of work should actually exercise himself in another. The monk, who can imagine nothing higher than a mystical, direct communion with God, may find himself forced, by his own limitations or by the rules of the order, to devote himself to the most prosaic of good works, in which he exhausts himself and where, even though he may have occasional recourse to spiritual exercise, he labours with his hands to alleviate a purely physical suffering. His method for the attainment of sanctity, for the furtherance of the kingdom of God, differs wholly from his ideal, from the inclination of his temperament; he is not a mystic, though he should like to be one; the result of his life is a record of good works and not a chapter in divine revelation. There is no doubt that Gautier's ideal was plastic art, that in it he saw the nearest approximation to absolute Beauty. He himself did not accomplish this form of art, but he wished to make his substitute there for, literature, as nearly equivalent to it as possible, and by preoccupation, by desire, it may be said that his literature was indeed plastic. It does not follow, however, that his method was of necessity equally plastic, and an investigation of the means by which he worked must be undertaken in order to come to some decision as to whether he was really plastic in his activity, or whether he was perhaps, in spite of all dicta, more literary than plastic. The plasticity of his desires may be admitted, the essential plasticity of his method requires further consideration. According to Luitz, “die Fähigkeit der scharfen Beobachtung (in Gautier) hat sich mit der Fähigkeit, das Geschaute scharf wiederzugeben, gepaart" (3), and he quotes Sainte-Beuve's record of Gautier's words to support this assertion: . . On m'appelle souvent un fantaisiste, me disait-il un jour, et pourtant, toute ma vie, je n'ai fait que m'appliquer à bien voir, à bien regarder la nature, à la dessiner, a la rendre, à la peindre, si je pouvais, telle que je l'ai ' (4). vue Luitz continues: "Aber da, wie Walter Küchler in seinem schon erwähnten Aufsatz sich ausdrückt, der malerische Instinkt bei ihm bedeutet stärker war, als die malerische Fähigkeit, die technische Geschicklichkeit,' machte er im Atelier von Rioult wenig Fortschritte, und er hat dieses bald verlassen; dass er nun Dichter wurde, ist nur eine äusserliche Veränderung. Er hat nur die Mittel, mit denen er sich äusserte, vertauscht. Der Grund blieb derselbe, der Sinn für die sichtbaren Formen der Welt. Diese gab er nun, statt mit Farben und Linien, mit Worten wieder. . Gautier himself was not wholly convinced of the possibility of success in this exchange of expressive medium, for to him it seemed that "Chaque art a ses moyens et ses limites": “Malgré l'ut pictura poesis d'Horace, la peinture et la poésie n'ont rien de commun entre elles; c'est cette malheureuse préoccupation de poésie en musique et en peinture, qui a fait de nous si long-temps les dilettante et les connaisseurs les plus ridicules du monde" (5). The means and the limits of the literary art of Gautier, however, are, in so far as possible to be made to coïncide with those of the plastic art; to this objective his growing conviction of the worth of the latter leads him. Thus his deviation from the highest possible correspondence will indicate here to what extent the "malerische Fähigkeit, die technische Geschicklichkeit," lack ing in his actual painting, were also absent from his whole creative imagination. So the question arises as to what is plasticity in literature. Its criteria are ill defined, and still less well applied. Some have been noted and utilized by literary critics-in the case of Gautier, especially by Luitz and Küchler, although these authors have occupied themselves with plastic intent rather more than with plastic method. Others have remained largely the property of theoretical æstheticians. There is, moreover, no assurance that since the time of Lessing there have been discovered all possible means of creating a plastic literature, of using the plastic capacities of words and their combinations. Such criteria as have been distinguished need not be discussed here in and for themselves; it is in their application to Gautier's method that they are now of interest, and their own definition is made more clear by his example. The first point where the criteria of plasticity may be applied is, perhaps, that of the choice of subject-matter, of "idea," at the basis of his individual compositions. The distinction between the plastic and the literary idea continues to be a moot point in æsthetics. Gautier, nevertheless, had come to certain conclusions in regard to it when he was still at the beginning of his career as a critic of art, and his own criterion of plasticity in this case may justly be applied to his production. . . Dieu le sait, il n'y a rien de plus opposé sur la terre et au ciel que les vrais principes de la composition pittoresque et ceux de la composition poétique. "Avant tout il faut à la peinture des bras, des jambes, de grands airs de tête, des torses à étudier, des armes, des étoffes à plis larges et puissants, une architecture de haut style, des fonds de paysages d'un caractère grandiose. Il faut du nu et des draperies, plus de nu que de draperies, plus de draperies que de vêtements et d'armure; c'est une vérité qu'on ne saurait trop dire. "Tout sujet où ces choses ne se rencontrent pas est fort bon à faire une ballade ou un chapitre de roman, mais ne vaut rien pour un tableau. "On fait une déplorable confusion et transposition de mots. Une idée en peinture n'a pas le moindre rapport avec une idée en littérature. Une main emmanchée d'une certaine façon, les doigts écartés ou rapprochés dans un certain style, un jet de plis, une courbure de tête, un contour attenué ou renflé, un mariage de couleurs, une coiffure d'une bizarrerie élégante, un reflet piquant, |