Images de page
PDF
ePub

as indirectly his delight in certain sensations or his dislike of certain situations. The literary development may proceed by affective, as by conceptual interpolation. On the whole, however, it is the perceptual elements which are most notable, and their share in his composition is extended by transpositions from the impressions of one sense to those of another. Here again the visual is of primary but not of sole importance. While sound may often become sight, the visible may also be heard. Gautier makes use of verbal translations as still another means of giving his whole impression. Transposition, like the use of all kinds of documentary material, like the combination and intermingling of various sources, like the rendering of various single perceptual, affective, and conceptual elements in a situation, is employed in order that the writer may evoke most vividly for his reader the total experience, past or present, into which he himself has been able to enter.

Evocation, again, is the end toward which his stylistic means work. By repetition and by antithesis, by additions and eliminations in the original draught, Gautier proceeds toward concision, and toward precision of effect. His poetry is more concise than his prose, his fiction more exact than the inclusive poetic rendering. He does not hesitate to give actual facts in changed order and emphasis, if the impression gained by this method of verbal translation is more nearly in accord with that of the total original experience. Accentuation, as a matter of fact, was something over which the author had to labour. He was little interested in effects of sound as such, and his true principle of accentuation was a plastic one:

[ocr errors]

Chaque phrase.

doit avoir un commencement, un milieu et une fin. . . . Une phrase est un tout dans lequel on doit pouvoir retrouver, comme dans le corps humain, des os, des muscles, des veines et des nerfs. Si la phrase n'est pas construite selon les lois de la plastique, si elle ne peint pas. si, étant isolée de celles qui la précèdent et qui la suivent, elle n'a pas son caractère, sa couleur, sa beauté propre, elle est défecteuse; il faut la changer" (5).

Nevertheless, he realized that literary composition depended in at least a certain measure on its auditory impression, and his manuscripts denote his work for certain effects, his hesitations in prose,

his difficulties in poetry. Gautier's creative imagination did not proceed with certainty where sound was involved. He was interested in rhythms from a technical point of view, he enjoyed the manipulation of various verse forms, the adaptation of foreign metres to French thought and expression, but he was not sure, from the beginning, of what the auditory impression would be, and found himself involved in a difficult construction when he set about the writing of true poetry.

Further characteristics of Gautier's creative imagination are shown in certain qualities of his finished work. In the first place, it is analytic in character rather than synthetic. Some of the short tales, the Emaux et Camées, are unified and single in their impression; the greater portion of the original and critical work, however, is diverse in effect, a succession of more or less related scenes or pictures but not an organic whole nor the microcosm which Gautier praised in Eugène Delacroix and others with true genius. It was the rare synthetic piece which required the greatest effort of composition on Gautier's part, and by the very infrequency of this writing a second quality of his imagination appears: it is economical. Gautier the man was characterized by a certain physical laziness. In his work there are evidences of a similar mental inertia. Notwithstanding the great total volume of his writing, he had to be urged to accomplish the task he set himself. His production shows economy in its plastic content, where imitation of a model made composition easier, and likewise in its prose form, for by its choice Gautier was spared the difficulties inherent in poetry to a man with his lack of interest in sound and of facility in attaining auditory effects. His very verbal gift inclined him to prose composition, to the discursive writing most comparable to conversation. Further, his sentiments were not fully organized into a complete hierarchy, and while the love of beauty and desire for its creation were indeed paramount with him, there existed beside them, unassimilated in large measure, rival tendencies which might at times work in direct opposition to his artistic ideals. Gautier speaks of one such conflict, in itself

of little importance for his creative work but still indicative of the forces at variance within him:

. . Il parle du profond ennui qu'il a toujours éprouvé, de ce tiraillement perpétuel de deux hommes en lui: l'un qui lui dit, quand tous ses effets sont prêts pour aller en soirée: 'Couche-toi, qu'est-ce que tu irais faire là!' Et l'autre qui lui dit, quand il est couché: 'Tu aurais dû y aller, tu te serais amusé!'" (6).

More notable was the division between his love for his family and his love of absolute beauty, between his desire for protection and his desire to create plastically. Beside the Emaux et Camées, beside certain especial interests, certain attempts to reproduce classic beauty, must be placed a large number of trivial pieces, stories based on the commonplaces of popular interest, innumerable feuilletons which brought him in the means of support for his family. It is these latter productions which were favoured by the verbal facility that characterized him. The absence of a single canalization for Gautier's energy, the presence of two main opposing outlets, made it theoretically possible for him to choose between a hard and an easy path. To induce him from the kind of composition favored by its simple verbal form and by its accord with one of his main emotional tendencies to another type of work-a creation in accordance with his artistic ideal and implying a perfection in the difficult poetic execution demandedthere must have been a great force of energy at the disposal of his desire to create plastic beauty. It seems that this was not present in Gautier, and in so far as his production is not forced into this path of difficulty, it may justly be called economical.

. . . Son expression bizarre manque de force et de vie; ses tableaux coloriés avec tant de soin n'ont pas assez d'âme et de chaleur; l'esprit se fatigue à travers les détails dont il abonde, et cherche en vain une pensée unique qui résume ces poésies et se retrouve dans chaque pièce, dans chaque vers. Cette idée-mère, qui doit être au fond de tout livre, n'est pas assez dans celui de M. Gautier ce sont des rêves à propos de tout, d'une goutte d'eau qui tombe, d'une grenouille qui saute, d'une jeune fille qui court, etc., et cela sans que ces rêves épars se rattachent et se lient entre eux par quelque grande généralité. Encore un défaut que nous reprocherons à la poésie de M. Gautier, c'est qu'elle parle en vers si semblables à la prose que l'oreille, en les écoutant, y peut à peine deviner un rhythme . . ." (7).

Gautier's imagination is analytic, economical; it is also literary. He desired to create a plastic beauty in written form, but he went

about this work by a method more literary than plastic. For his subject-matter, indeed, he chose frequently that which might have been adapted to actual pictorial or sculptural representation or, again, that which was analogous in possibilities of treatment to the true plastic subject. Nevertheless, the treatment accorded it was rarely other than literary. Gautier's transposition did not bring about expression only in terms of the visible; the seen was frequently transformed from a stationary composition of forms and colours to a moving representation of the possible phases of its make-up, to a succession of parts comparable to true Homeric description. Even the order of presentation was most often not plastic. Gautier accomplished, in the great majority of his visual descriptions, the ascent to a literary climax. He mingled his representations of the plastic with reflections of intellectual or emotional interests quite foreign to the reproduction of the art object. He scorned no verbal resource which might make his writing more evocative, and even when the plastic original was before his eyes, he would in his rendering of it resort to literary means and effect a real transposition in manner of thought which belies his own description of his imagination as more plastic than literary.

Finally, Gautier's imagination may be said to be that of the writer of prose rather than that of the poet, that of the dilettante, of the lover of beauty, rather than that of its creator. According to the definition of Sully-Prudhomme, Gautier would be the perfect critic:

"Le plus équitable, le meilleur critique est l'homme à qui ne manque, pour être un artiste producteur, que la correspondance de la main avec le cerveau, l'homme qui voit avec l'œil et l'âme de l'artiste sans être doué du don manuel de l'exécution. Celui-là, malgré les tendances de son tempérament, n'a pu s'attacher à un genre particulier au point de méconnaître les aptitudes requises par les autres genres; il est évidemment placé dans des conditions plus avantageuses pour reconnaître toutes les qualités et rendre justice à tous les talents" (8).

The author himself had felt, from the time of the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin onward, that the critic was to be differentiated from the truly creative artist. One of his recent commentators has come to the conclusion that he did not, for the most

part, "über ein grosses Wollen hinausgekommen" (9), and Flaubert, who knew him well as man and as writer, who was himself obsessed with a love of beauty very similar to Gautier's own, was of much the same opinion (10). He felt, however, that while Gautier was not a poet, he was indeed a writer:

"Je trouve que tu es sévère pour Gautier! ce n'est pas un homme né aussi poète que Musset, mais il en restera plus, parce que ce ne sont pas les poètes qui restent, mais les écrivains. Gautier a un monde poétique fort restreint, mais il l'exploite admirablement quand il s'en mêle; lis le Trou du serpent, c'est cela qui est vrai et atrocement triste. Quant à son Don Juan je ne trouve pas qu'il vienne de celui de Namouna, car chez lui il est tout extérieur (les bagues qui tombent des doigts amaigris, etc.), et chez Musset tout moral. Il me semble, en résumé, que Gautier a raclé des cordes plus neuves (moins byroniennes) et quant au vers, il est plus consistant. Quel dommage que deux hommes pareils soient tombés où ils en sont; mais s'ils sont tombés, c'est qu'ils devaient tomber, quand la voile se déchire, c'est qu'elle n'est pas de trame solide; quelque admiration que j'aie pour eux deux. ce sont en somme deux hommes du second rang et qui ne font pas peur à les prendre en entier. Ce qui distingue les grands génies c'est la généralisation et la création; ils résument en un type des personnalités éparses et apportent à la conscience du genre humain des personnages nouveaux. Ce n'est pas là qu'il faut chercher l'art de la forme, mais chez les seconds (Horace, Labruyère) . . ." (11).

[ocr errors]

Gautier himself differentiated sharply between the prose author and the poet. The Goncourts present him, in Charles Demailly, as the feuilletoniste by nature, who is bored with his task because it does not fulfil his artistic ideals and who yet knows that his real force lies in the perfect accomplishment of this task (12). In his article on l'Excellence de la Poésie, the younger Gautier had pointed out that an especial endowment was necessary in him who was to be a true poet :

"Il n'est pas facile de faire des vers. Outre l'abondance d'idées, la connaissance de la langue et le don de l'image, il faut un certain sens intime, une disposition secrète, quelque chose qui ne s'acquiert pas et qui tient au tempérament propre et à l'idiosyncrasie; car si les sciences finissent toujours par ouvrir les portes de leur sanctuaire à qui vient y frapper souvent, la poésie, la musique et la peinture font voir un goût plus dédaigneux et ne se livrent qu'à certaines organisations d'élite. Ce qui ne veut pas dire que l'on devient un grand artiste sans travailler, mais que les plus profondes études qui feraient de vous un savant n'en feront pas un artiste" (13).

The prose author could not compete with this genius which, with beauty and goodness, composed a " rayonnante trinité, magnifiques présents que Dieu seul peut faire, qui sont au-dessus de la gén

« PrécédentContinuer »