waggon on foot. They search for him in vain, in vain shout his name at the top of their voices across the great snow plain. No answer. One of them carries a lantern, the red light of which moves along the snow; and we see the long, shapeless shadows following the men upon the white ground. The black dog belonging to the company follows them, howling. Suddenly the howls stop, and we are conscious of the death-like stillness which prevails when falling snow stifles every sound. At last the actor who has the sharpest eyes thinks he sees a curious figure lying beneath a tree, strangely, ominously still. It is he, the luckless Matamore. He is lying with his back against the tree, and his long, outstretched legs are half covered with the driving snow. His gigantic rapier, without which he was never seen, stands at such an odd angle to his breast that under any other circumstances one would have laughed. The lantern-bearer holds the lantern to his poor comrade's face, and gets such a shock that he almost drops it. The face is of a waxy whiteness; the ridge of the nose, which is pinched at the nostrils by the bony fingers of death, shines like a piece of cuttle-bone; the skin is tightened across the temples; snow-flakes lie on the eyebrows and lashes; the dilated eyes have a glassy stare. At each end of the heavy, pointed moustache gleams a little icicle, the weight of which drags down the hair. The seal of eternal silence has closed the lips which have delighted so many an audience with their merry brag; and a death's-head shows beneath the pale, thin face, on which the habit of making grimaces has carved furrows, now terrible in their comicality. "Alas!" says one of his comrades, "our poor Matamore is dead. Exhausted and stupefied by the driving snow, he must have sought shelter for a moment under this tree, and as he has not two ounces of flesh upon his bones, he has been frozen to the marrow in no time. When we were in Paris he reduced his rations every day in order to produce more effect, and he had made himself leaner than a greyhound in the coursing season. Poor Matamore! you are safe now from all the kicks and slaps and drubbings which your part obliged you to submit to! You are as stiff now as if you had swallowed your own dagger." The pathos of the situation is here brought out indirectly by a conscientious plastic treatment of the subject. It was natural that such a degree of feeling as this seldom revealed itself in an art like Gautier's, and that in time he became entirely addicted to a species of descriptive writing which, perfect as it was in its kind, was ever more soulless. He had a passion for travelling; he visited Spain in 1840, Africa (in the company of the Duc d'Aumale) in 1845, Italy in 1850, Constantinople in 1852, Russia (penetrating as far as Novgorod) in the following year; and all these journeys he described, thanks to his fabulous memory for the appearance of things, with incomparable accuracy, though the descriptions were often written. long after his return. One disappointment awaits the reader, namely, that everything in the different countries is described except their inhabitants. We are told that when Madame de Girardin had read his Tra los montes, she said to him: "But, Théo, are there no Spaniards in Spain?"—a criticism which is applicable to all his books of this kind. The inner man gradually ceased to exist for him, and even the outer man was at last lost to sight in his clothes. In Gautier's conversations with Bergerat, his son-in-law, we come upon the following comical and characteristic speech: “A royal tiger is a more beautiful creature than a man; but if out of the tiger's skin the man cuts himself a magnificent costume, he becomes more beautiful than the tiger, and I begin to admire him. In the same way, a town interests me only by virtue of its public buildings. Why? Because they are the collective result of the genius of its population. Let the inhabitants be utterly vile and the town a habitation of crime, what does it signify to me so long as I am not assassinated whilst I am inspecting the buildings?" This is the worship of beauty and art carried to a characteristic extreme. The human, the emotional, the modern, life itself, at last lost all interest for Gautier the artist and art-lover. In dramatic art he became indifferent to everything but the style, the costumes, and the scenery. He often maintained that it ought to be possible for a dramatist to produce all his effects by employing four Pierrots in different situations for all that was wanted was "an impression of life, not life itself." "Life itself is too ugly," he used to add. Thus he finally, as it were, criticised himself, showing distinctly to all except his blind admirers where his limitations lay. He exhibited in himself the weak side of his axiom, L'art pour l'art; proved that an art which does nothing but revolve round the axis of art itself, inevitably becomes barren and empty. Art enthusiasm creates a Galatea out of marble, but the personal stream of thought is the divine breath which breathes life into the statue. Nevertheless Gautier did a great and a good work by labouring with unexampled energy to free art from unwarrantable claims, and by developing it in as characteristic a manner as it lay in his power to do. Though this was not enough for art, it was enough for one man to have done. It cannot, however, be said that Gautier's talent was appreciated as it deserved during his lifetime; the artistic circles formed his public; merely literary people, not to speak of the reading world at large, did not understand him. often have I myself heard from the lips of French scientific men the foolish assertion that Gautier wrote his books out of dictionaries, without caring for anything but the sound of his words and their singularity. How This want of understanding is to a certain degree explained by the fact that, in the mind of the general public, Gautier the journalist had gradually supplanted Gautier the poet. As early as 1836 the man who had told the journalists such bitter truths had joined their ranks to earn his daily bread; and his connection with the press lasted until his death-thirty-six years. His facility in writing was of great advantage to him, and the tasks he accomplished as art and dramatic critic were herculean. According to his own and Bergerat's calculations, which must, however, be exaggerated, his works, if all his articles were collected, would fill three hundred volumes. He wrote for Girardin's paper, La Presse, for nineteen years, and afterwards, under the Empire, chiefly in the Moniteur officiel. His dramatic criticism, which he undertook unwillingly, is only valuable for its fine style. As an art critic he confined himself more and more, as time VOL. V. U went on, to describing pictures, an art in which he was unapproachable. Weariness of his profession, disinclination to make enemies, compassion for beginners and the untalented, good-nature and indifference in equally large proportions, made him more and more indulgent. At last he praised everything and every one with the same serene impassibility and in the same distinguished, ornate style. The general public knew him only as an art and literary critic. But upon authors, both of poetry and prose, his influence was great. Paul de Saint-Victor, with his excellent prose, Leconte de Lisle, the most unemotional of modern poets, Baudelaire, the "Satanic" lyric poet, and the whole group of young poets who during the Second Empire formed themselves into a school under the name of "Les Parnassiens," are direct descendants of Théophile Gautier. SaintVictor inherited his sense of form and colour, his devotion to plastic art, Leconte de Lisle his perfect comprehension of foreign civilisations and his Oriental serenity, Baudelaire his partiality for abnormal feelings and passions, and the Parnassians his faultless metre and rhyme. But although Gautier's influence has thus extended far beyond the 1830 period, and beyond the term of his own life, his is one of the names most inseparably connected with the early, the fighting, days of Romanticism. It is significant and touching that the last, uncompleted article he wrote was a description of the audience on the night of the first performance of Victor Hugo's Hernani. XXIX SAINTE-BEUVE As a poet he GAUTIER'S critical writings, though they form such an enormous proportion of his total production, are already almost forgotten; he survives as the novelist and poet. But one of his contemporaries, who like him was both a poet and a critic, and whose name during their lifetime was frequently coupled with his, has had a different fate. The rank which Sainte-Beuve won for himself as a critic is so elevated as completely to overshadow his position as a poet, and as a historian in the usual sense of the word. showed himself to be possessed of delicate and original talent; but he was an epoch-making critic, one of the men who inaugurate a system and found a new branch of art. In a certain sense it may be said that he was a greater innovator in his province than the other authors of the period in theirs ; for there was modern lyric poetry before Victor Hugo, but modern criticism in the strict acceptation of the word did not exist before Sainte-Beuve. At any rate he remodelled criticism as completely as Balzac did fiction. During the last years of his life his authority was undisputed; nevertheless, it was not until some ten years after his death that the literary public beyond the frontiers of France awoke to a full sense of his preeminence. An excellent foreign critic of French literature, the German historian, Karl Hillebrand, has pronounced SainteBeuve's to be the master-mind of the period, an assertion which, though it may be an exaggeration, can only be called absurd if criticism be regarded as in itself a lower branch of art than the drama or lyric poetry. This, however, is surely now an antiquated standpoint. To the author that branch of art is the highest in which his nature finds fullest expression; and though there may be an order of precedence among intellects, |