of Musset.
Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law
of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand
that moulds and colours--that is all. A child of the South, born at
Tarbes in 1811, THEOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's
studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gerard de Nerval having
summoned him to take part in the battle of _Hernani_, he swore by
the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter.
His first volume, _Poesies_, appeared in 1830, and was followed in
two years by _Albertus_, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and
horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The
_Comedie de la Mort_ evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust,
Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and
love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The
_Orientales_ was his poetic gospel; but the _Orientales_ is precisely
the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most
exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early
poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and
picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as
they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured
with vivid pigments.

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for
poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a
critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task
in workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions
than to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary
criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century
poets--Theophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others--published
in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title _Les
Grotesques_, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the
request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on _Les Progres de la
Poesie Francaise depuis 1830_. A reader of that memoir to-day will
feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shifted
as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria,
Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of life
or as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things
in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye.