Endowed
with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary,
he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline
or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which
he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner
of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of
a Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collection
of gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skill
and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in one
of his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, and
found that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; on
the faith of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ he had loved the old cathedrals;
"the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, which
with me was never very severe."

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonishing
the bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on all
subjects except art had less value than those of the philistine.
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ has lost any pretensions it possessed to
supereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth;
such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness,
lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty.
In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness--the sense of
mystery he did not in truth possess--on a basis of exactly carved
and exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors
strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days of
Louis XIII., _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, suggested doubtless by
Scarron's _Roman Comique_, and patiently retouched during a quarter
of a century.

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the
_Emaux et Camees_. He is not without sensibility, but he will not
embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated
himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter
or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into
coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values
words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little
stanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caring
only to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering
hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the city, when
Regnault gave away his life as a so