GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE. — Poet and novelist, born at Tarbes on 30 August 1811, died in Paris on 23 October 1872. A pupil at the Parisian Collège Louis-le-Grand, he later attended the studio of the painter Rioult and, although from there he turned to literature, descriptive notation would always remain his finest characteristic.
Introduced to V. Hugo in 1830, he joined the Romantic movement and was among the ardent supporters of Hernani. In July of that same year he published a small collection of poems, reprinted in 1833 under the title Albertus ou l'âme et le péché, légende théologique, whose Romanticism finds expression in a verse already tending toward stylistic purity. With Les Jeunes France, romans goguenardes, also published in 1833, he criticized the deformation through excess of V. Hugo’s Romantic principles, bringing his art to a comic and grotesque tone. The publication of the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836) provided the exact terms of his spiritual biography, testifying to his deficient capacity for ethical judgment, his intellectually grounded anti-Christianity, his love of the impossible and of a beauty which, being empty form, is lost in banality. Also widespread in the novel is a lack of human sensitivity, arising from an excess of analysis and a deficiency of common sense. From that Christianity, which G. rejected in favor of an aesthetically appraised paganism, there nevertheless came to him the anguished questions concerning the meaning of life and death, to which his characters in La comédie de la mort (1838) are unable to respond. From the material of his travels in Spain, Constantinople, Russia, and Italy came his most vivid pages, precisely because the description of the external world found in him the colorist for whom a store of ideas was unnecessary. For the same reason, in Le capitaine Fracasse (1863) the finest pages are provided by the etchings and sketches, rather than by the plot describing the life of a company of itinerant comedians in the age of Louis XIII. In 1852 the collection of poems entitled Emaux et camées appeared, in which the technique of verse reached perfection and art, becoming impersonal and detached from every interest other than the formal one, foreshadowed the Parnassian movement. Baudelaire considered G. his master and, in the dedication of Les fleurs du mal addressed to him, called him «poète impeccable».
Maria Luisa Rondini