GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE. - Poet and novelist, b. at Tarbes on 30 Aug. 1811, d. at Paris on 23 Oct. 1872. A pupil at the Parisian Collège Louis-le-Grand, he later attended the studio of the painter Rioult, and although from there he passed on to literature, descriptive notation would always remain his finest characteristic.
Presented to V. Hugo in 1830, he joined the Romantic movement and was among the ardent supporters of Hernani. In July of the same year he published a small collection of verse, reprinted in 1833 under the title Albertus ou l'âme et le péché, légende théologique, whose Romanticism finds expression in a line that already tends toward stylistic purity. With Les Jeunes France, romans goguenardes, also of 1833, he criticizes the excessive distortion of V. Hugo's Romantic principles, carrying his art into a comic to grotesque tone. The publication of the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836) set out the exact terms of his spiritual biography, bearing witness to his lack of capacity for ethical judgment, to an anti-Christianity of an intellectual nature, to a love of the impossible and of a beauty that, being empty form, loses itself in banality. Also widespread in the novel is a lack of human sensibility, deriving from an excess of analysis and a deficiency of good sense. From that Christianity, which G. rejected in favor of a paganism evaluated aesthetically, there nonetheless came to him the anguished questions concerning the meaning of life and death, which his characters in La comédie de la mort (1838) are unable to answer. From the material of his travels in Spain, Constantinople, Russia, and Italy were born his most vivid pages, precisely because the description of the external world found in him the colorist who had no need of a stock of ideas. For the same reason, in Le capitaine Fracasse (1863) the best pages are given by the etchings and the sketches, rather than by the plot, which describes the life of a troupe of traveling players in the age of Louis XIII. In 1852 there appeared the collection of poems entitled Emaux et camées, in which the technique of verse reached perfection, and art, becoming impersonal, detached from every interest other than the formal one, preluded the Parnassian movement. Baudelaire regarded G. as his master and in the dedication of Les fleurs du mal addressed to him called him «poète impeccable».
Bibliography
Maria Luisa Rondini