by S. T. Joshi
The Last Man is crippled by its slow-moving pace and its deficiency in extrapolating technological and other advances a century and a half beyond the novel’s date of writing; and even the sociopolitical implications are relatively undventurous. Many features of the novel, including its conclusion, are clear reflections of events in the life of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nevertheless, the novel does gain a cumulative power in spite of its handicaps. The plague is of course not presented as anything approaching a supernatural phenomenon, but its inexorable progress creates a kind of shuddering terror not found in any previous work of Gothic fiction. It may not stand up well in comparison with M. P. Shiel’s infinitely more skillful novel on the same idea, The Purple Cloud (1901), but it is a commendable feat of the imagination.
Mary Shelley will live in general literature, and in the literature of the weird, for Frankenstein; but that does not mean that her extensive array of other works should be summarily dismissed. Her entire corpus of fiction exhibits a powerful and vivid imagination, a narrative skill that impels the reader forward, and a prose idiom of muscular tensity and pungency, capable of rousing the emotions of fear, wonder, and terror, but also of pathos, melancholy, and pensive reflection—emotions that she herself experienced over the course of a tragedy-filled life.
Théophile Gautier: The Eternal Feminine
The tradition of French weird fiction is rich and deep, and needs to be more widely appreciated by Anglophone readers. There are fantastic elements in the work of such classic writers as Rabelais and Voltaire, although not much of it is weird or horrific in the strictest sense. Relatively few French writers contributed to the Gothic novel during its heyday (1764–1820), but it was not long thereafter that Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier, and others began writing novels, tales, and poems that placed them among the forefront of the weird fiction of their era. Among the most notable of these was Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), whose weird work extends far beyond the one or two anthology chestnuts for which he has hitherto been known in the English-speaking world.
Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, to Pierrce and Antoinette-Adélaide Gautier at Tarbes, a French city near the border with Spain. This remoteness from the nation’s dominant cultural center, Paris, perhaps signaled Gautier’s self-perception as both a Frenchman and a citizen of the world: he became one of the most widely travelled men of his generation. In 1815 the family moved to Paris, as Gautier’s father became a minor functionary in the government. After a brief and unhappy few months at the Collège Royal de Louis-le-Grand in 1822, Gautier enjoyed his years spent at the Collège Charlemagne, where the young poet Gérard de Nerval became a lifelong friend. Gautier was fascinated with Latin and Greek but also relished reading the Gothic novels of Radcliffe, Maturin, and “Monk” Lewis—a fusion of classicism and Romanticism that dominated the rest of his life and his literary work. Gautier also studied painting, and he remained extraordinarily sensitive to the pictorial and plastic arts.
In 1829 he met Victor Hugo, whose post-Gothic novel Han d’Icelande (1823; Han of Iceland) focused on a diabolical figure in the wilds of Norway. It was in 1830 that Gautier himself published a slim volume of his Poésies (it was paid for by his father) and also attended the premiere of Hugo’s revolutionary play Hernani, which officially launched the Romantic movement in France. In 1832 he published a long poem, Albertus, described by his biographer as “the tale of a witch turned woman who persuades her lover to sell his soul to the devil.”[11] Shortly thereafter Gautier began writing articles on painting for Le France Littéraire, the first of many magazines and newspapers for which he would write thousands of pieces of journalism over the next forty years.
In 1834 Gautier wrote what became his manifesto for the credo of “art for art’s sake.” It was published as the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), a fascinating account of a woman who disguises herself as a man and thereby attracts the love of both a man and a woman. The novel remains Gautier’s most celebrated work, but it is the preface that attracted the greatest attention at the time for its uncompromising stance on the independence of art from conventional morality and its provocative declaration that art is, and must be, “useless”:
Nothing that is beautiful is indispensable to life. You might suppress flowers, and the world would not suffer materially; yet who would wish that there were no more flowers? I would rather give up potatoes than roses, and I think that there is none but an utilitarian in the world capable of pulling up a bed of tulips in order to plant cabbages therein.
What is the use of women’s beauty? Provided that a woman be medically well formed, and in condition to bear children, she will always be good enough for economists.
What is the good of music? of painting? Who would be foolish enough to prefer Mozart to Monsieur Carrel, and Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?
There is truly nothing beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man’s needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.[12]
That comment on “women’s beauty” is significant, for Gautier came to believe that the human female constituted the most exalted form of beauty in all creation, and much of his work—and, for that matter, his life—was devoted to seeking it out.
The young novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) read Mademoiselle de Maupin and sought out Gautier, urging him to write for his paper, Le Chronique de Paris. But Gautier also seized the opportunity to write for Emile de Girardin’s paper La Presse, and over the next several decades he contributed enormous quantities of dramatic criticism to it, becoming perhaps the leading drama critic in France during that period. Around this time he met Eugénie Fort, and she became the first of his several mistresses. She bore him a child, Théophile Gautier fils, on November 27, 1836, and remained in close touch with him (although their relationship later became platonic) for the rest of his life.
Gautier’s first voyage outside of France was a modest trip to Belgium in 1836, accompanied by Gérard de Nerval. But in 1840 he undertook a more extensive trip to Spain. A travelogue he later wrote, Voyage en Espagne, was published posthumously in 1881. (This is not to be confused with his 1843 play Voyage en Espagne.) In 1841 he wrote the hugely successful ballet Giselle. It was written largely with the celebrated ballerina Carlotta Grisi in mind; he had fallen in love with Carlotta, but for various reasons she was not available to him. A few years later he initiated a liaison with her sister, Ernesta, who gave birth to two daughters, Judith (1845–1917) and Estelle (b. 1848). Judith would later become a poet and novelist in her own right.
The year 1842 saw Gautier’s first trip to England, a country he would visit repeatedly over the next several decades. A voyage to Algeria occurred in 1845, followed by another trip to Spain the next year. But Gautier’s life was disrupted by the Revolution of 1848; his contract with La Presse was cancelled (although he later resumed writing for the paper on a freelance basis), and for the next decade or more he suffered considerably from financial difficulties. In 1849, on another trip to England, he met Maria Mattei, who briefly became his mistress; but she broke from him because she could not endure his continuing involvement with Ernesta and other women. In 1850 Gautier made an extensive trip to Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii; that last locale led directly to his weird tale “Arria Marcella: A Souvenir of Pompeii” (1852). The year 1852 also saw Gautier undertaking a two-month visit to Constantinople (Istanbul); on his return to France, he stopped off in Greece and absorbed the ancient monuments that had been a source of wonder and fascination for him since childhood.
The year 1852 was also notable for the publication of a slim poetry volume Emaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos), initially containing only eighteen poems but augmented in several succeeding editions. It was hailed as an impeccable fusion of classical precision and Romantic sensibility.
A few years later Gautier gave up writing for La Presse and turned his attention to another paper, Le Moniteur Universel. By this time he was hobnobbing with the leading literary figures of France, including Flaubert, Hugo, the Goncourt brothers, and the critic C. A. Sainte-Beuve, as well as painters such as Gustave Doré and the composers Georges Bizet, Giuseppe Verdi, and Hector Berlioz. The deaths of Balzac in 1850 and of Gérard de Nerval (by suicide) in 1855 affected him deeply, but he was gratified to receive the dedication of the first edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal:
AU POÈTE IMPECCABLE
au perfait magician ès lettres françaises
à mon très-cher et très-vénéré maître et ami
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
avec les sentiments de la plus profonde
humilité
je dédie ces fleurs maladives
C. B.
[To the impeccable poet, the perfect magician of French literature, to my dearest and most venerated master and friend, Théophile Gautier, with feelings of the deepest humility, I dedicate these sickly flowers. C. B.]
In the fall of 1856 Gautier began writing Le Roman de la momie (1857; The Romance of a Mummy), a novel about an English explorer who unearths a lovely female mummy. There are no weird elements here, as the novel is a straight historical novel in which a scroll found in the mummy’s sarcophagus narrates her life and loves in ancient Egypt. In late 1856 Gautier became editor of L’Artiste, where he devoted himself to art criticism. He championed many of the revolutionary French painters of his day, including Delacroix, Ingres, Millet, Corot, and Manet. He spent several months, from the fall of 1858 to the spring of 1859, in Russia, as he was commissioned to write a book about Russian art. Another trip to Russia followed in 1861.
The year 1863 saw the appearance of a novel that Gautier had long worked on, Le Capitaine Fracasse. Although highly melodramatic (with many tropes derived from the Gothic novels), it is full of lush and vivid imagery. It proved to be a critical and financial success; Gautier boasted in a letter: “Le Capitaine Fracasse is more successful than [Hugo’s] Les Misérables [which had appeared in 1862], and the success grows daily.”[13] The fantastic novel Spirite, inspired by Carlotta Grisi, began appearing in the Moniteur Universel on November 17, 1865.
Although his financial situation was now more secure, Gautier was at this time plagued by various illnesses: “rheumatism, haemorrhoids, excessive sweating, frequent colds, depression, lethargy,” as his biographer notes.[14] His personal life was also in turmoil. His daughter Judith had fallen in love with the poet Catulle Mendès. For various reasons Gautier considered him an unsuitable husband for Judith, but she married him anyway. And because Ernesta Grisi had encouraged the marriage, Gautier broke off relations with her.
In 1868 Gautier gained a sinecure by becoming the librarian (and sometime lover) of Princess Mathilde. The next year he undertook his long-deferred trip to Egypt. The man who had written “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” and “The Mummy’s Foot” decades before he had ever seen Egypt would now finally set foot on the soil of the ancient land. But the journey began inauspiciously—he broke his arm on board the ship that took him there—and the trip itself featured numerous other disappointments and irritants. Nevertheless, he did see Cairo, Alexandria, and the Suez Canal.
But with the onset of the Franco-Prussian War on July 15, 1870, Gautier’s life took a sudden turn for the worse. Although he arranged for his daughter Estelle to stay with Carlotta Grisi in Switzerland, he himself returned to Paris in early September, where he endured appalling conditions during the siege of Paris:
We are eating horse, donkey, macaroni without butter or cheese; we shall soon be down to rats and mice. The horse is excellent, but the donkey is a real delicacy. There is nothing less true than the phrase: “Tough as a donkey.” . . . We’re rationed for gas as we are for meat. We only light one jet in four and the sight of these black streets, where a rare passer-by brushes against the walls and we do not hear the sound of a single carriage, is really not calculated to enliven us. But either we bury ourselves beneath the ruins of Paris or we die of hunger if we cannot fight our way out.[15]
Later on Gautier actually did say that “I regaled myself with a rat pâté which wasn’t bad at all.” He managed to write Tableaux de Siège (1871), but it provided little material comfort. The war finally ended on May 10, 1871, with France’s humiliating defeat; but least the siege was over.
Gautier’s health, however, was permanently shattered. For the remaining seventeen months of his life, he went from bad to worse, suffering several heart attacks and strokes in June and July 1872. He somehow continued writing, working on an ambitious Histoire du romanticisme, an account of literary and artistic movements from the epochal date of 1830 to 1868; although not fully complete, it was published posthumously in 1880. Gautier, largely bedridden for the final months of his life, died quietly on October 23, 1872.
Gautier’s influence on French—and English—literature should not be underestimated. He may well have been the key transitional figure leading from the fiery Romanticism of the early nineteenth century to the realism and naturalism (ultimately embodied in the novels of Émile Zola) in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Joanna Richardson speaks eloquently of Gautier’s influence on Flaubert:
It was probably in Gautier that Flaubert discovered his pessimism, his descriptive vocation, his passion for colour, his doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake, his exclusive cult of form, his hatred of the bourgeois. It was Gautier, it is said, who inspired Salammbô. No one could be the friend of Gautier without becoming the friend of Flaubert, too. “He was,” wrote Flaubert to [Ernest] Feydeau, after Gautier’s death, “a great man of letters and a great poet.”[16]
Later Richardson writes: “There is much indeed to confirm the contention that if Gautier had not existed, Baudelaire and the Parnassians, Flaubert and the Goncourts, Anatole France and Pierre Louÿs would probably have written their work; but certainly they would not have written it as we know it.”[17] And Gautier’s influence on the preeminent British advocate of art for art’s sake, Oscar Wilde, is patent. Was it not he who stated satirically, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that “all art is quite useless”?
Specifically in terms of Gautier’s weird work, we can state that he initiated or broached a number of themes and motifs that numerous other writers would take up in the decades that followed. Several of his weird tales were written early in his career, among them “Omphale: A Rococo Story” (1834), “Clarimonde” (1836), “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” (1838), and “The Mummy’s Foot” (1840). “Clarimonde” is a pioneering story of a vampire, written less than two decades after John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and anticipating some of the details of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871–72), with its lustful female vampire. The figure of Clarimonde, who seeks to corrupt a hapless priest both physically and spiritually, is unforgettable. And Gautier was one of the earliest to find horror in the appalling antiquity of Egypt. While—as Albert B. Smith, the most exhaustive commentator in English on Gautier’s weird work, rightly contends[18]—it is an exaggeration to say that “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” is in the strictest sense weird, it may well have contributed its mite to subsequent writers’ focus on Egypt as a locus of aeon-old horror. Certainly, a passage like the following—
[Egypt] is only a vast covering for a tomb—the dome of a necropolis; a sky dead and dried up like the mummies it hangs over; it weighs upon my shoulders like an over-heavy mantle; it constrains and terrifies me; it seems to me that I could not stand up erect without striking my forehead against it . . . whithersoever one turns, only frightful monsters are visible—dogs with the heads of men; men with the heads of dogs; chimeras begotten of hideous couplings in the shadowy depths of the labyrinths . . .
—anticipates what H. P. Lovecraft wrote in “Under the Pyramids” (1924), where the protagonist (Harry Houdini) cries out at one point:
I saw the horror a
nd unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable sacrifices to indescribable gods. [. . .] Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches . . . men should not have the heads of crocodiles. . . .[19]
And a story like “Arria Marcella” is a relatively rare instance of an author attempting to evoke weirdness from Greco-Roman antiquity.
The dominant thread of Gautier’s weird work—in line with his Romanticism and his devotion to female beauty—is the union of supernaturalism and romance. The evil Clarimonde is an anomaly in Gautier’s weird fiction; in nearly every other tale in this volume, women are either the pursuers or the pursued in love affairs that at times transcend death and the centuries. “Omphale” is a Pygmalion-type tale wherein a beautiful woman emerges from a tapestry to make love to the astounded protagonist. The essence of “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” is the nearly blasphemous quest of an Egyptian peasant to spend a night of love and feasting with the unapproachable queen; her insuperable boredom causes her to acquiesce to the man’s outrageous desires before having him summarily executed.