Mademoiselle de Maupin (Illustrated Edition). Theophile Gautier
The critic who has produced nothing of his own is a coward; he is like an abbé paying court to a layman's wife: the layman cannot pay him back in his own coin or fight with him.
I think that an account of the different methods of depreciating any sort of work, resorted to during the last month, would be at least as interesting as the story of Tiglath-Pileser, or of Gemmagog, who invented peaked shoes.
There would be enough matter to fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but we will have pity on the reader and confine ourselves to a few lines—a favor for which we demand more than everlasting gratitude.—In a very remote age, lost in the darkness of time—it was fully three weeks ago—the romance of the Middle Ages flourished principally in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in high esteem; coiffures à la Hennin were not despised and party-colored trousers were thought well of; the dagger was priceless; the peaked shoe was adored as a fetich.—There was nothing but ogive windows, turrets, colonnettes, stained glass, cathedrals, and fortified châteaux;—the characters were all damoiselles and damoiseaux, pages and varlets, beggars and swash-bucklers, gallant knights and ferocious castellans;—all of which were more innocent certainly than innocent games, and did absolutely no harm to anybody.
The critic did not wait for the second romance before beginning his work of depreciation: as soon as the first appeared, he enveloped himself in his robe of camel's hair, and sprinkled a bushel of ashes on his head; then, in his loud, wailing voice, he began to cry:
"More Middle Ages, nothing but the Middle Ages! who will deliver me from the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages which are not the Middle Ages?—Paste-board and terra-cotta Middle Ages, which have nothing of the Middle Ages save the name!—Oh! these iron barons, in their iron armor, with iron hearts in their iron breasts! Oh! the cathedrals with their rose-work always in bloom and their stained glass in flower, with their lace-work of granite, with their open-work trefoils, their toothed gables, their chasubles of stone embroidered like a bride's veil, with their tapers, their psalms, their glittering priests, with their people on their knees, their rumbling organ, and their angels soaring aloft and flapping their wings under the arches!—how they have spoiled my Middle Ages, my refined, brightly-colored Middle Ages!—how they have blotted it from sight under a layer of coarse plaster!—what discordant colors!—Ah! ignorant daubers, who fancy you have created an effect by splashing red upon blue, white upon black, and green upon yellow, you have seen only the outer shell of the Middle Ages, you have not divined the true meaning of the Middle Ages, the blood does not circulate beneath the skin in which you have clothed your phantoms, there is no heart in your steel corselets, there are no legs in your tricot trousers, no stomach or breast behind your emblazoned skirts; they are clothes that have the shape of men and that is all.—So, down with the Middle Ages as they are presented to us by the fabricators"—the great word is out, the fabricators!—"The Middle Ages meet no need of the present day, we must have something else."
And the public, seeing how the feuilletonistes snarled at the Middle Ages, was seized with an ardent passion for the Middle Ages, which they claim to have killed at a single blow. The Middle Ages invaded everything, assisted by the obstruction of the newspapers:—dramas, melodramas, novels, tales, poetry—there were even Middle-Age vaudevilles, and Momus recited feudal mummeries.
Beside the romance of the Middle Ages flourished the carrion romance, a very pleasing variety, which nervous petites-maîtresses and blasé cooks consumed in great numbers.
The feuilletonistes speedily came flocking to the stench, like crows to the carrion, and they tore with the beaks of their pens and inhumanly put to death that poor species of novel, which asked nothing more than to be allowed to prosper and putrefy in peace on the greasy shelves of the book-stalls. What did they not say? what did they not write?—Literature of the morgue or the galleys, an executioner's nightmare, hallucination of a drunken butcher, or a convict-keeper with the jail-fever! They benignly gave us to understand that the authors were assassins and vampires, that they had contracted the vicious habit of killing their fathers and mothers, that they drank blood from human skulls, that they used the bones of the legs for forks and cut their bread with a guillotine.
And yet they knew better than any one, from having frequently breakfasted with them, that the authors of those charming slaughters were excellent young men of family, very easy-going and in the best society, white-gloved and fashionably near-sighted—with a decided preference for beefsteak over human cutlets, and more accustomed to drink Bordeaux wine than the blood of young girls or new-born children.—From having seen and touched their manuscripts, they knew perfectly well that they were written with ink of great virtue upon English paper, and not with blood from the guillotine upon the skin of a Christian flayed alive.
But whatever they might say or do, the age was after carrion, and the charnel-house suited them better than the boudoir; the reader would bite at no hook that was not baited with a little body already turning blue.—A state of things easily conceived; put a rose at the end of your line and the spiders will have time to spin their webs in the crook of your elbow before you catch the tiniest minnow; put on a worm or a piece of rank cheese, and carp, barbel, perch, eels, will all leap three feet out of water to snap at it.—Men are not so different from fish as people generally seem to believe.
One would have said that the newspaper men had become Quakers, Brahmins, or Pythagoreans, or bulls, they had been suddenly seized with such a horror of red and of blood.—Never had they been known to be in such a soft and melting mood;—it was cream and buttermilk.—They admitted the existence of only two colors, sky-blue and apple-green. Pink was only tolerated, and if the public would have allowed them to do as they chose, they would have led it to the banks of the Lignon to feed on spinach beside the sheep of Amaryllis. They had changed their black frock-coats for the dove-colored jacket of Celadon or Silvander, and surrounded their goose-feathers with clusters of roses and ribbons after the style of a shepherd's crook. They let their hair float in the wind like a child's, and had made themselves virgins according to the recipe of Marion Delorme, and about as successfully as she.
They applied to literature the article in the Decalogue:
Thou shalt not kill.
The least little dramatic murder was no longer permissible, and the fifth act had become an impossibility.
They considered the poniard extravagant, poison monstrous, the axe horrible beyond words. They would have liked dramatic heroes to live to the age of Melchisedec; and yet it has been a recognized fact, from time immemorial, that the object of every tragedy is to have a poor devil of a great man, who cannot help himself, murdered in the last act, just as the object of every comedy is to join in matrimony two idiots of jeunes premiers of about sixty years each.
It was about this time that I threw into the fire—after having taken a duplicate, as almost always happens—two superb and magnificent Middle-Age dramas, one in verse, the other in prose, in which the heroes were quartered and boiled on the stage, which would have been very entertaining and decidedly unusual.
To conform to their ideas, I have since composed an antique tragedy in five acts called Héliogabale, the hero of which throws himself into the privy, an extremely novel situation and one that has the merit of introducing a bit of scenery not yet seen on the stage.—I have also written a modern drama, very much superior to Antoni—Arthur, or L'Homme Fatal, where the providential idea arrives in the shape of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after committing various rapes, and that, combined with his remorse, brings on a frightful attack of indigestion of which he dies.—A moral ending, if ever there was one, which proves that God is just, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded.
As for the monstrosity species, you know how they have dealt with that, how they have abused Han d'Islande the cannibal, Habibrah the obi, Quasimodo the bell-ringer, and Triboulet, who is only a hunch-back—all that family so strangely swarming—all those gigantic deformities whom my dear neighbor sends crawling and leaping through the virgin forests and the cathedrals of his romances. Neither the great strokes à la Michael Angelo, nor the curiosities worthy of Callot, nor the effects of light and shade after the fashion of