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Hero-worship is appropriate only to youth. With age one becomes cynical, or indifferent, or perhaps too busy. Either the sense of the marvelous is dulled, or one’s boys are just entering college and life is agreeably practical. Marriage and family cares are good if only for the reason that they keep a man from getting bored. But they also stifle his yearnings after the ideal. They make hero-worship appear foolish. How can a man go mooning about when he has just had a good cup of coffee and a snatch of what purports to be the news, while an attractive and well-dressed woman sits opposite him at breakfast-table, and by her mere presence, to say nothing of her wit, compels him to be respectable and to carry a level head? The father of a family and husband of a federated club woman has no business with hero-worship. Let him leave such folly to beardless youth.

But if a man has never outgrown the boy that was in him, or has never married, then may he do this thing. He will be happy himself, and others will be happy as they consider him. Indeed, there is something altogether charming about the personality of him who proves faithful to his early loves in literature and art; who continues a graceful hero-worship through all the caprices of literary fortune; and who, even though his idol may have been dethroned, sets up a private shrine at which he pays his devotions, unmindful of the crowd which hurries by on its way to do homage to strange gods.

Some men are born to be hero-worshipers. ThÉophile Gautier is an example. If one did not love Gautier for his wit and his good-nature, one would certainly love him because he dared to be sentimental. He displayed an almost comic excess of emotion at his first meeting with Victor Hugo. Gautier smiles as he tells the story; but he tells it exactly, not being afraid of ridicule. He went to call upon Hugo with his friends GÉrard de Nerval and PÉtrus Borel. Twice he mounted the staircase leading to the poet’s door. His feet dragged as if they had been shod with lead instead of leather. His heart throbbed; cold sweat moistened his brow. As he was on the point of ringing the bell, an idiotic terror seized him, and he fled down the stairs, four steps at a time, GÉrard and PÉtrus after him, shouting with laughter. But the third attempt was successful. Gautier saw Victor Hugo—and lived. The author of Odes et Ballades was just twenty-eight years old. Youth worshiped youth in those great days.

Gautier said little during that visit, but he stared at the poet with all his might. He explained afterwards that one may look at gods, kings, pretty women, and great poets rather more scrutinizingly than at other persons, and this too without annoying them. ‘We gazed at Hugo with admiring intensity, but he did not appear to be inconvenienced.’

What brings Gautier especially to mind is the appearance within a few weeks of an amusing little volume entitled Le Romantisme et l’Éditeur Renduel. Its chief value consists, no doubt, in what the author, M. Adolphe Jullien, has to say about Renduel. That noted publisher must have been a man of unusual gifts and unusual fortune. He was a fortunate man because he had the luck to publish some of the best works of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, ThÉophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, GÉrard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, and Paul Lacroix; and he was a gifted man because he was able successfully to manage his troop of geniuses, neither quarreling with them himself nor allowing them to quarrel overmuch with one another. Renduel’s portrait faces the title-page of the volume, and there are two portraits of him besides. There are fac-similes of agreements between the great publisher and his geniuses. There is a famous caricature of Victor Hugo with a brow truly monumental. There is a caricature of Alfred de Musset with a figure like a Regency dandy,—a figure which could have been acquired only by much patience and unremitted tight-lacing; also one of Balzac, which shows that that great novelist’s waist-line had long since disappeared, and that he had long since ceased to care. What was a figure to him in comparison with the flesh-pots of Paris!

One of the best of these pictorial satires is Roubaud’s sketch of Gautier. It has a teasing quality, it is diabolically fascinating. It shows how great an art caricature is in the hands of a master.

But the highest virtue of a good new book is that it usually sends the reader back to a good old book. One can hardly spend much time upon Renduel; he will remember that Gautier has described that period when hero-worship was in the air, when the sap of a new life circulated everywhere, and when he himself was one of many loyal and enthusiastic youths who bowed the head at mention of Victor Hugo’s name. The reader will remember, too, that Gautier was conspicuous in that band of Romanticists who helped to make Hernani a success the night of its first presentation. Gautier believed that to be the great event of his life. He loved to talk about it, dream about it, write of it.

There was a world of good fellowship among the young artists, sculptors, and poets of that day. They took real pleasure in shouting Hosanna to Victor Hugo and to one another. Even Zola, the Unsentimental, speaks of ma tristesse as he reviews that delightful past. He cannot remember it, to be sure, but he has read about it. He thinks ill of the present as he compares the present with ‘those dead years.’ Writers then belonged to a sort of heroic brotherhood. They went out like soldiers to conquer their literary liberties. They were kings of the Paris streets. ‘But we,’ says Zola in a pensive strain, ‘we live like wolves each in his hole.’ I do not know how true a description this is of modern French literary society, but it is not difficult to make one’s self think that those other days were the days of magnificent friendships between young men of genius. It certainly was a more brilliant time than ours. It was flamboyant, to use one of Gautier’s favorite words.

Youth was responsible for much of the enthusiasm which obtained among the champions of artistic liberty. These young men who did honor to the name of Hugo were actually young. They rejoiced in their youth. They flaunted it, so to speak, in the faces of those who were without it. Gautier says that young men of that day differed in one respect from young men of this day; modern young men are generally in the neighborhood of fifty years of age.Gautier has described his friends and comrades most felicitously. All were boys, and all were clever. They were poor and they were happy. They swore by Scott and Shakespeare, and they planned great futures for themselves.

Take for an example Jules Vabre, who owed his reputation to a certain Essay on the Inconvenience of Conveniences. You will search the libraries in vain for this treatise. The author did not finish it. He did not even commence it,—only talked about it. Jules Vabre had a passion for Shakespeare, and wanted to translate him. He thought of Shakespeare by day and dreamed of Shakespeare by night. He stopped people in the street to ask them if they had read Shakespeare.

He had a curious theory concerning language. Jules Vabre would not have said, As a man thinks so is he, but, As a man drinks so is he. According to Gautier’s statement, Vabre maintained the paradox that the Latin languages needed to be ‘watered’ (arroser) with wine, and the Anglo-Saxon languages with beer. Vabre found that he made extraordinary progress in English upon stout and extra stout. He went over to England to get the very atmosphere of Shakespeare. There he continued for some time regularly ‘watering’ his language with English ale, and nourishing his body with English beef. He would not look at a French newspaper, nor would he even read a letter from home. Finally he came back to Paris, anglicized to his very galoshes. Gautier says that when they met, Vabre gave him a ‘shake hand’ almost energetic enough to pull the arm from the shoulder. He spoke with so strong an English accent that it was difficult to understand him; Vabre had almost forgotten his mother tongue. Gautier congratulated the exile upon his return, and said, ‘My dear Jules Vabre, in order to translate Shakespeare it is now only necessary for you to learn French.’

Gautier laid the foundations of his great fame by wearing a red waistcoat the first night of Hernani. All the young men were fantastic in those days, and the spirit of carnival was in the whole romantic movement. Gautier was more courageously fantastic than other young men. His costume was effective, and the public never forgot him. He says with humorous resignation: ‘If you pronounce the name of ThÉophile Gautier before a Philistine who has never read a line of our works, the Philistine knows us, and remarks with a satisfied air, “Oh yes, the young man with the red waistcoat and the long hair.” … Our poems are forgotten, but our red waistcoat is remembered.’ Gautier cheerfully grants that when everything about him has faded into oblivion this gleam of light will remain, to distinguish him from literary contemporaries whose waistcoats were of soberer hue.The chapter in his Histoire du Romantisme in which Gautier tells how he went to the tailor to arrange for the most spectacular feature of his costume is lively and amusing. He spread out the magnificent piece of cherry-colored satin, and then unfolded his design for a ‘pour-point,’ like a ‘Milan cuirass.’ Says Gautier, using always his quaint editorial we, ‘It has been said that we know a great many words, but we don’t know words enough to express the astonishment of our tailor when we lay before him our plan for a waistcoat.’ The man of shears had doubts as to his customer’s sanity.

‘Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is not the fashion!’

‘It will be the fashion when we have worn the waistcoat once,’ was Gautier’s reply. And he declares that he delivered the answer with a self-possession worthy of a Brummel or ‘any other celebrity of dandyism.’

It is no part of this paper to describe the innocently absurd and good-naturedly extravagant things which Gautier and his companions did, not alone the first night of Hernani, but at all times and in all places. They unquestionably saw to it that Victor Hugo had fair play the evening of February 25, 1830. The occasion was an historic one, and they with their Merovingian hair, their beards, their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively and picturesque occasion.I have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in Gautier’s Histoire du Romantisme. The narrative is one of much sweetness and humor. It ought to be translated for the benefit of readers who know Gautier chiefly by Mademoiselle de Maupin and that for reasons among which love of literature is perhaps the least influential.

It is pleasant to find that Renduel confirms the popular view of Gautier’s character. M. Jullien says that Renduel never spoke of Gautier but in praise. ‘Quel bon garÇon!’ he used to say. ‘Quel brave coeur!’ M. Jullien has naturally no large number of new facts to give concerning Gautier. But there are eight or nine letters from Gautier to Renduel which will be read with pleasure, especially the one in which the poet says to the publisher, ‘Heaven preserve you from historical novels, and your eldest child from the smallpox.’

Gautier must have been both generous and modest. No mere egoist could have been so faithful in his hero-worship or so unpretentious in his allusions to himself. One has only to read the most superficial accounts of French literature to learn how universally it is granted that Gautier had skillful command of that language to which he was born. Yet he himself was by no means sure that he deserved a master’s degree. He quotes one of Goethe’s sayings,—a saying in which the great German poet declares that after the practice of many arts there was but one art in which he could be said to excel, namely, the art of writing in German; in that he was almost a master. Then Gautier exclaims, ‘Would that we, after so many years of labor, had become almost a master of the art of writing in French! But such ambitions are not for us!’

Yet they were for him; and it is a satisfaction to note how invariably he is accounted, by the artists in literature, an eminent man among many eminent men in whose touch language was plastic.