Émaux et Camées. Par Théophile Gautier.

Nombre définitif. Paris:

Charpentier; New York: F.W. Christern.

Gautier was polishing and adding to his literary jewelry almost to the day of his death, and the final edition which he published among the last of his works about doubles the number of poems first issued. These verses are like nothing we have in English. Their imagery is strongly sophisticated, tortured, brought from vast distances, and then chilled into form. Yet they are the most sincere utterances of a soul fed perpetually among cabinets and picture-galleries, to whom their compact method of utterance is, so to speak, secondarily natural. That they are precious and beauteous no one can deny. How sparkling are the successive descriptions of women—blonde, brune, Spanish, contralto-voiced, coquettish, etc.—whom the poet, like some capricious artist, invites into his atelier, drapes hastily with old Moorish or Venetian or diaphanous costumes, and then reflects in a diminishing mirror, changing the model into a fine statuette of ivory and enamel! More virile and thoughtful images are intermixed: such are the figures of the old Invalides seen at the Column Vendôme in a December fog, and for whom he pleads: "Mock not those men whom the street urchin follows, laughing: they were the Day of which we are the twilight—maybe the night!" Not less fresh are the two "Homesick Obelisks"—that in the Place de la Concorde, wearying its stony heart out for Egypt, and that at Luxor, equally tired, and longing to be planted at Paris, among a living crowd. But Gautier is a colorist, an artist with words, and he is at his best when he works without much outline, celebrating draperies, bouquets and laces, to all of which he can give a meaning quite other than the milliner's, as where he asserts that the plaits of a rose-colored dress are "the lips of my unappeased desires," or describes March as a barber, powdering the wigs of the blossoming almond trees, and a valet, lacing up the rosebuds in their corsets of green velvet. Whatever he touches he leaves artificial, "enameled," yet charming. The verses added in the present edition are more pensive, even sombre. A life given to art wholly, without patriotism or religion or philosophy, does not prepare the greenest old age. There is a long and beautiful poem, "Le Château du Souvenir," which he fills, not exactly with Charles Lamb's "old familiar faces," but with portraits of his mistresses and of his old self. There is the "Last Vow"—to a woman he has pursued "for eighteen years," and whom he still accosts, though "the white graveyard lilacs have blossomed about my temples, and I shall soon have them tufting and shading all my forehead." There is also the accent of his irresponsible courtiership, the facile and unashamed flattery he paid to such a woman as Princess Mathilde. This personage was, or is, an artist; and we may not be mistaken in believing that we have seen, cast aside in the vast storerooms of Haseltine's galleries in this city—an example and gnomon of disenchanted glory—her water-color sketch called the "Fellah Woman," and the very one of which Gautier sang: "Caprice of a fantastic brush and of an imperial leisure!... Those eyes, a whole poem of languor and pleasure, resolve the riddle and say, 'Be thou Love—I am Beauty.'"

The late poems, however, as well as the old, are filled with felicities. They contain many a lesson of the word-master, who, though he did not attain the Academy, left the French language gold, which he found marble. The ornaments, exquisite licenses, foreign graces and wide researches which Gautier conferred upon his mother-tongue have enriched it for future time, and they are best seen in this volume.