Mademoiselle de Maupin. Theophile Gautier

but once; in which the leading rôle was taken by some robust, athletic Dacian or Pannonian whom they would very often have found it embarrassing to produce at the end of the play, his sweetheart being a lovely and dainty Numidian lioness who had fasted for three days?—Does it not seem to you that the rope-dancing elephant was superior to Mademoiselle Georges? Do you suppose Mademoiselle Taglioni is a better dancer than Arbuscula, and Perrot better than Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius could have given points to Bocage, excellent actor though he is—Galeria Coppiola played ingénue rôles when she was more than a hundred years old. It is fair to say that the oldest of our jeunes premières is but little more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars shows no sign of progress in that direction: they had three or four thousand gods in whom they believed, and we have only one and we hardly believe in him; that is a strange kind of progress.—Was not Jupiter a better man than Don Juan and a much more successful seducer? Verily, I cannot see what we have discovered or even improved.

      After the progressive journalists, as if to serve as a foil to them, come the blasé journalists, who are usually twenty or twenty-two years old, who have never left their quarter and have as yet lain only with their housekeeper. Everything bores them, tires them out; they are sated, blasé, used up, inaccessible. They know beforehand what you are going to say to them; they have seen, felt, heard, experienced everything that it is possible to see, feel, hear, and experience; the human heart has no corner so dark that they have not held a lantern to it. They say to you with marvellous self-possession: "The human heart is not like that; women are not made so; that character is falsely drawn;"—or else: "What's this! always love or hatred! always men and women! Can't you talk about something else? Why, man is worn threadbare, and woman, more so, since Monsieur de Balzac took a hand.

      "'Who will deliver us from men and women?'

"Do you think your fable is new, monsieur? it is new after the fashion of the Pont-Neuf:[2] nothing in the world could be more common; I read it somewhere or other;—when I was out at nurse or somewhere else; it's been dinned into my ears for ten years.—By the way, monsieur, understand that there's nothing I don't know, that everything is worn threadbare for me, and that even if your idea were as virginal as the Virgin Mary, I would swear, none the less, that I had seen it prostituting itself on street corners to the vilest scribblers and the most contemptible pedants."

      Journalists of that stamp are responsible for Jocko, Le Monstre Vert, Les Lions de Mysore, and a thousand other charming conceits.

      They are constantly complaining of being obliged to read books and see plays. Apropos of a paltry vaudeville, they will talk about flowering almond-trees, limes that perfume the air, the breezes of spring, the odor of the young foliage; they set up for lovers of nature after the style of young Werther, and yet they have never set foot outside of Paris and could not tell a cabbage from a beet.—If it is winter, they prate about the joys of the domestic fireside, and the crackling fire, and the andirons, and the slippers, and the reverie and the state between sleeping and waking; they never fail to quote Tibullus's famous line:

      Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem,

      by the aid of which they assume a knowing and at the same time ingenuous air, the most fascinating thing imaginable. They pose as men upon whom the work of men can no longer make any impression, whom the emotions aroused by the drama leave as cold and hard as the knife with which they cut their quills, but who exclaim, nevertheless, with Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Ah! there's the periwinkle!" They profess fierce antipathy to the colonels at the Gymnase, the American uncles, the cousins, male and female, the sensitive old grumblers, the romantic widows, and try to cure us of the vaudeville by proving every day by the feuilletons that all Frenchmen are not born wicked.—In truth, we see no great harm in that, but the contrary, and we are glad to acknowledge that the extinction of the vaudeville or the opera-comique in France—national style—would be one of the greatest benefactions that the press and Heaven could bestow.—But I should be very glad to know what species of literature these gentlemen would allow to be established in its place. To be sure, it could be no worse.

      Others preach against false taste and translate Seneca the tragedian. Lastly, and to close the procession, a new battalion of critics has been formed, of a species never before seen.

      Their formula for estimating a work is the most convenient, the most elastic, the most malleable, the most peremptory, the most superlative, and the most successful that a critic ever could have conceived. Zoilus would certainly have lost nothing thereby.

      Hitherto, when it has seemed desirable to depreciate a work of any sort or to cast odium upon it in the eyes of the patriarchal and simple-minded subscriber, the ordinary method has been to make false or cunningly isolated quotations; to maim sentences and mutilate lines in such a way that the author himself would have considered himself the most ridiculous creature on earth; to bring accusations of imaginary plagiarisms; to place passages from his book side by side with passages from ancient or modern authors, which had not the least connection therewith; to accuse him, after the style of a cook and with innumerable solecisms, of not knowing his own language and of degrading the French of Racine and Voltaire; to assert in all seriousness that his book tended toward anthropophagy, and that readers would infallibly become cannibals or have hydrophobia in the course of the week; but all that was paltry, out of date, false and fossilized to the last degree. By dint of having dragged along through feuilletons and Variétés articles, the charge of immorality became insufficient, and so unfit for service that the Constitutionnel, a bashful and progressive journal, as we know, was almost the only one that had the desperate courage to continue to use it.

      So they invented the criticism of the future, the Prospective criticism. Can you imagine, at first thought, what a charming thing it is and what a prolific imagination it indicates? The recipe is simple and I can tell you what it is. The book that will be considered fine and will be praised is the book that has not yet appeared. The one that has just appeared is infallibly detestable. The one to appear to-morrow will be superb; but it is always to-day. It is the same with this sort of criticism as with the barber who had these words in huge letters for his sign:

      SHAVING FREE HERE TO-MORROW.

      All the poor devils who read the placard promised themselves for the next day the ineffable, sovereign sweetness of being barbered once in their lives without unloosing their purse-strings: and the hair on their chins easily grew half a foot during the night that preceded that blessed day; but when they had the napkin around their necks, the barber asked them if they had any money and bade them pay up, or he would treat them like nut-pickers or apple-gatherers of Le Perche; and he swore a mighty sacre dieu that he would cut their throats with his razor unless they paid him; and when the poor devils, whining and whimpering, talked about the sign and the sacrosanct inscription:—"Ha! ha! my little fatties!" said the barber, "you don't know so much after all, and you'd much better go back to school! The sign says: 'To-morrow!' I'm no such whimsical fool as to shave for nothing to-day; my confrères would say I was throwing away my trade.—Come another time, come the week that has two Sundays together, and you'll find everything all right. May I be called a niggardly fellow and a flat, if I don't shave you for nothing, on the word of an honest barber."

      Authors who read a prospective article in which an existing work is attacked always flatter themselves that the book they are writing will be the book of the future. They try to accommodate themselves, as much as possible, to the ideas of the critic, and become socialists, progressives, moralizers, palingenetics, mystics, pantheists, buchezists, thinking in that way to escape the anathema; but the same thing happens to them that happened to the barber's customers:—to-day is not the eve of to-morrow. The to-morrow that we hear so much about will never shine upon the world; for the formula is too convenient to be abandoned so soon. Even while decrying the book of which they are jealous and which they would be glad to annihilate, they put on the gloves of the most generous impartiality. They apparently ask nothing better than to approve and praise it, and yet they never do it. This recipe is very superior to the one that we might call retrospective, which consists in vaunting ancient works only—works which no one reads and no one cares about—at the expense of modern books, which people do think about and which wound their self-esteem more