22 
Land & Water 
February 7 
Judith Gaufier : By Arthur Symons 
TIIIC i^Riitt-st .lutubiugiaphv ever written by a 
woman is Santa Teresa's ; and Catholic Spain 
places Iier manuscript of her own Life beside a 
page of Saint Augustine's writing in the Palace 
of the Escurial. Her position as a spiritual force 
i>i as unique as her place in literature. She is not only a 
miracle of genius, and a glorious saint, but the greatest woman 
who ever wrote in prose ; the singliMinc of her sex who stands_ 
beside the world's most i>erfect masters. \ She attains sub- 
limity, and, in her rapturous vision, finds " large draughts 
(if intellectual dav." She is indeed tlie undaunted daughter 
of <ii-sires ; she has in her tlie eagle and the dove : and in her 
(l.inies tlie flaming heart. 
How different from liers is Saint Augustine's, whose Conft's- 
xinns arc the first autobiography, and which have this 
to distingiush them from all other autobit)graphies, that 
they are addressed directly to God. \\\d more different 
■-till from Rousseau's, with his exasperation of all men's eyes 
fixitl on him, thi' protesting self-conseiousness which they 
called forth in him, drove him. in sjMte of himself, to set about 
explaining himself to other people, to the world in general. 
Still morcunhkeis Cellini's, who hurls at you this book of his 
own deeds, that it may smite you into admiration. 
But Le Collier de ines J ours of Judith (lantier has a special 
place of its own among women's confessions ; and, to me, 
it is the most amusing of all women's confessions tha^ I have 
e\'er read. There is something in it of her ^'rencli father and 
of her Milanese mother ; which in no sense detracts from its 
originaUty. There is a touch of the exotic in these pages, as 
in ail that is finest in her prose. 
Take, for instance, in regard to tne style and the rhythm 
of her prose, these sentences from her atrocious " Flem- 
Serpent," with its imaginative study of a criminal's mind; 
curiously shown in the penetrating elaboration of the re\engi- 
ul the [xjisonous flower on all that-it touches : 
("est comme tine gerbc de minces seypeiits tiiessjs ski' lew- ([itciie 
I qui inclinent leur teles plates vers tin petit fruit cl'iin rintge 
iiaiigS assez semblable a itne grosse fraise. mats phis veloute 
I't rappelant tine fletir. Ce soiit les fetiilles qtii figtirent les 
reptiles, elle s' ilargissent en forme de tetes, et ces teles soni 
tachis de detix yeu.x et tine epine aigiif se proje^ie conitne tin 
(lafd. La ressemblance avec le serper.t est saisissante. 
This prose has the serpent's undulations, its venom. 
Certainly every writer ha,s to choose his own vocabulary; 
I ine must beget a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of one's 
own spirit, and in the strictest sense original. Good literary 
art must be good just in proportion as it renders the complex 
world in the foiins of the imagination. It has been said that 
the '^ one beauty " of all literary style is of its very essence., 
and independent, in prose and verse alike, of all removable 
decoration ; that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in 
yiaubert's Madame Bovary, for' instance, or in Stendhal's 
Le Rouge et le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned, with 
hardly a suggestion of visibly beautiful things. 
The Hurricane" 
I 
Judith Gautier's life began witli a passion. . She was said 
to have had such repugnance in coming into existence that 
she refused obstinately to enter into this life of ours, and that 
in her fury she seized the doctor's hands-who had Titanic 
strength — in such a fashion that he had to shake Jiimself free 
of them, saying : " What can this little monster mean ? " 
No wonder that later on she was called I'Onragan for the 
rapidity of her entrance into her home : J' entrain a le Uaison 
tn coup de vent. 
Judith Gautier gives an amusing account of tlie adventures 
of the Gautiers in London at the time of the International 
lixhibitton. They stayed in the Hotel de France, Leicester 
Square, where they were deUghted, as all foreigners always are, 
by the animation of those nights when, the lamps being 
lighted, that strange little world of Soho promenades. Here 
is a curious experience of hers at the Exhibition. She was 
looking at a Gainsborough, when a man lifted her by the elbows 
and moved her some steps awa}'. " Fidile," she says, " a 
man prindpe, apres le premier moment de surprise, jc me mis 
a taper sur ce monsieur, a le tirer, avec des saccades, par les 
basques de sa tedingote ; mais il tourna vers moi une bonne 
face rejouie, se cramponner a. la barre de fer et ne demarrapas." 
One night Judith looks out qf the window in Paris. The 
streets are covered with mud, she sees a man coming down the 
street treading the yellow mud mider his feet ; and before 
him a big dog, horribly dirty. Suddenly she realises that it is 
Baudelaire, coming, as she knows, to call on them. Is his 
intention to tread on the dog's tail, so as to frighten the animal 
<( 
and find out what he might do? He puts liis foot on the 
dog's tail ; it howls, turns on him so furiously that Baudelaire 
falls backwards in the mud. He gets up, examines his clothes 
in a state of perplexity, then crosses t"he street and comes 
towards the house. Marianne lets him in, stupefied at seeing 
him in such a state. " You must make me jiresentable," he 
says, and goes with her into the kitchen. He enters Gautier's 
study, perfectly correct, with his red cravat tied in a negligent 
knot around his neck. He tries to explain. " I have Ix'cn 
knocked down by a dog I did not know." 
" Was he' a mad dog ? " cried Gautier. 
" He was in his riglit : I had offended him in expressly 
treading on his tail. Let's talk of something else." 
He had cut a sorry figure certainly ; perhaps he had some 
occult reason for doing what he had done : but his intention 
was to a.stonish people- to be astonislnng and tlnr^'forf- 
to be always original. 
Her Chinese Writings 
It was a wonderful moment for the Gautiers when the 
Chinese Ting-Tan-Ling entered their house, to become, in a 
sense, one of their intimates. It was understood that he was 
to teach Judith the Chinese language ; the final result of 
which was the publication of her masterpiece, which I have 
before me as I write, Le Livre de fade par fudiUi Walter : 
Paris, Lemerre, 1867. She assumed the name, i suppose, 
as a kind of disguise. It is a translation, in rhythnjic prose, 
from the verses of Chinese poets ; and it is a marvellous thing 
to have given— as Baudelaire did in giving more than the 
spirit of Poe from the English text — more than the spirit Of 
these Chinese poets. Her prose is exotic, Eastern, full of 
strange poetry, of unknown images, of evocations, of moon- 
light and love and war and wine and the seasons, that remain 
in one's cars like the faint music I have heard in Constantinople 
and in Spain. What a sense, in these versions, which at times 
wail with the lamenting voice that one can still hear at night 
on any country road in Spain, of the dramatic moment, the 
situation, the crisis ! 
[,e Paravent de Soie et d'Or (of which I have a copy printed 
on Japanese paper with superb coloured illustrations of some 
of the finest pictures of the Chinese painters of the fifteenth 
century) is, in every sense, extraordinary. These pages 
Ixing before one visions of unearthly beauty and of strange 
humours and of enchantments and evocations ; of devils 
and angels, virgins and priests, kings and Satans, tigers and 
dragons ; that swami. enormously, as a whirlwind hurled 
onward by the wind's fury. 
Take, for instance, Une Descente aiix Enfers, which is as 
magnificent as an opium dream ; as tormented as the fabulous 
ten hells ; as tragic as a canto of Dante's Inferno ; as gro- 
tesque as the sculptured figures of St. Etienne de Bourgcs, 
where devils thrust the sinners, naked, along the road to the 
bottomless abyss, where devils with faces full of horrible 
mirth hft^np women and men on their shoulders, and stami) 
them down into a boiling cauldron. You see the Haines 
underneath, and two devils blowing the furnace. 
While this art is an art of negation — the art of the bcjdy 
rendered by artists who hold the body in contempt — on' the 
contrary Judith Gautier's sense of hell has in it no negation. 
It is as cruel as a Chinese painting, and it gives, as these do, 
.omething of the beauty of the horrible. It is also a vision of 
Villon's Hell : 
"And eke an Hell where damned folk seethe full sore." 
Only this vision is mediaeval. 
Le Ramier Blanc is a delicious drama where two Chinese 
lovers are drawn together by the mysterious instinct of 
youth ; and the finely-woven intrigue at the end is superbh* 
original. She evokes illusions, disguises, love, the moonlight, 
and China. It is certainly a paradox to compare this sceni' 
with some scenes in Romeo and Juliet : yet the piece is like 
a piece of music, and it is the music, which all true lovers have 
heard in the air since they began listening to one another's 
voices. And these four lovers — the Italian and the Chinese- 
awaken us from a dream and the awakening is to that true 
reality which henceforth shuts them off from the world, 
as in a deeper dream. .\nd is not the love scene in both 
gardens a duet of two astonishments ? ^ 
Les Seize Ans de la Princesse has in it a magician's miracle 
of creating an imaginary spring in winter, to please the 
insatiable desires of Fiaki. In these pages I find a kind of 
hidden irony, not unlike the finer irony of Une Mori Heroique 
of Baudelaire. Only it is the misfortune of the Prince of 
Kanga to have had no theatre vast enough for his genius. 
