To Gautier and his disciples the form is everything in poetry; the substance has no importance. ‘A poet,’ says he,[254] ‘say what you will, is a labourer; he ought not to have more intelligence than a labourer, or know any other trade than his own, otherwise he will do it badly. I hold the mania that there is for putting them on an ideal pedestal is perfectly absurd; nothing is less ideal than a poet.... The poet is a keyboard [_clavecin_], and nothing more. Every idea in passing lays its finger on a key; the key vibrates and gives its note, that is all.’ In another place he says: ‘For the poet, words have in themselves, and outside the sense they express, a beauty and value of their own, like precious stones as yet uncut, and set in bracelets, necklaces, or rings; they charm the connoisseur who looks at them, and sorts them with his finger in the little bowl where they are stored.’[255] Gustave Flaubert, another worshipper of words, takes entirely this view of the subject when he exclaims:[256] ‘A beautiful verse meaning nothing, is superior to a verse less beautiful meaning something.’ By the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘less beautiful,’ Flaubert here understands ‘names with triumphant syllables, sounding like the blast of clarions,’ or ‘radiant words, words of light.’[257] Gautier only credited Racine, for whom he, a romanticist, naturally had a profound contempt, with one verse of any value: ‘La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.’ The most instructive application of this theory is found in a piece of poetry by Catulle Mendès, entitled _Récapitulation_, which begins as follows: ‘Rose, Emmeline, Margueridette, Odette, Alix, Aline. ‘Paule, Hippolyte, Lucy, Lucile, Cécile, Daphné, Mélite. ‘Artémidore, Myrrha, Myrrhine, Périne, Naïs, Eudore.’ Eleven stanzas of the same sort follow, which I will dispense with reproducing, and then this final strophe: ‘Zulma, Zélie, Régine, Reine, Irène!... Et j’en oublie.’[258] ‘And I forget the rest’--this is the only one of the sixty lines of the piece which has any sense, the fifty-nine others being composed of women’s names only.