and stormy evening at the theatre, Gautier displayed perfect dignity and indifference when the philistines pointed him out to each other, and made him the target of all their opera-glasses. His name became inextricably connected with the legend of the red waistcoat, although he only wore it that one evening. For long little was known about him beyond the fact that he had worn it (I, myself, when in Paris in 1867, met people who believed that he wore it still); and it shines to this day in the history of French literature, a naïve symbol of the love of brightness and colour in life which distinguished that enthusiastic group of youths. But the essentially luminous and flamboyant was art, pure art; and seldom has the boundless love of art as art taken such entire possession of a heart as it did of Gautier's. He was animated by it all his life, but in his youth he felt it with all the pleasures it brings, all the admiration it arouses, all the courage it imparts, and all the hatred it inspires. It was this love which made the man who was himself a master, a sincerely, nobly modest admirer of other artists. He was Hugo's servant, Balzac's self-sacrificing friend. He was a poet, but admiration made him a critic; and to no one did a well-constructed line, a luminous word, a picturesque expression, or a bold flight of imagination give more pleasure. He was a painter before he became an author; and no one meted out such ample recognition as he to the powerful, if somewhat blundering, originality which produced that glory of colour in Delacroix's pictures, which blinds one to their deficiencies in the matter of drawing. With what passionate disapproval he fell upon Scribe's platitudes and Delavigne's cautious improvements, upon stupid vaudevilles and passionless tragedies--this man who worshipped style, and who infinitely preferred a performance at the circus to a bourgeois comedy at the Gymnase Theatre! At the circus, where they only shouted Hop! and Hé! they could not possibly commit all Scribe's sins against syntax and metre. With what fury he fell upon Delaroche when the latter (whose real talent developed late) charmed the half-educated with his laboured, highly finished representations of mediæval subjects, and taught them to prefer his Middle Ages to the Middle Ages of Hugo and Delacroix! To rank cautious talent above reckless, alarming genius was true sacrilege in Gautier's eyes; and the favour which these men of mere talent found in the eyes of the public roused in him a perfectly tiger-like fury. He confessed at a later period that he could have eaten Delaroche raw with the greatest of pleasure. Art for art's sake! Art as its own end and aim! _L'art pour l'art!_ This was Gautier's motto. And that he loved art for its own sake means (as it would mean in the case of anything else) that he loved it without any regard to its so-called morality or immorality, patriotic or unpatriotic tendency, utility or inutility.