Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/71

58 easel, engaged at forty sous a sitting to take off her dress and let down her hair, is obviously the model for the heroine. His stories are always the measure of an intellectal need to express an ideal of the exquisite in personal beauty and in costume, combined with that of a certain serene and full-blown sensuality in conduct, and accompanied with gorgeous visions of upholstery and architecture. Nothing classifies Gautier better, both as to the individual and the national quality of his genius, than the perfect frankness of his treatment of the human body. We of English speech pass (with the French) for prudish on this point; and certain it is that there is a limit to the freedom with which we can comfortably discourse of hair and skin, and teeth and nails, even to praise them. The French, on the other hand, discuss their physical texture as complacently as we discuss that of our trousers and boots. The Parisians profess, we believe, to have certain tendencies in common with the old Athenians; this unshrinking contemplation of our physical surfaces might be claimed as one of them. Practically, however, it gives one a very different impression from the large Greek taste for personal beauty; for the French type, being as meagre as the Greek was ample, has been filled out with the idea of "grace," which, by implying that the