Works of Gautier Volume 6 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 Excerpt: ... I ntroduction SPIRITE" is a standing proof of Gautier's versatility, for the subject of the tale is not one that would usually appeal to his intense love of plastic beauty. However, the possibilities of spiritual beauty that must necessarily be expressed in terms of earthly loveliness, and the attraction of the fantastic and the extraordinary, an attraction he could not readily resist, combined to induce him to try his hand at writing a tender, delicate, ideal, and dreamy poem in prose. He succeeded, as the perusal of the story conclusively proves, in creating a very lovely and winsome character, that of Lavinia d'Audefini, the maiden whose confession of love had so often been on her lips in this world, and at last made itself heard from beyond the tomb. Gautier has admirably rendered the suavity, the chastity of the young girl's unrequited affection. SPIRITE Engaging herself, she compels the sympathy of the reader, and her charming apparitions are watched for as keenly by him as they were by Guy de Malivert. It was a very difficult subject to treat, but Gautier proved equal to the task. His touch is delicate, his feeling tender; he has cast aside all thought of the earth and of sensuality; his conception of beauty, which is ever present with him, assumes a loftier and more ideal aspect. He manages to describe supernatural happenings without arousing in the reader's mind any doubt of his own sincerity and belief in the truth of what he relates. Though he was not a believer in religion or the supernatural, he felt the influence of mystery, legend, tradition, the picturesque and the imaginative, and this excursion into the realms of the beyond was a delightful experience to him. He must have been grateful to Swedenborg, whose doctrines he had made himself ac...