SOURCE: "The Brief-Narrative Art of Théophile Gautier," in Modern Philology, Vol. 14, No. 11, March, 1917, pp. 135-52.

In the following essay,Smith compares the narrative processes of Gautier's short fiction to those of the short stories of Poe and of the nineteenth-century German nouvelle.

When Maxime Du Camp affirms¹ that Gautier is less of a romancier than a conteur, he is attempting to distinguish between these as between invention and imagination, arguing that whereas a roman is composed objectively, upon a deliberate plan, a conte or a nouvelle is subjective and spontaneous. This distinction, carried to its logical consequences, means that in novels the writer guides the narrative, in brief tales the narrative guides the writer, a reduction to the absurd even if limited to Gautier. For the structural unity of "la Morte amoureuse" is as voluntary as that of le Capitaine Fracasse, and vastly superior to that of...