SOURCE: Afterward in Theophile Gautier: His Life & Times, Max Reinhardt, 1958, pp. 278-90.

In the excerpt below, Richardson maintains that since Gautier "was an artist and a poet, not a conventional journalist or critic . . . he gave journalism a new significance and a new status" by making his criticism "a work of literary art."

Gautier's criticism is indeed (in Brunet's phrase) an organ of revivification; and it not only revivifies the drama, art and literature of the past but, as Gautier anticipated, it is a vast source of information about the arts, celebrities and events of the nineteenth century. Gautier's dramatic criticism reflects the French theatre from Marie Dorval to Sarah Bernhardt, from Hugo to Sardou. His music criticism embraces the performances of Chopin and of Liszt, the struggles of Berlioz and Wagner, the early work of Verdi. His criticism of art begins at a time when artists are still...