BOOKS.

HOOD AND DORE.* DORE'S greatest powers and his greatest deficiencies are alike illustrated in the eight engravings of this splendid book. Hood could be grotesque and grim, and here Dore even outdoes his original ; but Hood always contrasted his grotesque and grim effects with some touch of simple pathos or sweet homeliness that satisfied the craving for nature and enhanced the power of the preternatural side of his genius. Here Dore fails. Take, for instance, "The Dream of Eugene Aram," which he has here illus- trated most powerfully. In Hood it is a perpetual contrast. The account of the dream is preceded by the two beautiful verses in which Hood describes the "loosing," as they call it in Yorkshire, of the afternoon school in summer, and the innocent frolic of the boys as they rushed to their game of cricket :— "Away they sped with gamesome minds And souls untouched by sin.

To a level mead they came, and there They drove the wickets ID; Pleasantly shone the setting sun Over the town of Lynn.

"Like sportive deer they coursed about, And shouted as they ran,—

Turning to mirth all things of earth As only boyhood can ; But the usher sat remote from all, A melancholy man."

Not only so, but the contrast is preserved throughout the poem. Eugene Aram relates his dream to a little boy whom he finds sitting alone and poring over a book which turns out to be the Death of Abel, and it is this which gives the usher his opportunity for relating the horrible dream which represents his own inward sufferings. He describes the torture he suffered in his dreams in sitting among the innocent children in the school, after he had dreamed the commission of the crime, the peace which smoothed their pillows, while Guilt drew his own "midnight curtains round with fingers bloody red." When he goes in his dream to look at the river into which he had plunged the corpse, and finds the "faithless stream" dry, he is careful to recollect that

"Merrily rose the lark, and shook

The dewdrop from its wing, But I never marked its morning flight, I never heard it sing.

For I was stooping once again Under the horrid thing."

Now all this side of the poem is entirely left out of sight in Gustave Bore's powerful picture. He has concentrated all the grim suggestions of the poem with wonderful power,—not only those of the dream itself, but those suggested by the tutor in his talk with the child before he begins to relate his dream, when he told the boy "—how the sprites of Mined men Shriek upward from the sod,—

Ay, how the ghostly hand will point To show the burial-clod, And unknown facts of guilty acts Are seen in dreams from God."

He has not only taken care to illustrate—perhaps even slightly to over-draw—the suggestion of the fine lines concerning the mur- dered man's corpse,—

" There was a manhood in his look That murder could not kill," but has gathered up all the spirit of the lines,— " And lo ! the universal air

Seem'd lit with ghastly flame ;

Ten thousand thousand dreadful eyes Were looking down in blame."

But the picture has no relief, no contrast ; it is all lurid and ghastly fancy. There are serpents and efts and toads crawling, as in such a dream they would seem to crawl, round the grave ; there are the ghostly hands of other corpses pointing to show the new-made corpse's burial-place ; there are the hosts of shadowy eyes "looking down in blame ;" there are the horrid stabs in groves forlorn ;" there is an angel of dread following the mur- derer's footsteps, and pointing him out to the anger of Heaven ; and there, too,

* Thomas Hood Illustrated by Gustave Dore. London: brown. 1870.

from forth the frowning sky, From the heaven's topmast height,"

you see descending a dark form with a naked sword, no doubt, "the blood-avenging sprite," which says,—

" Thou guilty man, take up thy dead, And hide it from my sight."

And most fearful of all, the dead man's head has risen out of its leafy grave, and its face seems to be turned sternly on the murderer as he approaches. For preternatural grimness of effect the picture could hardly be surpassed ; but then there is nothing whatever to suggest the contrast with innocence and nature which Hood has so carefully preserved throughout the poem; and the figure of the murderer itself is too theatrical, containing less of powerful effect than any other element of the picture. No doubt an artist produces under much narrower conditions than a poet. In each individual picture at least, he is almost compelled to observe the unities of time and space, and cannot render the effect of the poet's succession of conceptions. But Dore, if he wished to crowd all these grisly effects into this single illustration, should at least have illustrated also the quiet sunset scene in which the dream is narrated,—the happy children at cricket, the studious little lad sitting apart with his book and listening with terror to the tutor's fearful narrative. Taken alone, powerful as this picture is, it is not an adequate rendering of Hood's poem.

The finest of these conceptions are the two illustrations of "The Bridge of Sighs,"—especially the latter. There is wonderful grandeur and force in that which depicts the solid masonry of the bridge—from the nearness of St. Paul's, apparently Blackfriars- from one arch of which" the unfortunate" is about to leap, with St. Paul's towering up into a sky on which there are gleams of moon- light, though no moon is visible. Apart from the figure of the Un- fortunate 'itself (which is much too clear for the light, and rather in an attitude of dreamy melancholy than in one expressive of cold and unutterable misery and desperate resolve and fear), nothing could possibly be more impressive than the scene,—the obtrusive and almost cruel solidity of the masonry, which seems to threaten dashing the girl to pieces should she not spring forward with sufficient resolution, the dark house-roofs clustering beneath the dark and solid church-dome, the parted clouds of the sullen sky, with just a gleam of moonlight on them. But even here the touches of human nature are not given by way of contrast. Hood wrote : —

"Where the lamps quiver, So far in the river,

With many a light From window and casement, From garret to basement, She stood with amazement, Honseless by night. The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver, But not the dark arch Or the black flowing river; Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery Swift to be hurled,— Anywhere, anywhere Out of the world!"

There are several human touches here. There are the gleaming lights, which suggest the interior of warm homes to the homeless girl ; but they are not given by Dore, who makes the City tower up as black as if no soul were waking in it still. There is the cold wind of March which makes the suicide shiver, but Dore's figure is not shivering ; it is posed in a melancholy contemplation which might even be one of composition, if the situation—the outside of the parapet of a bridge—were not so unlikely a place to write a sonnet in. There is madness and desperation delineated in the last three lines we have quoted, of which, again, Dore gives nothing whatever to his heroine. In a word, while the scene is drawn with wonderful grandeur, the figure is expressionless, and all the human contrasts are missed. And this is still more the case with the illustration in which the body is found beneath the arch by the boatmen—(who are, by the way, by no means London figures,— one of them is bare to the waist, though it is a cold March dawn)—where none of Hood's hints have been attended to except the "Fashioned so slenderly,

So young, and so fair !"

Hood says,— "And her eyes, close them,

Staring so blindly!"

but the girl's eyes in ford's picture are already closed, though she is only just found. Hood speaks of her clinging wet garments and her lips "oozing so clammily," but Dore's figure might have been killed by a fall on dry ground, so little trace is there of drowning, either in hair or dress ; yet the dawn is evidently just breaking

• now, while her leap was taken at midnight. Both the pictures, I fine as they are, are far finer for their picture of the scene than for their illustration of the very essence of Hood's poem, "the pity of I it'" Perhaps the illustration of "The Song of the Shirt" has I been more successful in this respect, as the worn face and thin

• fingers of the seamstress are really expressive. But who are those two happy little winged cherubs looking in at her through the window ? There is no hint of any celestial influence bearing her up, or even looking pitifully down upon her in Hood's song, which sticks with tenacious realism close to the human want, and squalor, and exhaustion, the weariness of

"Band and gusset and seam, Seam and gusset and band,"

and never once relieves the heart with even the hint of an angelic m inistrant.

The only really poor illustration among the eight,—the only one

in which we see none of Bore's power, is that to "Queen Mab," •

where Hood's fanciful conception is really travestied. Hood wrote :—

" A little fairy comes at night, Her eyes are blue, her hair is brown, With silver spots upon her wings, And from the moon she flutters down.

"She has a little silver wand, And when a good child goes to bed She waves her wand from right to left, And makes a circle round its head ;— " And then it dreams of pleasant things," &c.

Well, Dore has pictured this good-natured little fairy as a smart French coquette in wings, quite "a fine figur' of a woman," as Joe calls his wife in Mr. Dickens's Great Expectations,—full as big as the sleeping mamma or nurse who sits by the sleeping child. As for that "fine figur' of a woman" being "a little fairy," and "flutter- ing down," it is quite out of the question. She is almostfloppiny down beside the sleeping child. This picture is a mere piece of artificiality, a vice into which Dore, when he ceases to be grisly, is too apt to fall. Why, for instance, in the picture,—in many respects powerful,--of "A Lady's Dream," does he snake the lady dream with her eyes open and sleep in her bracelets? Surely that is hardly common even in France ?

But carp as we may, or rather must, at Dore's great defects as an illustrator of so tender and human a poet as Hood, this volume contains some of his finest work. The grisly picture of Eugene Aram's dream, and still more, the pictures of the London Bridge of Sighs, are not likely to be forgotten by any one who has looked upon them, while every other picture (the illustration to "Queen Mab " excepted, in which we see really no merit) has some stroke of power in it which no other artist could have given.