are scattered over such a vast expanse of country. The
MEssns. CassErs., PETTER, and GALPIN deserve credit, much populations of England and Wales and of our Free States are more credit than theywill we fear obtain, for this publication. There nearly equal, about 20,060,000. Your twenty millions produce a is real spirit in it, commercial courage, the sort of pluck aometimes certain number of readers who desire and can pay for a first-rate exhibited by the great Leipsic booksellers. Usually popular pub- newspaper. Our twenty millions produce even a larger number lishers, men who appeal to the mass of readers rather than any who have the same desire, if not the same ability, to pay. But of particular section in the mass, they have gone out of their way to those readers with you very few indeed are so remote from your produce in English a work such as the few who buy those things capital that they cannot read their newspaper on the same day on would sooner buy in its original Italian, to reprint in a popular forna which it is issued, while with us they are scattered over an an edition de luxe which only those will seek who care little for expanse of country so vast that papers sent from our great centres the popular taste. It is a bold attempt, whether it succeeds or of wealth and enterprise (we have no capital) are stale before they fails, and one which deserves a commendation we very seldom can be distributed to those who, if they were within a radius of bestow on the mere externals of a book, and it is just possible that twelve hours by rail from New York, would perhaps make it easy it may succeed. There is not much appreciation of Dante in Eng- to establish a really great newspaper there to-morrow. I say per- land, where his language is little known, and his mental attitude haps, because our interests are as widely diffused and scattered as has become almost incomprehensible ; but then there is apprecia- our intelligence and culture ; and this also operates against the tion of Gustave Dore, as there is of scarcely any other Frenchman, production of newspapers of a high class, which can only be and of all subjects for Gustave Dore the Inferno is the one most published at capitals, that is, at centres of interest. A news- perfectly suited to his genius. He is par excellence the paper must be read while it is fresh. An old newpaper is an draughtsman of the French grotesque, of the grotesque, that absurdity, a contradiction in terms ; and a newspaper grows old is, in which it is possible for humour—primary element in the here sooner than in any other country. Its life is not a day, abstract grotesque—to be entirely wanting. There is a bizarrerie hardly half a day. I have scores of times tried in vain to buy at of the horrible as well as of the comic, and it is in the former that the news-shops in the afternoon the newspapers of the morning, Gustave Dore consciously revels, like all genuine French caricatur- and have often asked in vain for them at the newspaper offices ists, from himself to the lowest furnisher of the Pont Neuf who themselves. The papas are valued only for their news. That draws the devil coquetting—devil being the skeleton kept in his glanced over, and the important items noted, sometimes only those studio as a lay figure and coquette an impudent model. The abominable headings read which serve the double purpose of table single objection which criticism ventures to offer to Dante's claim of contents and puffing advertisements, they are thrown aside, to his rank among the immortals is that his imagination was torn, burnt, except by the few who keep them for special pur- materialistic, and that also is, we conceive, the defect in Gustave poses. Therefore it is quite out of the question to tell a man Dore. When Dante would describe a villain suffering, he places three hundred miles from New York to wait till to-morrow for a him in some position in which his torture would excite the reader's good paper, when the telegraph brings all the news to the miser- pity, but that a certain unearthliness or bizarrerie, a sense that the able little sheet which he receives at the same time that the man emotions of earth have in such scenes no place, that pity is as in Wall Street receives his Tribune or his 2'imes. These matters misplaced as hate, love as fear, forbids the natural instinct to of distance and date are so much considered, that such weekly arise. When Gustave Dore would paint a villain suffering he papers devoted to literature and art as we have, they being of gives us his heels thrown up in agony to heaven, while the in- course dependent upon a somewhat cultivated, and so widely visible body is visibly writhing in the burning marl. The mind of scattered class of readers, are sent to press a week, ten days, and man has thought out no situation of torture worse than that sug- even two weeks before the day of their date of publication. gested in canto xix. and drawn in plate 45, suggested by Dante and Nothing is more common than the ridiculous cry in a railway drawn by Gustave Dore, and yet there is something in the material- ear, "Here's the — — for next week !" Why not for next istic conception, something else in the more materialistic en'- year? It is for the reasons which I have thus imperfectly, cution, which almost prohibits the natural emotion. Two hun- although I hope sufficiently, stated, that we have instead of a few dred years ago the spectator would probably have looked on first-rate daily newspapers, a thousand poor ones. Each paper is the drawing with horror, for he would have believed that torture, addressed to the whole population of the part of the country in that wicked horror of planned infliction, certainly sublime, and which it circulates, else it would not live. Consequently every possibly divine. To-day that feeling is absent, but yet the full reader has to be contented with what will snit the average taste of flow of criticism, the cold estimate of Dante's thought and Dore's the aggregate population around him, and that average is higher Cassell.or lower according to the advantages of his position. My readerCassell.Inferno. Illustrated by Gustave Dore. (Cory's Translation.) London: representation thereof, is barred by a sense that in one there is grandeur, in the other wildness, which transcends human experience till thought has no data, reason no basis, and the imagination is left as in a dream to indulge or to recoil. With us it is recoil. To us there is cruelty in Dante, cruelty in Dore; cruelty in the poet who has placed amid that awful scene not simony but Pope Nicholas Quintus as its incarnation, as the man whom he hated more than he did the crime, and cruelty in the artist who has so studiously deprived the scene of veil, who makes the very toes of the victims scream by ascribing to them the motions which are possible only to the hand. (Witness the right foot in the upper group of the triangle at the bottom of plate 45.) But we can imagine minds in which the effect is not recoil, is rather a horrible fascination, a feeling which they mistake for awe, and which is really the latent cruelty in the majority of hearts, a fas- cination such as we feel in blank despite of ourselves in gazing at the last picture but two in the series, plate 73. There is nothing in that plate, even in the original edition—in which it is infinitely better printed, the plate being one of the few failures in the English reprint—except a huge man, with malevolent eyes and a double set of bat's wings, gazing upon a frozen sea sprinkled with freezing puppets. One sees how it was made up, and yet saw any one ever such a conception of the popular devil, the being in form of man so malignant, so powerful, and so powerless, who can do so much and yet so little, whose power is external not internal, who moves so rapidly and is not omnipresent, sees so much and is not omniscient? Had it been possible to give that figure some faint trace of fear, some slight appearance of shrinking either from the light above or from the figure regarding him from the distance, some evidence of the sense that he is not Ahriman, equal Bad contending with equal Good, but only an agent per- mitted for a season, the middle-age conception of Satan would have been fully realized.
It is not where Dante has succeeded that Gustave Dore seems to us most to succeed. His Francesca da Rimini is scarcely above the conventional, or even the melodramatic. Paolo, for all Francesca's face reveals, might be whispering a secret to his sister ; and how came Lanciotto there, with his short sword in that absurd position? If the eternally quoted phrase "We read no more that day" has any meaning at all, it certainly does not mean that the injured husband was crouching by Paolo ready to kill him as his reading paused, and his intrusion into the scene increases its theatricalness while depriving it of its tragedy. It is where Dante has failed that the artist so conspicuously succeeds. Nothing, for instance, is less vigorous in the Inferno than the doom pronounced upon suicides. The ancient world could not condemn them, for after all suicide was with the Pagan world but an appeal to the sympathizing and therefore just Gods, against the unsympathizing and therefore unjust though irresistible Fate—from the elder my- thology of personified Forces to the newer one of embodied Quali- ties, yet Dante has taken his punishment of suicides wholly from heathendom. The suicide becomes a male Dryad, a human tree whose twigs suffer when they are broken, whose branches drop blood, whose leaves are eaten by the Harpies, but who yet retains enough of human vanity to desire that the visitor from the world shall tell the world that he, Secretary of the Emperor Ferdinand, never betrayed his lord. It is not genius which is revealed in that conception, but only fantasy, based too evidently upon acquired knowledge ; but see how Gustave Dore has rendered him in plate 35, how the trees writhe, and groan, and sprawl; or even, witness the right-hand figure, grin with a horrible mirth, and yet are purely trees. The next, plate 36, with the same subject, is scarcely so good, the human element being too prominent ; and yet observe that figure in front to the right, who, at once tree and old woman, stretches her branches to Heaven in agony of protest. Is there not a history visible in that tree, an agony of effort and of remorse? and if so, is not that precisely the thought in Dante's brain, the figure that passed momentarily before eyes which looked out so far and saw so little worthy pardon? We scarcely comprehend the artist's idea of Nimrod, who is simply a giant poorly drawn in a nearly impossible attitude, though Dante saw in him the first of hunting tyrants, but there is singular power in the face of Plutus, the naked but giant Shylock hungering ever for the gold beyond his reach. Plutus, by the way, was in Pagan times somewhat of a pleasant deity, but Dante took him to represent man's lust of gain, and Gustave Dore has contrived to draw a figure utterly evil which yet may once have been bacchanalian in its joviality. For the rest, he has, we think, once or twice taken refuge from his own vagueness of conception in multiplicity of figures, and we cannot always admire his conception of depth, which he almost always draws from below, where depth is no longer dreadful, but he always leaves on the mind that sense of seeing horrible things prepared and ruled by something other than nature, which it was one of Dante's objects to create. Whether he has not once or twice erred in ascribing to Dante ordinary grotesquerie we must leave to deeper scholars to decide. To us the great Florentine has always seemed most horribly in earnest, to have piled up images which to other men seem most monstrous in pure desire to realize to mankind the scathing, and as it were sardonic, punishment of which in the eye of Heaven he held them worthy. Even in that scene of the tree suicides there is nothing to suggest that Dante saw the grotesquerie of his own conception, saw anything save the just destiny befalling one who, plucking his own soul from the place to which God has assigned it, hurls it unprotected into any soil which may chance to receive and clothe it with a new form. He saw in it in fact only what the artist has written on his face—a scene to pity, but not to compassionate with human love, certainly not to smile at, but rather to witness with the physical shrinking with which we watch a result terrible but inevitable. Men do not compassionate though they may pity the barque into which they fire, and Dante looked on sinners as, let us hope, Mr. Eyre looked on Jamaica negroes. Gustave Dore renders him well, yet with a trace of grotesquerie, of half-conscious disbelief in the horrors he is drawing, which to the modern mind is a relief, but yet which Dante would have striven in vain to understand. We do not know that we can wish to his drawings a great circulation, for we doubt the influence of the grotesque when the humorous is so entirely absent, but to those who can estimate Dante a rendering of his thought must always be of interest, and here is one not unworthy of the poet who saw rather than dreamed of a released and puri- fied Italy.
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