GUSTAVE DORE'S " RA..13ELAIS."*
THOSE fortunate book-hunters whom visions of rare Elzevirs and dainty Amsterdam classics have drawn down the Paris quays, from powerful manifestations passionless and cruel. The peculiarity * Lea &tares de Rabelais. Illustrees par Gustave Duct. Paris: Gamier, titres. Of this Teutonic sense of sublimity and humour —a pecu- the Corps Legielatif to the Institute, light now and then on the beginning of many great men's glory, marked modestly " one franc " by the merchant bibliophilists who use Seine parapets as show-boards. The moral bucolic, " couronne par l'Academie " of famous and ferocious realists, is to be found ; the treatises on politi- cal economy with which most poets begin literary life, the great novelist's first work—on moral philosophy—the great economist's first batch of sonnets, the burlesque writer's early theories con- cerning the differential calculus—all those humble efforts we call achievements at twenty-one are discoverable in the vast caphar- naum of the Quai Voltaire. And among the embryos and tenta- tive essays the explorer with the pertinacity of his class and its eye for a picturesque title-page, chances at times, even now, on the two paper-bound volumes which first introduced Gustavo Dore's name to the public and the publishers. Phillipon, the discoverer, the friend and patron of the young Strasbourg artist, formed of the special capabilities of Dore a judgment which contrasts singularly with the general one of our day, that which popularity has in a measure consecrated ; the founder of the Charivari saw a carica- turist in the painter of Francesca de Rimini and Christ in the Pnetorium, and this early Rabelais was evidence in favour of his opinion. The faces of Ponocrate, the professors, astronomers, and Sorbonnists, who preached unto Gargantua, were drawn from life studies watched through smoked and distorting lenses. We have all seen the lantern-jaws move formidably iu the dell rooms of the College de France, and wag to mumble an Assyrian memoirs in deserted hemicircles of the Institute. There was the cold irony, the wild diseased and devilish imagination of the Cure de Mendon re- flected in the borders, woodcuts, and fantastic culs de lamps that illustrated his text. The master of mad satire and pitiless carica- ture; the first French literary revolutionist had met a marvellously endowed interpreter ; as the pen of the sixteenth-century libellist ran riot, spluttered invective and ridicule haphazard, so did the pencil of the modern Parisian illustrator, held in nervous, restless fingers, guided, by a fancy that seldom failed or paused, and by an intuition of the satirist's meaning that few of Rabelais' ablest commentators (the Bibliophile Jacob excepted) can be said to have possessed. The illustrator can scarcely have been more than twenty when the Rabelais appeared ; so early a manifestation of the power of grotesque travesty warranted Phillipon's verdict on the artistic temperament of his protege; and after summing up all that M. Dore has produced since the crude, coarse (in spirit and in execution), but thoroughly original and subtly fantastic performance of his youth, it is hard to say that that verdict will not be ratified sooner or later. Dore will endure less as a painter, less as a poet (the poetic imagination that produced some of the Idylls of the King, parts of La Fontaine, and the Inferno is incontestable) than as a master of grotesque imagery, of carica- ture, in fine. In this speciality he stands apart from all but a few German dealers in goblins an :I ludicrous devils, such as Kaulbach, Busch, Konewka. His distortion, the essence of caricature, is painful, scarcely ever comic. A caricaturist in the simple and rather infantine English sense of the term he could not possibly be. He is as far from Leech as from Cruikshank, as far from Daumier as from Chem, Gavarni," and Denten. There is no hint iu his plates of the jovial, vulgar, sweet-tempered satire of Leech ; in his hands modern costume loses its angles, loses its every-day aspect, and that vague, curious awfulness an old-world dress possesses is substituted, to render the ridiculous disquieting, impressive, if not painful. Dore has under- stood that ruffles and powder, doublet or mail, may be rendered grotesque, but never laughable. Falstaff on canvas is not more comic than a mask of Greek farce. He can make nothing of the sempiternal cocottes and treads of Grevin ; Chain's 1830 bourgeois are yet too modern for him, and Gavarni's allegories convey a homely moral he cannot comprehend. These are the gay, polished Hogarths of Imperial boulevards, professors of insouciance in the Horatian manner, cynics of the sects of Offenbach and Herve, perfected by Victorieu Sardou ; and so, kindly and smooth-tem- pered, the living links between Aristophanes and Guignol. Dore has not the Parisian temperament ; his illustrations of Paris Nouveau are those of a provincial observer ; the artistic faculty that gave birth to Capitaine Fracasse has the characteristics of its German origin. The Alsatian imagination is everywhere in Dore's works, half mystic, half grossly positive, rich in grotesque creations, weird at moments, and then revelling in the culinary details of an ideal orgy of thin beer, pig's flesh, and pastry. It is the counterpart of the peculiar genius of Erckmann- Chatrian, coarsely good-humoured at times, but in its most liarity we share to a certain degree, but which Mr. Carlyle's nation of monkeys and tigers is completely without—has been commented upon again and again. M. Dore serves as a last and conclusive illustration. There is in his pictorial Baron Munchausen, a fantastic drawing of the sun's disk,—a round face swollen by influenza. The fancy was comic ; the eyes are streaming with rheum, the mouth writhes, the nose is rubicund and
twinkles; but the child who would laugh at that absurdity
• would dissect its pet canary. The tour de force is excellent
in its way, but it essays to be comic, and is merely painful and repulsive.
These views and tendencies of Dore's genius are thoroughly exemplified in the two large volumes of his perfected Rabelais, just published. Three years ago the artist undertook to revise and complete his boyish work. The woodcuts intercaled in the text of the first edition were corrected ; eliminations were made, cull de lampe, and head-pieces added, and more than a hundred full-page illustrations designed. The result is a new work, grafted on the youthful essay, and forming two formidable volumes, whereof each contains the matter of the Inferno. The two parts fit in perfectly ; it is difficult to discover where the boy's work ends, where the man's work commences. The subtly-con- ceived and epigrammatic mils de lampe, representing a sphynx stretched full length ou a missal, and studying it sardonically ; a nude figure of Pleasure perched on a drinking glass ; Truth bestriding a bottle, &c., have not aged one jot. The young Strasbourgois understood the spirit of Rabelais at twenty, as well as the mature man. Dore has been singularly happy —or judicious—in his choice of subjects ; he has detected the affinities of his genius and claimed relationship. What pencil was more fitted to portray the burlesque, sorrowful, clownish, mad epic of Don Quixote ? CodIpare Flaxman's illustrations to Dante with Dore's rendering of the Inferno ; how meagre and limp are the classicist's eternal draperies and Greek lines beside the distor- tion and infinite variety of Dore's dream of Hell ! It is the con- trast of Virgil and the Ghibelline. It is only in the Idyls of the Bing and the Bible that the artist's hand is constrained ; elsewhere he has been—whatever may be the slovenliness and incorrectness of execution, the faults of taste and exaggerations of mannerism —an acute and discriminating interpreter of the text,—titles it is not easy to make good in a day when illustration is " une sauce qui devore le poisson." And turning from the long list of Dore's works to this last large item—the Rabelais—it may be safely said that in the phantasmagoria of the Pantagrueliad and Gargantuan epic he is more at home than iu Cervantes' Spain and Dante's Hell. There was a people of monstrosities to be pictured here, a medley of battles, jousts, knightly pageants, elongated cathedral towers, Middle Age street with meeting eaves, churls, monks, scullions, beggars, skeletons, drunkards,—all the various forms of monstrous vice and impossible eccentricity on which the artist of the Inferno dwells most lovingly and to the greatest effect. His antipathy to the details of modern costume and architecture could here be in- dulged without stint, and his seemingly wilful tendency to distor- tion and exaggeration be vented without prejudice to the harmony of the work as a whole. He has not abused this last advantage, and the Rabelais is one of the most correct as well as the most powerful of his works. The portrait of Rabelais, the first touch of pencil in the volumes, is an excellent study, toned faintly like an old engraving, showing Rabelais as most men imagine him—if not exactly as the historic portraits in the Bibliotheque Nationale represent him—a young, sharp, smiling face, with the pleats of Florentine finesse about his lips, and the straight, thick nose of a satyr. The panorama of the monster Gargantua's miraculous childhood is no less subtly composed—though coarsely, in one sense, of course—for M. Dore is nearly as Rabelaisian as Rabelais in his work. "A boire, h boire !" the yawning mouth of the baby emits indeed ; it is the central point of the composition, and behind, the oily smile of the Epicurean Grandgousier encourages this early manifestation of hereditary appetite. The crowd of " commeres emerveillees " supporting the baby are drawn from the life ; the hands on the hips, their heads wagging with that air of sage deliberation with which the genus monthly nurse invariably considers minute new-comers: A saturnalia, a middle-age Kermesse, where " lea tripper fnrent copieusea" and Grandgousier presided, illustrates the fourth chapter. It would form a worthy pendant to the Roman Orgy and Kaulbach's parody ; a myriad figures move, drink, kiss, serve wine from fat and lofty pitchers ; a donkey sprawls across a bench, a drunkard vomits his wine, burly monks pass their arms round the waists of viragoes with dishevelled hair ; and above all are the nodding plumes of helmets, the peaks of fantastic casques, spear-points, and banderols. It is veritably the mad, gluttonous revel Rabelais describes; and there is nothing voluptuous in the picture,—the feast would turn Silenus faint.. The education of Gargantaa is completed by lean clerks of the Sorbonne, marvellous academical figures seen in nightmares and the Ecole Normale, toothless dotards with crumpled mouths and lank-haired theologians in rusty gowns. The lesson of astronomy is one of those night-pieces DorZ has made us familiar with. The night is full of stars ; old Paris is sketched from an elevated terrace, with its domes, steeples, turrets, cam- panillas, and belfrys sharply defined ; and below, a pigmy professor is pointing out the planets to a gigantic and inattentive baby. The pigmy's face, with huge spectacles overstriding a bulbous nose, looks like a mask of Mardi Gras. Another piece in Dore's familiar and slightly hackneyed manner is the delibera- tion of Gargantua and his knights, at midnight, before attacking Picrochole, in the Roche Clermauld. For the sake of effect, the councillors are armed to the teeth, with vizors lowered ; mailed feet are toasting at a camp fire, and steel-clad heads are laid together in impossible conversation. The flicker of light on steel, the serio-comic meeting of helmet-beaks, were to be obtained at any risk. M. Dore would make the Queen take tea in the coronation robes with the same imperturbable insouciance. Further on we note a graceful and poetic composition, the pastime of knights and lathes at the Abbey of the Thalemitaii. In these parades of the middle ages, Dore is one of the greeted, modern experts ; his faces may be meaningless and monotonous ; the grandeur of Norman architecture, the details of lofty coifs and pleated jerkins are sketched with a master-hand. The tail- piece of the first book is an excellent group, —the legion of ancient and modern authors, from Moliere to Arsene Houssaye, in doublet, in periwig, in gown, and in broadcloth, peeping at the pages of the Livre de Gargantua, and hurrying away with their volumes written, their inspiration obtained. The other books form quicker and fuller panoramas. Gargantaa is at war ; his sword halves an army at one stroke ; there are Homeric assaults and battles ; cities burnt and pillaged ; desperate combats in cathedral naves, hideous figures of monks, and warriors with owlish faces; all the life of the middle ages is contained in this succession of plates,—its wars, its love courts, its tyrannies and miseries, its scholiastic debates on the origin of good and evil, its intrigues, and its monstrous orgies. And in all the scenes the gigantic figures of Gargantua and Pantagruel predominate. The book breeds a species of bewilderment, the dazed sense of one who has surveyed another world from some Pisgah height. There is no lack of artistic solecisms in the book, of sins against the canons of good taste as well as against those of technical excellence, but they are fewer than in any one of Dore's later works. The picture of Gar- gantua weeping from a window for his dead wife is slightly vulgar, but Rabelais' text admits of the interpretation ; the widower's face is blotched and swollen ; it fills the window-space, and enormous tears are labouring down the cheeks into the street below and on to the crowd of chanting monks following the corpse. There is further on a repulsive representation of the baby Pantagruel im- bibing his first nourishment after the fashion imagined by Rabelais ; and again, the image of a drunken dream,—winy satyrs and monks by the score leering at the nude figures of women. But there is seldom the slightest sensuality even in such images as these ; the passion is cold, hard, and inhuman, the exaggeration of posture and expression sever the subjects from any analogy with the inde- cencies of Pradier and Cabanel. And beside them there are proofs of rich and refined poetic feeling, such as the group of Arthur's Knights, " pauvres gagne-deniers," plying a ferry on the river of Cocytas ; and the gentle, beautiful figure of the " Reins de toutea maladies" at the harpsichord, and crowned with an Etruscan lamp. Dore has put more horror and hideousness into some of the diablesque and grotesque compositions in Rabelais than is expressed by all the imagery of the Conies Drolatiques, the inferno, and Dom Quixote. There are devils assaulting a death-bed—the crucifixlying on the dead man's breast—Death clambering over the bulwarks of a sinking ship ; devils perched in hell on gigantic dice, with raquets, cards, balls, cups, all implements of play around them ; there are the reviews and battles of an army of kitchen-folk, armed with spoons, ladles, forks, and helmeted with overturned wine- cups. Again and again we meet with the old mannerisms, the tricky "stamping " of effect, often there are palpable recollections of the Cordes Drolatiques and the Inferno ; but as a whole, the book is sober and correct as Dore could make it, and constitutes the best exposition of his power, poetic feeling, and fertile imagine, tion that he has yet produced. And he need not fear to be judged finally by Rabelais alone.
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