ART.
GUSTAVE DORE.
LAST week there died in Paris, at the age of fifty, Gustave Dore, the most fertile and vivid designer that the would has ever known, and an artist who was probably more widely famous than any of his contemporaries. For this last there were good reasons, since his best work was done for the purpose of book illustration, and in that easily portable form found its way into the remotest corners of Europe. To say that as an illustrator no artist has in any way approached his fame, is scarcely to put -the matter with sufficient strength. It would be more accurate to say that the enormous range and variety of his work place him entirely in a rank by himself, wherein we have to compaie him, not with this artist or with that, but with all those who have attempted to depict the intellectual ideas of others. We should probably be within the mark if we asserted that, in the twenty years during which Dore was chiefly engaged in work . for the publishers, he produced more designs than all his country- men put together, and of the enormous majority of these works it may be confidently asserted, that whatever be their shortcomings, they possess power, originality, and vivid imagination. Rims been said with justice that in a matter such as this of illustrating, the mere quantity of the work produced prohibits us from criticising with extreme severity minute, individual errors. No one man, for instance, could be expected to illustrate per- fectly such a poem as " The Inferno," or such a book as the Bible ; the range of ideas is too vast, the number and complexity -of the personages and circumstances are too tremendous, to admit of perfect reproduction by a single mind and hand. And therefore it is the almost universal custom in England -to employ upon such works a variety of artists, who will supply in variety what they lose in unity ; whose powers will, in fact, supplement one another. But Dore attempted (and in the main succeeded) in carrying the whole artistic burden upon his own broad shoulders ; and where another man would have sent two or three designs, he sent two or three hundred,—we might almost say, two or three thousand. If he did not render his author's ideas with uniform success, he is at least en- titled to this praise,—that in some way or another he ren- dered them all ; he shrank froni no difficulty of subject, how- ever great, and grudged no labour, however wearisome. An artist who, by the time he is thirty, has published forty-four thousand designs on subjects of every imaginable kind, has earned a right to be judged by the general quality of his work, and the general success or failure which he has shown in enter- ing into the ideas of his authors. To demand from such a one a scrupulous delicacy of execution, or an entire freedom from inaccuracies of any kind, is alike futile and unjust. What we are entitled to ask is, that he should justify his comprehen- siveness by throwing new light upon all the subjects he treats of ; that he should prove himself capable of entering into the spirit of his author, and that his work should not fall below a certain fair average of executive skill and intellectual insight. On the whole, Dore fulfilled these conditions, and even exceeded them. His woodcuts have, besides, the merit of telling their story intelli- gibly and strongly, and with an amount of weird fancy and super- abundant life, such as renders them as original in character as the work in which they are placed.. And it is a strange proof of the power of the young French artist, that he was able to give to his designs for such works as "The Inferno" and "Don Quixote " sufficient character and imagination to make them take their place by the side of the text, as it were, less than in subordination thereto. For in looking at books which Dor6 has illustrated, one is somehow almost obliged to take the illus- trations into serious consideration ; and it is impossible to help feeling that they are, even when most extravagant and un- natural, works of genius, as opposed to works of manufacture. When we consider that the young artist was doing these wood- drawings at an average rate of production of eight a day (for he could hardly have begun publishing designs before he was fifteen, and at thirty, as we have said, he had published 44,000), the only feeling with regard to their shortcomings is one of wonder that they could be as perfect as they are. The rate of production seems incredible.
An analysis of M. Dore's art would take far more space than is at our command, and for such, should the subject be one which interests -our readers, we may refer them to an elaborate and most detailed article by Mr. P. G. Hamerton, published in the Fine Arts Quarterly Review (1865). We shall only endeavour here to touch upon one or two of the artist's most characteristic points. One of the most notable of these was the absence in his art of all quality of gentleness, an absence which may be considered absolute, for where he strives to be gentle, he only succeeds in being weak, and his tenderness is either ludicrous or childish. Of humour which is not fun, but grim and rather savage in its intention, he has a great store, and at the point where comedy touches burlesque he is also powerful. But of fun such as it is understood in England, our artist shows no trace; his laughter is either coarse, with Rabelais, or mocking, with Voltaire,—there is an absinthe flavour in his simplest jokes. His three finest works are the " Coutes Drolatiques " (Balzac), the "Don Quixote," and "The Inferno," and illustrations to these remarks of ours may be found throughout these books. His laughter, indeed, has little human good-fellowship,—it scarcely seems to come from a man of the same race as our- selves. But perhaps its least human quality is neither its scorn nor its cruelty, but a strain of exaggeration such as that which produces the great pasteboard beads which we see at Christmas pantomimes. We never feel quite sure that there is any real personality behind the outside appearance of Dore's heroes and heroines. They are beings of no human race transplanted from the land of " Erewhon ;" and this impression is probably deepened by finding that their creator cares little or nothing what becomes of them. He stabs, or slashes, or drowns them, with little ceremony and no remorse, in his pictures, as Mr. Hamerton truly says, " heads fly about like tennis-balls," to which we may add that legs, arms, and bodies follow their example ; and there is one particularly horrible drawing, we remember, in which a man who has been cut in half is raising himself upon his bended arms, apparently to see what has become of the lower portion of his body. We have mentioned this, because it lies at the root of Dore's short- comings, and of many of his merits. His genius was one which showed an indifference to suffering such as could scarcely be paralleled in the history of Art; he revelled in the horrible, and conceptions of Dante's which appear to most readers almost unbearable even in words, were elaborated by him into designs in which no detail of their horror was omitted. No doubt the painter was cruel by temper, and occasionally even ferocious in his cruelty, and this failing underlies all his work. His sympathies were with the "big battalions," and in some ways he might be called the Carlyle of Artists. But he was only an irreverent Carlyle at the best of times ; he believed in nothing except himself. His vanity and his power seem to have been almost equal, indeed probably the one could not have existed without the other. At all events, he could never have done half the work he did, had he been able to see his own shortcomings. As a painter, he was, in France, where they understand painting, frankly a failure. And his power in sculpture, though real, consisted in ignoring rather than fulfilling all the accepted requirements of the art. In fact, his sculpture is illustration in the round, just as his designs are illustrations in the flat. And though London, with its customary ignorance of Art; sustained for ten years, and does sustain to this day, a Dore Gallery, it would be difficult to find a single person of cultivated judgment who regards his pictures 'otherwise than as great scenic representations. The art of painting be never mastered, did not perhaps give it even the " huit jours " which Ingres said it required. The art of drawing, in which he might probably have excelled, he grew to disregard, from the fact of habitually exaggerating all the details of his designs. It were easy to pick out some of his illustrations in which all the rela- tive proportions are entirely wrong,—in which, evidently, the artist has never stopped to consider them. What will be his place in the future P It is very hard to say. He had a wider imaginative range in all subjects where the gloomy, the terri- ble, the fantastic, or the extravagant played leading parts, than any living artist, and probably than any artist who ever did or will live. But his power is singularly unsympathetic, his conceptions are too uniformly unreal not to forfeit much of their power, and for the delineation of the simpler aspects of humanity he shows no capability. In fact, out of his fifty thousand designs, Dore has not left us a single beautiful picture.
Previous page
