127 ART. V.-M. GUSTAVE DORE. THE extraordinary popularity of Gustave Doré is one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern art, even though we use popularity more in the sense of publicity than of approbation. Go where you will, you will find his works. Their sale has been very great in Britain, astonishingly great throughout the world. What other French artist is employed to illustrate English books? What other artist of any nation stands, as it were, ready to illustrate anything and everything-the most sublime epics, the broadest farce, the Bible, or a fairy tale ? And not only does he attempt everything, but he achieves a certain success in all. There is not one of these volumes that can be thrown aside as worthless. There is vigour, life, imagination in each of them. itself wonderful. To most artists, on reading a passage, there This extraordinary fecundity is in will arise a clear and distinct vision of the scene described; the longer the mind dwells on it, the clearer it becomes, until it stands embodied in fullest detail before the eyes of others. But which of us could put forth four or five different sketches of the same scene? Doré seems to get possessed by an idea; turns and re-turns it, he thinks about it on paper, and gives us he half-a-dozen different views of it. For instance, in Dante there are three sketches of the suicides punished by being turned into trees; they fling aloft their distorted limbs, they are twisted and contorted as with pain, yet there is no repetition. There are three distinct representations of the same thought. Such works must be worthy of attention; there is some reason for the popularity of everything, were it but a crinoline petticoat. So soon, therefore, as a thing is generally sought after and admired, it becomes an index to the taste or principles of a large portion of our fellow-creatures, and is therefore worthy of examination. Besides, every production of the human mind is the result of the man's whole character. He does it so, and no otherwise, because he is what he is. His features, his gestures, the shape of his head, of his hand, his walk, his writing, all reveal somewhat of the man's nature and character. There is truth in phrenology, in physiognomy, in the art of judging of character by the handwriting; the only difficulty is in deciphering the signs, and reading them aright. And if this is true of what we may call involuntary or passive manifestations of a man's inner self, much more so is it of active voluntary revelations of his nature-in poetry, prose, sculpture, painting, or music. The speaker, the author, or the artist expresses his thoughts, gives them to the public. We consequently know much more about him than we do of a 'mute inglorious Milton,' who never put pen to paper. Again, what has made the man thus and no otherwise? In subordination to the overruling providence of God, he is the result of his race, of his nation and family, of his circumstances, his position and education, and, finally, of his own will working amid these complex influences. A great artist is a representative man, as truly, though not in the same degree, as a great statesman. Only an epoch of passionate worship of beauty, and enthusiastic patronage of art, only a race and a climate eminently characterized by beauty of form and colour, could have produced a Raphael; while, in the severer genius of Michael Angelo, we may trace, not only the sterner character of the man, but the influences of those biblical studies and that earnest search after truth which stirred the noblest portion of Italian society to its very depths. The friend of the high-minded, saintly Vittoria Colonna produces quite another Madonna from those of the lover of the Fornarina. He does not fear to represent Mary as an aged woman, bearing up the sacred body of her Son upon her knees, and gazing at it with mingled sorrow and resignation. To him there is a higher beauty in truth than in the youthful loveliness with which Raphael invests the Virgin Mother. The stout-hearted defender of Florence is revealed in the Titanesque grandeur of his famous Night,' as much as in the passionate lines in which he retorted in her name that it was well to be asleep, and better to be of stone in such a time of misery and shame!1 An artist and his works are characteristic of the nation that produced him, of the time in which he lives, and of the taste of those who admire him. We will therefore endeavour to learn what it is that is indicated by Gustave Doré and his works. The very first quality which strikes us in them is the one we have already mentioned: the wonderful abundance, fecundity, and vigour of the images which arise before him, and his remarkable facility in expressing them. Where there is such prolific production, it is impossible to attain great accuracy; it would be unreasonable to expect it. But Doré's faults in this respect are generally from haste, not ignorance. You see that he has studied, that he knows the human form, but that, in many cases, he has not taken time to drawn it correctly. His sketches are the random shots of a good marksman. Here is a young man who has already illustrated the Bible Perception of Beauty defective in the French. 129 and Dante, Milton and Croquemitaine, the Contes Drolatiques and Tennyson's Poems. If you expect all this to be done with classical purity of outline, like the studies Raphael made for his pictures, or even like those lovely drawings known to only a favoured few of the artist world, which the modesty of Edward Calvert, and his high standard of perfection, hid from the public, you expect that which you will not find. Why, the man is (we believe) under forty, and his drawings are numbered by thousands. He must do at least two or three a day. By the Cenacolo of Raphael, in the old convent of San Onofrio at Florence, hang two sheets of paper covered with original studies for the picture. Two of them are of Saint Peter's Feet, so carefully studied, so delicately and perfectly expressed, that you dwell on them with delight. There is more beauty of outline in any of the thirteen pair of feet in that picture, than in all Gustave Doré's works put together. Look at the grace and elegance both of shape and of action of each of the hands; if you have the faculty of perceiving it, you will know henceforward what beauty of form is, and that beauty you will not find in Gustave Doré. In rapidity and cleverness Doré is quite a typical Frenchman; he has all the dash, the vivacity, the élan of his race; he has also their hardness of heart, their want of sensibility, of tenderness, their total want of perception of beauty. As a people they do not know the meaning of the word. They understand effect, brilliancy, contrast of colour, elegance, prettiness, the attractive grace of Watteau, but pure simple beauty of form is a thing unknown to them. Ask the first sweet young girl you meet what she thinks of Doré, and she will unhesitatingly condemn most of his drawings as 'so ugly.' Her own glass shows her a fairer form every morning than any she will find in his works, and thus unconsciously gives her a higher standard of beauty than he has imagined. The plainness of Frenchwomen is recognised in their own proverb: Quand une française se mêle d'être jolie, elle est furieusement jolie,' but it is very seldom they do meddle in the matter. The perfection of form among the ancient Greeks is considered the source of the perfection of their statues, and on this ground we might expect to find that British and Italian painters far surpass either the French or Germans in their perception and delineation of beauty. Delaroche, whose Martyre Chrétienne is one of the loveliest creations of the French pencil, had a lovely wife, the only and lamented daughter of Horace Vernet. We may lay it down as a canon that none but a beautiful race will have a keen sense of beauty, and, even though it should endanger the entente cordiale, we must maintain that the French are not a beautiful race VOL. XLVII.-NO. XCIII. I Their illustrated books are all ugly,-Dore's perhaps the least so. The Italians are a remarkably handsome race, and this beauty is reproduced in their pictures. Without vanity we may say the same thing of our own nation. Look at the difference between the distractingly lovely young girls, the handsome matrons, and charming children portrayed by Leech, and those in any French illustrated book you can find. Here comes in another striking difference. In an avowedly satirical paper like Punch, there is not a line that a brother would blush to read aloud to his young sister, or a father to his daughter. Whereas such a paper in Germany would be dull, and occasionally coarse; in France it would be both coarse and immoral-for, generally speaking, there is the trail of the serpent over everything French, its valuable Protestant literature alone excepted. Even a French picture-dictionary for children will contain prints to be hurried out of sight. But on this side the Channel, we are scarcely prepared for the fact that their caricatures are not only objectionable, but dull. They take exaggeration of ugliness or absurdity for wit. Their caricatures fulfil the true meaning of the word, from the Italian caricata, something overloaded, enhanced to a preposterous degree; while our own modern caricatures, such as those of H. B. and Punch, are rather satirical pictures, the fun of which lies in the meaning, not in the distortion. What can be more diverting than Leech's exquisite satire on our undue valuation of a son and heir,' when he shows the puny little boy in the midst of his five beautiful elder sisters, saying, 'If you count the girls, we're six. I'm one.' Yet it would lose half its force if there were any trace in it of real caricature. If Both these characteristics of French drawings are connected with a defective perception of beauty. Milton tells us that 'Order is Heaven's first law,' and perhaps no better definition of beauty can be given than this, that it consists in the most perfect combination of unity and variety, in other words, in a complete subordination of parts to their whole. There must be a dominant form, but infinitely and exquisitely varied. there is no variety, we shall get the straight line; if the variation is too great, it becomes abrupt, startling, 'loud.' The right angle is not more beautiful than the right line. There must be difference, not disturbance; contrast, not opposition. The most perfect contrasts of colour are those which, like red and green, blue and orange, contain the same proportions of the primary colours as the prism reveals in pure white. The most perfect concord is heard on striking one string. Everything ugly is out of proportion, out of harmony, out of bounds. Sin is styled 'transgression,' a stepping beyond or over the Eternal Law of right; and there is no doubt that ugliness has some affinity to moral evil. All grossness is ugly; all distortion or exaggeration is unbearable to an eye accustomed to dwell on the exquisite perfections of form and colour which make up true beauty. It is like horrible discord to a musical ear. The perception of beauty of any kind is in the first instance a natural gift, but it is one capable of being educated to perfection, or of being in a great measure perverted and overborne by false training. If we wish therefore to cultivate it either in ourselves or in others, we must resolutely refrain from becoming accustomed to its opposite. What is true of the moral perceptions is true of intellectual ones: 'Vice is a monster of so frightful mien To keep the conscience pure we must refrain from a volunteer contemplation of sin; and to keep the taste pure we must refrain from dwelling on ugliness, especially before the judgment is formed and the taste fixed. What can be more hideous than those French bronze figures of preternatural length and emaciation, like spiders on legs? Yet these are, or were, all the fashion in Paris! The national hardness of heart and want of sensibility in the French nation comes out strikingly in Doré. Want of imagination often produces apathy. Kind-hearted people sometimes do not feel for suffering, because they cannot imagine it; but Doré, with a vivid imagination of suffering, has no feeling for it. On the contrary, he revels in depicting it. This is especially the case in his illustrations of Dante. The poet represents schismatics as cut in pieces,--their punishment for dividing the unity of the Church. Doré gives no less than four illustrations of these mangled bodies-some with the face cut off, some split in two, others with their mangled stumps turned towards the spectator. It is like a butcher's shop; all moral meaning is wholly lost sight of, and nothing but disgust excited. Dante's own descriptions are horrible enough, but they are generally brief, and there is a tone of judicial gravity about them which directs the attention rather to the punishment of the sin than to the torment of that punishment. We can read and approve of a hanging, though we could not endure to see either it, or an exact picture of it. Our sense of justice produces a feeling of satisfaction on hearing of the execution of such criminals as Burke |