GUSTAVE DORÉ[11]
By Kenyon Cox
(1832-1883)
It is now eleven years since Gustave Doré died. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was probably more widely known than any other artist of his day. His name was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor, and because the artists and critics of France never seriously recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and considered a great moral force—a "preacher painter"—by others he has been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Doré's own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them, the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this article.
The main facts of Doré's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg, near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes, and of an athletic temperament. Théophile Gautier afterward called him a "gamin de génie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and sent a letter to Doré's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late, and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books. One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr. Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes Drôlatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments of their art. We all know the books that followed.
Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would not accept them, were hugely admired in the Doré Gallery of London. Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out with excessive production—a great name, but an unsatisfied man.
Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with Doré the illustrator, and then with Doré the painter and sculptor. It is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at Doré's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.
Doré's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier work, up to and including the Rabelais, is not really funny—to many minds it is even painful—but it is unmistakably caricature of a dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that by which he is most likely to live. At least it is the work that formed him and fixed his characteristics, and an understanding of it is essential to any judgment of him. The qualities and the defects of his later work—that which is most praised and most blamed in his production—are inherent in the work of this period, and are best explained by a reference to the latter.
Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this as if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps, with Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of executions and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer sensationalism what they could not by gentler means. It is surprising that his critics have not seen that Doré's battles are always, even to the end, the battles of a caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven heads, smoking hearts, arms still fighting though severed from their bodies, are simply a debauch of grim humor. There is never the slightest attempt to realize carnage—only to convey, by the caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of colossally impossible bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of fun, but to take it seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic genius, is absurd.
The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Doré has received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his painting, as a great illustrator who identified himself with the minds of one great writer after another. But Doré identified himself with no one; he was always Doré. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep to the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better than many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad gayety and "Gallic wit" in the "Contes Drôlatiques," but it was not broad enough for Doré, and he has converted its most human characters into impossible grotesques.