The Genius of Doré: A Study in Æsthetics

DORÉ represents in their intensest degree the chief fundamental characteristics of his nation. Indeed, we must view him as a modern outbreak of the old fecund Gothic invention, which in mediæval times delighted so hugely in the grotesque, especially in sculpture, reckless of purity of thought or fitness of application. In one sense the ancient spirit was a serious one. It did grotesque things because it delighted in them. But Doré does them from levity, .scorn, and contempt. He likes them, too, but in another way. His is a strange genius. Mediæval idiosyncrasies of thought and belief are mingled with modern infidelity and jest. In all, however, Doré is thoroughly French. No other nation could have producer, him. As well might we look for an Albert Diireror a Shakespeare from Gallic stock, as a Doré from German or English. In one respect he is antagonistic to his origin. There is no sympathy in him for the pretty. The beautiful he wholly ignores, and with it academic order and rule. His æsthetic sense runs in a dark direction. He has burst upon the world of art with a prodigality of execution that overwhelms it with surprise. It is hazardous to undertake to analyze the gifts of a man who at only thirty-two years of age had made nearly fifty thousand designs and won universal fame, who Is cosmopolitan in choice of subjects, as familiar with the great writers of England, Germany, Italy, and Spain, as with those of France, and finally has laid the whole Orient under contribution by illustrating anew for the nineteenth century the Bible. And. moreover, he claims position as a painter.

In this character I will first examine him. By instinct he is a profound colorist, because his nature is profound ; but he has not yet won that mastery over materials which comes only from long and steady practice. The qualities of mind and execution which appear in his designs are reproduced in his paintings. Color echoes his feeling, or want of it, as may be. It is not held fast to local truth, but is made an outlook of his inmost motive. His “ Spanish Gypsy” exemplifies his system. We all know Murillo’s lousy boys, with their dirt-ingrained skins, rags, and filthy occupations. His coloring was toned to the dirtiness of his subject, and by itself would have been disagreeable. But Murillo made the life-giving sunlight, the Father’s gift to rich and poor alike, fall full upon his beggars. It is their saving grace, and all that wins sympathy comes of it. But Dord’s proclivities are so intense that his art must run to extremes. His wretched gypsy has no beauty, except a dusky, olive complexion, and that harsh in tone. Her rags are loathsomely gathered about her. Unmi ligated vagabondism and pitiless poverty are stamped upon her entire figure, as she leans in hardened endurance upon a stone wall, sunless and companion less. The quality of coloring is literally filthy, as is the subject; coarse beyond description, intensified by an emphatic crimson spot on her bosom,— a bit of red drapery in fact, but signifying the lust of sense or crime at heart. No good comes of such art.

The dominating trait of Dore is fiendish horror. That which devils most enjoy he most heartily depicts. Added to this is a fecundity of invention and a darksome flow of creative power, which places him the foremost of his terrible kind. Even Dante, reared in mediaeval notions ot theology and politics, finds some springs oi tenderness, and always of taith, in his soul ; But Doré, in translating his Inferno into pictorial French, discards all humanity, and presents the horrors of the Dantesque imagery in forms more appalling than the original. Before him we got no entirely adequate conception of diabolism. Other interpreters of Dante had given glimpses of its features in a grand way, but it was reserved to Doré to let us into its utter horror. He finds in it a satisfaction akin in depth to the ecstasy which prompted the celestial visions of Fra Angelico. It is no coldly studied design, but a spontaneous outflow like seething lava. Alike remarkable is the unceasing activity of his phantom creations : they are supernaturally endowed with vitality. He transforms all nature into demoniacal forces in keeping with the weird scenery evoked by his imagination. In the “Wandering Jew,”untrammelled by the necessity of illustrating the ideas of another, he gives his own freer play. The powers of darkness are let loose. Heaven itself catches the vindictive spirit of hell. This is art undergoing the delirium tremens, with ravings as blasphemous as they are foul and hideous. This may seem harsh judgment; but an art that distorts and misrepresents the divine attributes, engendering hate or fear in place of love and charity, is not to be gingerly dealt with. A sensitive imagination cannot look on it without risk of nightmare. In almost every sense it is unwholesome art. Coupled with the cruelty that enjoys human suffering in its most excruciating conditions, and peoples the world with fiends whose bestial grotesqueness of shape and ferocity of torment make one shudder, is a coarse obscenity, a witty licentiousness, the spiritual element in its mocking aspect, which comes naturally in such company. The lascivious pretty is not found in his compositions. Dore’s intellect is too deep for light sins. With him there is no dainty disguise or tempting display, but plain, outspoken passion, lust, and indifference to virtue. The four hundred and twenty-five cuts of the Contes Drôlatiques form a unique monument to his brilliant debauchery of design ; a consuming fire to the weak in morals ; a wonderful master-work of invention to the well-trained brain which can appreciate its wit and satire without being contaminated by its smut; and an object of disgust to the one-sided pious mind.

Doré seems to have faith of no kind. His mental vision explores behind the material veil of creation as freely as his natural eye sees the moving panorama around it. But the world, seen and unseen, is to him simply a field from which to cull motives for his extraordinary powers. He belongs to no fixed time. The mediaeval spirit of the grotesque is as fresh within him as is the sense of modern caricature. The supernatural element annihilates time, making him as much at home in the scenes of Oriental life recorded in the Bible, as if he had passed them in actual review. But there is no religious sentiment with it. Its force is expended in the graphic-realistic or the imaginative-creative of the supernal cast. A fine example of the latter is the sevenheaded beast of the Apocalypse rising out of the sea. The Mystical Scriptures are Doré’s most fitting sphere of invention. He excels also whenever free to compose wholly from his imagination on its dark side. The Deluge, Crucifixion, the Lives of Moses and the Prophets, are the topics on which his energy, originality, variety, and picturesque largeness of loose-jointed composition are best displayed. He is weak and conventional in those based directly upon the simpler religious sentiments. Fra Angelico could not paint a devil; Doré cannot draw a saint. His illustrations of the Bible are a record of his strongest and weakest qualities. He is not many-sided. But in his own wide field, — including the darker aspect of creation, natural and supernal, and up to a certain point the picturesque and sublime in realistic action,— he is supreme. The most, and almost the sole, human sympathy he exhibits is a certain liking for children ; but this only in their dubious sports. He is a pitiless destroyer of the humane and refined in general. His in tensest delight is got from terror, suffering, horror, jesting, and dishonor. Perhaps he seeks, by sheer force of caricature and exaggeration, to carry the mind from vice to virtue on the principle that extremes meet. But such a supposition is a dubious charity towards him at the best; as this, if meant, would be a crooked way to reach the good. There is too evident pleasure shown in the selfish for its own sake ; too great contempt of mankind ; indulgence in the scornful, indecent, and satirical; relish of ugliness, and appetite for the loathsomeness of disease, — to be altogether palliated by the usual apologies for misdirected genius. Doré makes love, pity, charity, and faith absurd. Under his influence one feels that honest emotion, or any trait of common humanity, much more piety, is evidence of weakness, and nonsense. The world being an infernal bubble, let us laugh or sneer; the end will take care of itself.

How incapable he shows himself of estimating rightly the character of Don Quixote except in its ridiculous aspect ! Look at I Doré’s design of him when wounded and melancholy! Is there anything of the honest, half-mad gentleman that he was, in that overdrawn, battered face ? There is some pathos in the anatomical refinement of lines expressive of gentle birth, combined with the deplorable condition of the patient sufferer ; and we feel that he is no rightly-served bully, but a true man who has met with misfortune, whether born of his own folly or not, it cannot be told. But Doré twists the pathetic into the ridiculous. The Don Quixote, however, contains much that is very good in individual character ; though that is not the artist’s strongest point. His treatment of groups and generalization of movement and effects are most masterly.

As a landscapist, Doré shows qualities of interpretation that place him above all others of his school. Thus far I know it only by designs like those of Atala. But these manifest his consciousness of the sublime in a remarkable degree. They are ideal compositions interpenetrated with the gloom and mystery of a Nature torn by her own wrath, terrified by her own mystic solitude, in general dissociated from man, or when associated with him, akin to his fellest passions, untamed and savage as he was before civilization began. They realize our conceptions of primal creation. There is no caricature in them, but a vast creative or disturbing sense, which makes and destroys with equal facility. Doré grasps the formative idea and shapes his creations to express the animating feelinm It is organic spirit even more than nature that we see in his designs. He thus insists upon the highest triumphs of art. One who does this may not always be, or intend to be, perfect in drawing, or exact in perspective. If like Doré one works immensely, he will often be careless and superficial. We find Doré sometimes blundering in details, weak in consequence of departing from his immediate fields of strength, but almost always making apparent the intended idea and artistic effect. Dealing largely with the supernatural and with caricature, he must exaggerate known forms, or invent new, to create the impressions he has in view. He cannot, therefore, be bound down to the ordinary rules of realistic art. His success depends on his being free of them at will. The grotesque, terrible, and supernatural, or the sublime, have a law unto themselves. An artist who can do what Doré does in this line attains his aims by means at the command only of genius. His deficiencies are those also of genius, and go to prove his intrinsic greatness.

Doré’s art is great. Is it good ? It need not be Christian in a nice sense to be this, but it should be natural, truthful, humane. It should also possess the instinct of the beautiful. His art has scarcely a trace of these qualities. Much of it is heartless, sensual, and perverse. It infuses to elevate, instruct, or even amuse, except the mind like the art be given to obscene, cruel, or mocking levity; preferring to excite emotions which have in them little that is pleasurable or refining. The general tendency is to deepen and strengthen those proclivities of French art which most need pruning and reforming.