GUSTAVE DORÉ AT WORK.

BY BLANCHARD JERROLD.

It was on the 25th of October of last year, while we were listening at the open grave of Théophile Gautier to the sharp vibrations of the voice in which the younger Dumas was recounting the claims of "the great Theo." upon the love and gratitude of all who valued letters and the arts, and his forty years of labor, that I turned to Doré, and thought how hardly he had been used by critics, who had thanked him for his prodigious capacity for work, by describing him to the world as an artist à la minute. I found him one day over the fourth plate of his "Neophyte," the three, already far advanced, having been put away because in some of the fine work they did not satisfy his fastidious conscientiousness. He glanced up at me from his copper, and

said quietly, answering my look of surprise, "I have the patience of the ox, you see— as I have often told you."

another example of the rapidity-and therefore the carelessness-with which the artist tosses off a poem, or embodies a legend. A caricaturist has had the audacity to draw the illustrator of Dante with pencils in both hands and between the toes of both feet-ignorant of the necessity under which a fervid and incessantly creative imagination, like Gustave Doré's, exists.

I repeat, Doré cannot get out of his art. He is almost incapable of relaxation. While you sit at table with him, you note the sudden pauses in the conversation, in which his eyes wander from the company to his land of dreams. On the instant he is away from you, and his face wears an expression of dreamy sadness, at which a stranger will start, but that is familiar to his friends, who humor him back to them with a laugh. His Rabelais, Quixote proclaim that he has humor. his "Contes Drolatiques," and his Don

It

Yea, it is the patience of the ox, forever fed by an imagination of the most fertile power and the most extraordinary impulsiveness; an imagination that has been directed by study in the company and Milton, and by the inspiration of the Bible; that has revelled in the joyeusetés of Rabelais and the "Contes Drolatiques ;" that has caught warmth from Don Quixote and from travels in his glowing land; and that has traveled with the Wandering Jew, and lived in fable and legend, in history and poesy, through more than twenty years of working days. The unthinking world and the careless critic look upon the marvellous accumulation of the poet's dreams and fancies, which he has cast upon paper or wrought in color, as evidence of the fleetness of his hand, and not of his valiant, patient spirit, that dwells in art forever through all its waking hours. The page to which Doré has given a week's thought, and upon which he was working when the critic was in bed, is described as

albums and his contributions to the Journal pour Rire. In the new Rabelais-a noble production, rich in the various qualities necessary to the illustrator of the great railleur of the Middle Ages-we find, in conjunction with the young work of the artist (1854)--rough, but brilliant and joy. ous, laughing with the laughing text-the finer pencilling and the richer brain of his maturity. The two superb volumes, in which all that Doré has to say with his pencil on François Rabelais is set out richly by printer and binder, comprehend examples of the ranges of observation, the circles of dreams, and the styles and effects that are to be found in his extraordinary work as an illustrator. Rabelais is nearer, in general quality, to the "Contes Drolatiques" than any of Doré's other works;

but it is superior to the Balzac interpretations in this, that it contains samples of the artist's highest work, as the ark in the origin of Pantagruel, in Pantagruel defying the three hundred giants; or, again, Pantagruel's entry into Paris; or, in short a score of examples I might cite from "Gargantua." Rabelais and Don Quixote I should instance as the fields in which the artist has delighted most, as Dante and the Bible are the stores on which the highest force in him has been lavishly expended never in haste, as I am able to testify. Before the pencil approached either of these labors, the artist's mind had traveled again and again over the pages; his imagination had dwelt upon every line, he had talked and thought about his theme in his walks and among his intimates. Patiently and incessantly the work coming in hand-the work next to be done-is investigated, parcelled out, put together, and pulled to pieces. There is not the least sign of haste, but there is labor without intermission, which, to the sluggish worker, produces a quantity that proves haste. I have known many artists, many men of letters, many scientific men, and many wonderworkers in the material world; but in none of them have I seen that capacity for continuous effort, and that impossibility of getting clear of the toil of production, which Doré possesses. He will never escape the charge of haste, because he will never slacken to the average hours of production. His entire heart and being lie within the walls of his studio. It is a place of prodigious proportions. Every trowelful of it has come out of his brain-pan, and his ardent and intrepid spirit fills it to the rafters, and turns to account every ray of light that pours through his windows. The student of Gustave Doré must understand his thoroughness and vehemence as a creator, and be able to count the hours he spends in giving shape to his creations, before he can estimate the artist's conscientiousness and, I will say, his religious

care to do his utmost, even on a tail-piece to an appendix.

As his fellow-traveler through the light and shade of London during two or three seasons, I had many fresh opportunities of watching the manner in which Doré approaches a great subject. The idea of it germinates slowly in his mind. We dwelt on London, and the way in which it should be grasped, many mornings over the breakfast-table; and through the hours of many excursions by land and water. Before any plan of pilgrimage had been settled, Doré had a score of note books full of suggestive bits, and had made a gigantic alburn full of finished groups and scenes; while I had filled quires of paper. Petit à petit l'oiseau fait son nid. We picked up straws, feathers, pebbles, clay, and bit by bit made the nest. You wonder how the swallows build the solid cups they fix under your eaves. These appear to have come by enchantment when for the first time you notice wings fluttering above your windows. But the birds have been at work with every peep of day-have never paused nor slack. ened.

It is in the Doré Gallery, however, rather than in the illustrated works-marvellous as these are-of the artist, that his untiring power is most strongly manifested; at the same time it is here that he has been most grievously misunderstood. Half the critics have begun by expressing their astonishment at the rapidity of the painter; and then they have gone on to remark that it is a pity he does not give more time to his pictures. This shows marks of haste; that is crude, thin, and in parts scarcely half developed; the other is a mere sketch. But here is the product of twenty years: for in all his life Doré has covered only fifty-three canvases!

No wonder that men stand astonished, confounded by the prodigious labors gathered under the fire of one man's genius into a gallery, and filling it. No wonder, again, that there should come into the gal

a very

As to the much bepraised post mortem portrait of Rossini, we confess to sickening at it. One does not slap one's breast over the body of one's dead friend, then paint his likeness, and show it for a shilling. Irreverent of the dignity of death, if one did so deeply sin against love, it would be in different way from this-not by propping the poor corpse on pillows, neatly parting its hair, ordering its hands, putting a crucifix above the lately-beating heart, closing the eyes, and painting it, not well, with all sentimental accessories. Had the painter's art carried us beyond this travesty of sorrow, an old master's example might have been pleaded, but the things differ not less in heart than in pathos. The master who did a thing not unlike in subject to this was a master, and did not display his work with the advantages of an "exhibition light." This is one of those things which they do not do better in France than in England.

bepraised " That it has been much " seemed to turn what spare allowance of milk of human kindness the critic might carry with him, at once. The delicacy with which the great artist dwelt on the subject, and shrank from the exhibition of it, is known to all who have had the slightest personal contact with him. It is the unenviable privilege of coarse natures to wound all those who are of finer metal whom they touch. The reader is besought to dwell on the astonishing lowness of the following sentence: "One does not slap one's breast over the body of one's dead friend, then paint his likeness, and show it for a shilling." The charge implied in this is unjustifiable, because it is one that the individual who will feel it most acutely, must disdain to answer. Among gentlemen there could not possibly be two opinions as to its taste; among men of heart there could not possibly be two

opinions as to the unwarrantable nature of the imputation.

Mark again the clodhopper hand, when the description is intended to be strong. "Neatly parting" the hair of Rossini! The ignorance implied in this passage is condemnation enough. "Ordering its hands, putting a crucifix upon the latelybeating heart!" Has the writer yet to learn that the crucifix is put upon every lately-beating heart, and that the seemly disposition of the hands is the attitude with which all who have stood in chambers of death, in the country where Rossini died, are familiar?

Was not the disposition of the body of the emperor in the Graphic the other day, exactly that of Rossini? The contriver of clumsy phrases, generally thorny and spiteful save about a certain few, did a positive harm to Doré in this instance. The people who know Doré's gallant life; his sensitive, delicate, highly-wrought mind; and his passionate love of Rossini's art (of which Doré is so brilliant a connoisseur and so accomplished an executant) will dismiss the clownish condemnation against which I have felt bound as an Englishman to protest.

It would seem that on a certain morning," the Athenæum, on the lookout for an anatomist in matters artistic, fell in with a slaughterman.

The Saturday Review is in advantageous contrast to the Athenæum in its attitude toward Doré. In the Review the many sides of the best-known artist of our epoch are considered. "Gustave Doré stands just now as the most startling art-phenomenon in Europe; his genius at each turn changes, like colors in a kaleidoscope, into something new and unexpected."

Surely this is truer than the statement that, the "Neophyte" apart, the Doré Gallery is trash-or was when the critic visited it. In the one instance there is prejudice, coarseness of feeling, jaundice; in the other there is a liberal outlook upon the whole of the art-life of a man of genius.

The foregoing remarks on Doré as a

worker have been provoked by a pictorial summary of the events of last season, in which he is represented as one of our distinguished visitors, armed with pencils and brushes at all points. He is painting, drawing, and sketching (I wonder he is not eating and drinking also) at the same moment. The caricaturist's level of criticism is about as true and just as that of the Athenæum critic.

Let the reader now contemplate the last and greatest effort of the poet-artist's power-"Christ Leaving the Prætorium."

The canvas is thirty feet by twenty. In regard to execution it is a marvellous tour de force and the depth and pathos of the conception are extraordinary. The beholder is fairly startled and bewildered by the prodigious tumult that encompasses the sublime central figure, which commands an awful quiet round about it-a quiet that impresses like the agonizing stillness which is the centre of a cyclone. The reality of the prodigious host that hems the Saviour round about after judgment, and his distance from the brutal soldiers, who guard him and lead the way, are effects which only genius of the highest order could conceive. The stages by which the fervid dream grew to this mighty thing-the child of one brain, formed by one pair of never-resting hands-return vividly to me while I sit wondering-who have looked upon the canvas hundreds of times, during the slow process of years which has covered it; and which has filled every square foot of it with the heat and glow of life, and sublimated the whole with the sacred tragedy that is the centre and impulse of it. The patient drawing of groups; the days and nights spent in endeavors to realize the dream of the One Presence amid the multitude; the painting and repainting; the studies of impulse to be impressed upon each of the crowd of men and women; and the exact poise of light and shade-were accomplished with a fervor that burned through every difficulty, and swept away every hindrance. Haste! I, who remember this most solemn sum of work, in nearly all its particulars, and used to speculate so often and anxiously on the fate of the great canvas, while the Germans were throwing shells into Paris; who watched the ever-heightening excitement with which, after the war

ended, and the picture had been disinterred, the toil was resumed and carried triumphantly to an end; who have seen the righteous thought which has preceded the fold of coarse garment, and the articulation of every limb; and lived in the excitement which filled the last days the canvas was to remain under the artist's hand-still wonder more than any outsider at the vast expenditure of power that is spread before me. Aye, in this, the hands answered to the brain-pan of the poet with "the patience of the ox." They were trained upon the "Neophyte," and upon the "Triumph of Christianity"-to this crowning effort, in which may be seen traces of the Byzantine school, of Raffaelle, of study, in short, of the great styles of the pastbut in which the genius of Doré shines with a lustre all its own.

The idealist and the realist are before us. While the turbulent host appears to move upon the spectator, and the ear almost strains to catch the deep murmurs of the passionate mob, the sublime motive of the whole fills the mind with awe. There may be many opinions on the means and methods by which the thrilling effect is produced; but there can be only one as to the extraordinary force of it upon the mind. It compels an emotion deeper than any which painter has produced in our time. The daring of the gifted man who produced it compels the spectator's respect, in these days, when so many artists are content to dwell in prettiness forever-to follow the fashion of the day, and to execute to order with the obedience of the sign painter.

By heroic work from dawn to dusk, through the boyish years most lads give at least somewhat to pleasure, the long path has been travelled to this gallery. It has been more than a journey round the world. The tentative work scattered by the way is prodigious, but a pure thirst for the highest fame has been the unfailing incentive.

As in illustration Doré has been schooling himself through many years' study of Rabelais, Dante, and Cervantes to Shakespeare, which is to be presently his magnum opus so in painting he has been gallantly. fighting his way per ardua ad alta. NEVER IN HASTE BUT ALWAYS AT WORK-should be upon the shield of my illustrious and gallant friend.

Vol. V.

The Athenæum says: "During the German invasion of France fears were entertained for the safety of the Tours Municipal Library. Such fears were not groundless; for, a few months before the war, Dr. Arndt, of the Berlin Royal Library, had inspected the bibliographical treasures of Tours, and had incidentally made the remark that one of them, a splendid copy of the Mentz Bible of 1462, had been carried away from Germany by General Custine during the first wars of the French Revolution. Taking account of this broad hint, as soon as the Germans were on French soil, the Tours librarian, M. Dorange, packed his books and MSS., and took them to Biarritz, in order that they might be shipped if the Germans passed the Loire. Among these treasures, now reinstated on their former shelves, is a MS. of Livy, written in the fifteenth century. It contains only the first and third Decades, but is interesting for its own history, which has just been traced. After a close examination of the MS., the following inscription was discovered, fol. 155:

VICESIMUS TERTIUS SCRIPTUS

IN DOMO DM CARDINALIS

ANDEG†PER ROBERTUM SUU

FAMIL. ROTHOMAGO NATUM.

Another similar inscription at fol. 177 confirms the

Nos. 55 & 56.

first. This Cardinal of Angers was no other than the celebrated Balue, who was kept eleven years in an iron cage by Louis the Eleventh. When the books of the Cardinal were laid hold of by the King, in 1469, the Livy was not finished. It was subsequently completed at the expense of Louis the Eleventh. The receipts of the money paid in his name to Robert du Val, the writer, and Pasquier Bonhomme, who had the MS. illuminated, have been found in the Paris National Library. Catalogue of the Tours Library is in the press, and will shortly be published."

The

The Athenæum speaks thus of Victor Hugo's new work: "M. Victor Hugo has nearly finished a novel, which will be published in the month of February, 1874, under the title of " Quatre-Vingt Treize," with the sub-title of "Premier récit: la Guerre Civile." The plot carries the reader for an instant to Paris, and the imposing figures of Robespierre, Danton, and Marat appear upon the stage; but the action takes place almost entirely in the Ven dée. The relations of the Vendéens to the English, and those of the Channel Islands to the Breton coast, are illustrated by documents hitherto hardly known. An encounter between an English frigate and a French squadron is said to be grandly told."

An Australian gentleman, Mr. Hodgson, who for some time rented the Clopton estate, Stratford-onAvon, where Shakspeare used to visit, has just bought it for the sum of £38,000.

The Pall Mall Gazette says: Of American ingenuity there is no end. When everything seemed to have been done that human smartness could devise to utilize the British author, some genius unknown has hit upon a plan for distributing the noblest works of English literature throughout the United States in such a way that they can hardly be said to have any price at all. The "Official Guide" of the Chicago and Alton Railroad is not only a local Bradshaw but a "monthly reprint." To the customary time-tables are added, from month to month, large portions of the work of some great author; and these portions are so printed that they may be easily detached from the