In The Heart Of The Vosges And Other Sketches Part 4

Hence, doubtless, his persistence in drawing on wood without preliminary sketch or copy.

Perhaps such obsession was natural. How could he foresee the variety of new methods that were so soon to transform book ill.u.s.tration? Anyhow, herein partly lies the explanation of the following notice in a second-hand book catalogue, 1911--

"No. 355. Gustave Dore: _Dante's Inferno_, with 76 full-page ill.u.s.trations by Dore. 4to, gilt top, binding soiled, but otherwise good copy. _42s._ for _3s. 6d._ London, n.d."

A leading London publisher consulted by me on the subject, writes as follows--

"Dore's works are no longer in vogue. One of the reasons lies in the fact that his pictures were done by the old engraved process. He drew them straight on wood, and there are, accordingly, no original drawings to be reproduced by modern methods."

The words "fatal facility" cannot be applied to so consummate a draughtsman as the ill.u.s.trator of Dante, Cervantes and Victor Hugo. But Dore's almost superhuman memory was no less of a pitfall than manual dexterity. The following story will partly explain his dislike of facsimile and duplication.

An intimate friend, named Bourdelin, relates how one day during the siege of Paris, the pair found themselves by the Courbevoie bridge. One side of this bridge was guarded by French gendarmes, the other by German officers, Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians, a dozen in all. For a quarter of an hour the two Frenchmen lingered, Dore intently gazing on the group opposite. On returning home some hours later he produced a sketch-book and in Bourdelin's presence swiftly outlined the twelve figures, exactly reproducing not only physiognomic divergences but every detail of costume! Poor Dore! In those ardently patriotic days he entirely relied upon victory and drew an antic.i.p.atory picture of France triumphant, ent.i.tled, "Le Pa.s.sage du Rhin." But the French never crossed the Rhine, and the drawing was given to this friend with the words: "My sketch has no longer any _raison d'etre_. Keep it in memory of our fallacious hopes."

III

In an evil hour for his peace of mind and his fame, Dore decided to leave ill.u.s.tration and become a historic painter. He evidently regarded genius as a Pandora's gift, an all-embracing finality, an endowment that could neither be worsened nor bettered, being complete in itself.

A reader of Ariosto, he had not taken to heart one of his most memorable verses, those mellifluous lines in which the poet dwells upon the laboriousness of intellectual achievement. Nor when ill.u.s.trating the _Arabian Nights_ had the wonderful story of Hasan of El-Basrah evidently brought home to him the same moral.

Between a Dore and his object--so he deemed--existed neither "seven valleys nor seven seas, nor seven mountains of vast magnitude." A Dore needed no a.s.sistance of the flying Jinn and the wandering stars on his way, no flying horse, "which when he went along flew, and when he flew the dust overtook him not."

Without the equipment of training, without recognition of such a handicap, he entered upon his new career.

In 1854 for the first time two pictures signed by Dore appeared on the walls of the Salon. But the canvases pa.s.sed unnoticed. The Parisians would not take the would-be painter seriously, and the following year's experience proved hardly less disheartening. Of four pictures sent in, three were accepted, one of these being a historic subject, the other two being landscapes. The first, "La Bataille de l'Alma," evoked considerable criticism. The rural scenes were hung, as Edmond About expressed it, so high as to need a telescope.

Both About and Th. Gautier believed in their friend's newly-developed talent, but art-critics and the public held aloof. No medal was decreed by the jury, and, accustomed as he had been to triumph after triumph, his fondest hopes for the second time deceived, Dore grew bitter and acrimonious. That his failure had anything to do with the real question at issue, namely, his genius as a historic painter, he would never for a moment admit. Jealousy, cabals, prejudice only were accountable.

The half dozen years following were divided between delightfully gay and varied sociabilities, feverishly prolonged working hours and foreign travel. The millions of francs earned by his ill.u.s.trations gave him everything he wanted but one, that one, in his eyes, worth all the rest.

Travel, a splendid studio, largesses--he was generosity itself--all these were within his reach. The craved-for renown remained ungraspable.

Even visits to his favourite resort, Barr, brought disenchantment. He found old acquaintances and the country folks generally wanting in appreciation. With greater and lesser men, he subacidly said to himself that a man was no prophet in his own country.

Ten years after the fiasco of his first canvases in the Salon came an invitation to England and the alluring project of a Dore gallery. The Dore Bible and Tennyson, with other works, had paved the way for a right royal reception. The streets of London, as he could well believe, were paved with gold. But many were the _contra_. "I feel the presentiment,"

he wrote to a friend, "that if I betake myself to England, I shall break with my own country and lose prestige and influence in France. I cannot exist without my friends, my habits and my _pot-au-feu_. Folks tell me that England is a land of fogs, that the sun never shines there, that the inhabitants are cold, and that I should most likely suffer from sea-sickness in crossing the Manche. To sum up, England is a long way off, and I have a great mind to give up the project."

Friendly persuasion, self-interest, wounded self-love carried the day.

Reluctantly he decided upon the redoubtable sea-voyage. Whether he suffered from sea-sickness or no we are not told. In any case the visit was repeated, John Bull according the great Alsatian, as he was called, what France had so persistently withheld.

Dore was here accorded the first rank among historic painters. His gallery in Bond Street became one of the London sights; in fashionable society, if not in the close ring of the great Victorian artists, he made a leading figure. Royalty patronized and welcomed him. The Queen bought one of his pictures ("Le Psalterion," now at Windsor), and invited him to Balmoral. The heir-apparent, the late King, admired his talent and relished his society. By the clerical world he was especially esteemed, being looked upon as a second Leonardo da Vinci. And, in fine, Dore must be regarded as an antic.i.p.ator of the Entente cordiale.

"Gustave Dore," his compatriots would say, "he is half an Englishman!"

Forty years ago our popular favourite might indeed have believed in the fulfilment of his dream. The Thorwaldsen Gallery of Copenhagen had ever dazzled his imagination. Bond Street was not Paris, certainly, but in the greatest metropolis of the world his memory would be for ever perpetuated. Turning to the dithyrambic utterances of the London Press at the time we can hardly wonder at the hallucination.

Here are one or two pa.s.sages culled from leading dailies and weeklies--

"In gravity and magnitude of purpose, no less than in the scope and power of his imagination, he towers like a Colossus among his contemporaries. Compared with such a work as 'Christ leaving the Praetorium,' the pictures in Burlington House look like the production of a race of dwarfs whose mental faculties are as diminutive as their stature. And it is not alone the efforts of the English School of Painting that appear puny in presence of so great and gigantic an undertaking; the work of all the existing schools of Europe sinks into equal insignificance, and we must go back to the Italian painters of the sixteenth century to find a picture worthy of being cla.s.sed with this latest and most stupendous achievement of the great French master."

Elsewhere we read--

"The most marvellous picture of the present age is to be seen at 35, New Bond Street. The subject is 'Christ leaving the Praetorium,' The painter is the world-renowned Gustave Dore."

A journal devoted to art-criticism wrote--

"In 'The Christian Martyrs' we have a striking, thrilling and enn.o.bling picture."

And so on, and so on. Yet at this time among "the dwarfs" of Burlington House then exhibiting was Millais, and contemporaneously with Dore in our midst, 1870-1, was Daubigny, whose tiniest canvases now fetch their thousands!

It was during Dore's apogee in England that a well-known French amateur, also visiting our sh.o.r.es, was thus addressed by an English friend: "Come with me to Bond Street, you will there see the work of your greatest living painter."

"_Our_ greatest painter!" exclaimed the other. "You mean your own. Dore is our first draughtsman of France, yes, but painter, never, neither the greatest nor great; at least we were ignorant of the fact till informed of it by yourself and your country-people."

Dore knew well how matters stood, and bitterly resented the att.i.tude of his own nation. Accorded a princely welcome across the Manche, his work worth its weight in gold on the other side of the Atlantic, in France he was looked at askance, even as a painter ignored. He regarded himself as shut out from his rightful heritage, and the victim, if not of a conspiracy, of a cabal. His school playmates and close friends, Taine, Edmond About and Th. Gautier, might be on his side; perhaps, with reservations, Rossini and a few other eminent a.s.sociates also. But the prescient, unerring verdict of the collective "man in the street"--

"The people's voice, the proof and echo of all human fame"--

he missed; resentment preyed upon his spirits, undermined his vitality, and doubtless had something to do with his premature breakdown.

The Dore gallery indeed proved his Capua, the long-stop to his fame.

IV

As a personality the would-be t.i.tian, Durer, Thorwaldsen and Benvenuto Cellini in one presents an engaging figure. His domestic life makes very pleasant reading. We find no dark holes and corners in the career of one who may be said to have remained a boy to the end, at fifty as at five full of freak and initiative, clingingly attached to a devoted and richly-endowed mother, and the ebullient spirit of a happy home. With his rapidly increasing fortune, the historic house in the Rue Dominique became an artistic, musical and dramatic centre. His fetes were worthy of a millionaire, and, alike in those private theatricals, _tableaux vivants_ or concerts, he ever took a leading part. An accomplished violinist, Dore found in music a never-failing stimulant and refreshment. Rossini was one of his circle, among others were the two Gautiers, the two Dumas, Carolus Duran, Liszt, Gounod, Patti, Alboni and Nilsson, Mme. Dore, still handsome and alert in her old age, proudly doing the honours of what was now called the Hotel Dore. By his literary and artistic brethren the many-faceted genius and exhilarating host was fully appreciated. Generosities he ever freely indulged in, the wealth of such rapid attainment being dispensed with an ungrudgeful hand. To works of charity the great ill.u.s.trator gave largely, but we hear of no untoward misreckonings, nor bills drawn upon time, health or talents.

With him, as with the average Frenchman, solvency was an eleventh commandment.

Meantime, as the years wore on, again and again he bid desperately for the suffrages withheld, his legitimately won renown held by him of small account. To his American biographer he said, on showing her some of his pictures: "I ill.u.s.trate books in order to pay for my colours and paint-brushes. I was born a painter."

On the lady's companion, an American officer, naively asking if certain canvases were designed for London or Paris, he answered with bitter irony--

"Paris, forsooth! I do not paint well enough for Paris." As he spoke his face became clouded. The gay, jovial host of a few minutes before sighed deeply, and during their visit could not shake off depression.

Two crowning humiliations came before the one real sorrow of his life, the loss of that gifted mother who was alike his boon companion, closest confidante and enthusiastic Egeria. Perpetually seeking laurels in new fields, in 1877 he made his _debut_ as a sculptor. The marble group, "La Parque et l'Amour," signed G. Dore, won a _succes d'estime_, no more.

In the following year was opened the great international exhibition on the Champ de Mars, Dore's enormous monumental vase being conspicuously placed over one of the porticoes. This astounding achievement in bronze, appropriately named the "Poeme de la Vigne," created quite a sensation at the time. Reproductions appeared in papers of all countries containing a printing press or photographic machine. But for the artist's name, doubtless his work would have attained the gold medal and other honours. The Brobdingnagian vase, so wonderfully decorated with flowers, animals and arabesques, was pa.s.sed over by the jury.

Equally mortifying was the fate of his marble group in the same year's Salon. This subject, "La Gloire," had a place of honour in the sculpture gallery and won universal suffrages. The critics echoed popular approval. The jury remained pa.s.sive. It was in the midst of these unnecessarily crushing defeats--for why, indeed, should any mortal have craved more than mortal success?--that Mme. Dore's forces gave way. From that time till her death, which occurred two years later, her son's place was by her side, floutings, projects, health and pleasure, forgotten, his entire thoughts being given to the invalid. No more beautiful picture of filial devotion could suggest itself to the painter of domestic subjects than this, Dore with table and sketching materials seated in his mother's sick-room, or at night ministering to her in wakeful moments. At dawn he would s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours' sleep, but that was all. No wonder that his own health should give way so soon after the death-blow of her loss.

"My friend," he wrote to an English boon companion, on March 16, 1881, "she is no more. I am alone. You are a clergyman, I entreat you to pray for the repose of her beloved soul and the preservation of my reason."

A few days later he wrote to the same friend of his "frightful solitude," adding his regret at not having antic.i.p.ated such a blank and made for himself a home--in other words, taken a wife.

Some kind matchmaking friends set to work and found, so at least they fancied, a bride exactly calculated to render him happy.

But on January 23, 1883, Dore died, prematurely aged and broken down by grief, corroding disappointment and quite frenzied overwork and ambition.

He never attained recognition as a historic painter among his country-folks. One canvas, however, "Tobit and the Angel," is placed in the Luxembourg, and his monument to Dumas ornaments the capital. His renown as an ill.u.s.trator remains high as ever in France. And one, that one, the pa.s.sionately desired prize of every Frenchman, became his: in 1861 he was decorated with the Red Ribbon. Six of Dore's great religious subjects retain their place in the Bond Street Gallery, but for reasons given above his wonderfully imaginative ill.u.s.trations are here forgotten.