Part 7

From the nursery upwards, if the term can be applied to French children, his life was a succession of artistic abnormalities and tours de force. The bantling in petticoats who could astound his elders with wonderfully accurate silhouettes, continued to surprise them in other ways. His memory was no less amazing than his draughtsmanship. When seven years of age, he was taken to the opera and witnessed Robert le Diable. On returning home he accurately narrated every scene.

Intoxicated by the colour and movement of the fête, garlanded and beflagged streets, the symbolic carriages, the bands, civic and military, and the prevailing enthusiasm, the child determined to get up an apotheosis of his own: in other words, to repeat the performance on a smaller scale. Which he did. Cars, costumes, banners and decorations were all designed by this imp of ten. With the approval of his professors and the collaboration of his school-fellows, the Doré procession, consisting of four highly decorated cars, drawn by boys, defiled before the college authorities and made the round of the cathedral, the youthful impresario at its head. The car of the painters on glass was conspicuously elaborate, a star copied from a Cathedral window showing the superscription, G. Doré, fecit. Small wonder is it that the adoring mother of an equally adoring son should have believed in him from the first, and seen in these beginnings the dawn of genius, the advent, indeed, of a second Michael Angelo or Titian.

The more practical father might chide such overreaching vaticinations, might reiterate--

"Do not fill the boy's head with nonsense."

The answer would be--

"I know it. Our son is a genius."

And Doré père gave way, under circumstances curious enough.

In 1847 the family visited Paris, there to Gustave's delight spending four months. Loitering one day in the neighbourhood of the Bourse, his eye lighted upon comic papers with cuts published by MM. Auber and Philipon. Their shop windows were full of caricatures, and after a long and intent gaze the boy returned home, in two or three days presenting himself before the proprietors with half-a-dozen drawings much in the style of those witnessed. The benevolent but businesslike M. Philipon examined the sketches attentively, put several questions to his young visitor, and, finding that the step had been taken surreptitiously, immediately sat down and wrote to M. and Mme. Doré. He urged them with all the inducements he could command to allow their son the free choice of a career, assuring them of his future.

A few days later an agreement was signed by father and publisher to this effect: During three years the latter was to receive upon certain terms a weekly cartoon from the sixteen-year-old artist, who, on his side, bound himself to offer no sketches elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Gustave would pursue his studies at the Lycée Charlemagne, his patron promising to look after his health and well-being. The arrangement answered, and in Le Journal pour rire the weekly caricature signed by Doré soon noised his fame abroad. Ugly, even hideous, as were many of these caricatures, they did double duty, paying the lad's school expenses, and paving the way to better things. Of caricature Doré soon tired, and after this early period never returned to it. Is it any wonder that facile success and excessive laudation should turn the stripling's head? Professionally, if not artistically speaking, Doré passed straight from child to man; in one sense of the word he had no boyhood, the term tyro remained inapplicable. This undersized, fragile lad, looking years younger than he really was, soon found himself on what must have appeared a pinnacle of fame and fortune.

Shortly after his agreement with Philipon, his father died, and Mme. Doré with her family removed to Paris, settling in a picturesque and historic hôtel of the Rue St. Dominique. Here Doré lived for the rest of his too short life.

The house had belonged to the family of Saint Simon, that terrible observer under whose gaze even Louis XIV. is said to have quailed. So aver historians of the period. The associations of his home immediately quickened Doré's inventive faculties. He at once set to work and organized a brilliant set of tableaux vivants, illustrating scenes from the immortal Mémoires. The undertaking proved a great social success, and henceforth we hear of galas, soirées, theatricals and other entertainments increasing in splendour with the young artist's vogue--and means.

The history of the next twenty years reads like a page from the Arabian Nights. Although dazzling is the record from first to last, and despite the millions of francs earned during those two decades, the artist's ambition was never satisfied. We are always conscious of bitterness and disillusion. As an illustrator, no longer of cheap comic papers but of literary masterpieces brought out in costly fashion, Doré reached the first rank at twenty, his Rabelais setting the seal on his renown. So immense was the success of this truly colossal undertaking and of its successors, the Don Quixote, the Contes de fées of Perrault and the rest, that he meditated nothing less than the illustration of cosmopolitan chefs 'd' oeuvre, en bloc, a series which should include every great imaginative work of the Western world! Thus in 1855 we find him noting the following projects, to be carried out in ten years' time:--illustrations of Æschylus, Lucan, Ovid, Shakespeare, Goethe (Faust), Lamartine (Méditations), Racine, Corneille, Schiller, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Plutarch's Lives--these names among others. The jottings in question were written for a friend who had undertaken to write the artist's biography.

The Rabelais, Don Quixote, The Inferno, and several more of these sumptuous volumes were brought out in England. Forty years ago Doré's bold and richly imaginative work was in great favour here; indeed, throughout his life he was much more appreciated by ourselves than by his countrymen. All the drawings were done straight upon wood. Lavish in daily life, generous of the generous, Doré showed the same lavishness in his procedure. Some curious particulars are given upon this head. Fabulous sums were spent upon his blocks, even small ones costing as much as four pounds apiece. He must always have the very best wood, no matter the cost, and it was only the whitest, smoothest and glossiest boxwood that satisfied him. Enormous sums were spent upon this material, and to his honour be it recorded, that no matter the destination of a block, the same cost, thought and minute manipulation were expended upon a trifling commission as upon one involving thousands of pounds. The penny paper was treated precisely the same as the volume to be brought out at two guineas. In the zenith of his fame as an illustrator, at a time when tip-top authors and editors were all clamouring for his drawings, he did not despise humbler admirers and clients. His delight in his work was only equalled by quite abnormal physical and mental powers. Sleep, food, fresh air, everything was forgotten in the engrossment of work. At this time he would often give himself three hours of sleep only.

Doré's ambition--rather, one of his ambitions--was to perfect wood engraving as an art, hence his indifference to the cost of production. 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 illustration? Anyhow, herein partly lies the explanation of the following notice in a second-hand book catalogue, 1911--

"No. 355. Gustave Doré: Dante's Inferno, with 76 full-page illustrations by Doré. 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--

"Doré'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 illustrator of Dante, Cervantes and Victor Hugo. But Doré'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, Doré 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 Doré! In those ardently patriotic days he entirely relied upon victory and drew an anticipatory picture of France triumphant, entitled, "Le Passage 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'être. Keep it in memory of our fallacious hopes."

III

In an evil hour for his peace of mind and his fame, Doré decided to leave illustration 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 illustrating the Arabian Nights had the wonderful story of Hasan of El-Basrah evidently brought home to him the same moral.

Between a Doré and his object--so he deemed--existed neither "seven valleys nor seven seas, nor seven mountains of vast magnitude." A Doré needed no assistance 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 Doré appeared on the walls of the Salon. But the canvases passed 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, Doré 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.