DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.36582#0033
THE DO RE G A LEERY.
7
“ Contes Drolatiques ” of Balzac are certainly superior to those which he contributed
to the cheap periodicals, for they share the elevating influences of fancy; but they
are not pleasant—nay, they are sometimes even horrible. It is impossible, however,
not to admire the prodigal invention and free,, agile fancy of these sketches.
They are fetched out of the strangest regions of the grotesque, and display a
wonderful power of imagining unwonted shapes and dreamlike incidents. They helped
to make M. Dore famous, and the sale of this edition of the “ Contes Drolatiques ”
has been enormous. A great deal of fantastic ingenuity, also, is exhibited in the
illustrations to “ Captain Castagnette,” and in some designs contributed by Dore to a
Parisian weekly miscellany, the jfotirnal pour Tons, fourteen or fifteen years ago.
d hese latter are not known in England, but they are full of whimsical conception.
1 he artist’s name was also greatly advanced by the publication of his illustrated
Rabelais, about the time of the Crimean war. It was by efforts such as these that
M. Dore was led upwards from the common work of delineating Paris life to the
lofty heights of Dante, of Milton, and of the Scriptures. Rabelais offered an admirable
intermediate ground. The licentious humour of that prodigious satirist has its points of
contact with the cynical side of Dore’s genius; while in the endless invention, the
poetical creativeness, of the originator of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the young artist
had a magnificent field for exercising his own fancy, and for developing his matchless
powers of picturesqueness. The licence of such a writer as Rabelais is a very different
thing from that of the scribblers for cheap Parisian prints. It has the elevation and the
inalienable nobility of genius—that sacred privilege, which only genius possesses, of rising
into pure and lofty air, even from low and gross beginnings. Carlyle has told us that
genius was never yet wholly base; and Coleridge has said of Rabelais that he could write
a treatise in praise of his moral elevation, “ which would make the Church stare and the
conventicle groan, and yet would be truth, and nothing but the truth.” M. Dore passed
from a lower to a higher stage of art by the road of Rabelais.
Early impressions will often do much towards shaping and colouring a man’s faculties.
Though the name would seem to betoken a genuine French descent, M. Dore was born
in that curious frontier town, Strasbourg, which, having been originally German, still retains
a Teutonic rather than a French character. This may in some measure account for the
element of Germanism which is visible in several of M. Dore’s works ; and to the fact
that the earlier years of the artist were spent amidst the mountainous and rocky scenery
of the Vosges may be ascribed much of that wild and gloomy spirit which we see
in many of his landscapes. It is said that he never forgets a landscape which he has
once beheld, and his pictures of natural scenery have often an individuality, a literal
accuracy of characterisation, which proclaims their general fidelity to truth, however much
they may be heightened by the informing eye of a poet, or clad in the atmosphere of
romance and passion. Pie told an English artist and art-critic that he could mentally
7
“ Contes Drolatiques ” of Balzac are certainly superior to those which he contributed
to the cheap periodicals, for they share the elevating influences of fancy; but they
are not pleasant—nay, they are sometimes even horrible. It is impossible, however,
not to admire the prodigal invention and free,, agile fancy of these sketches.
They are fetched out of the strangest regions of the grotesque, and display a
wonderful power of imagining unwonted shapes and dreamlike incidents. They helped
to make M. Dore famous, and the sale of this edition of the “ Contes Drolatiques ”
has been enormous. A great deal of fantastic ingenuity, also, is exhibited in the
illustrations to “ Captain Castagnette,” and in some designs contributed by Dore to a
Parisian weekly miscellany, the jfotirnal pour Tons, fourteen or fifteen years ago.
d hese latter are not known in England, but they are full of whimsical conception.
1 he artist’s name was also greatly advanced by the publication of his illustrated
Rabelais, about the time of the Crimean war. It was by efforts such as these that
M. Dore was led upwards from the common work of delineating Paris life to the
lofty heights of Dante, of Milton, and of the Scriptures. Rabelais offered an admirable
intermediate ground. The licentious humour of that prodigious satirist has its points of
contact with the cynical side of Dore’s genius; while in the endless invention, the
poetical creativeness, of the originator of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the young artist
had a magnificent field for exercising his own fancy, and for developing his matchless
powers of picturesqueness. The licence of such a writer as Rabelais is a very different
thing from that of the scribblers for cheap Parisian prints. It has the elevation and the
inalienable nobility of genius—that sacred privilege, which only genius possesses, of rising
into pure and lofty air, even from low and gross beginnings. Carlyle has told us that
genius was never yet wholly base; and Coleridge has said of Rabelais that he could write
a treatise in praise of his moral elevation, “ which would make the Church stare and the
conventicle groan, and yet would be truth, and nothing but the truth.” M. Dore passed
from a lower to a higher stage of art by the road of Rabelais.
Early impressions will often do much towards shaping and colouring a man’s faculties.
Though the name would seem to betoken a genuine French descent, M. Dore was born
in that curious frontier town, Strasbourg, which, having been originally German, still retains
a Teutonic rather than a French character. This may in some measure account for the
element of Germanism which is visible in several of M. Dore’s works ; and to the fact
that the earlier years of the artist were spent amidst the mountainous and rocky scenery
of the Vosges may be ascribed much of that wild and gloomy spirit which we see
in many of his landscapes. It is said that he never forgets a landscape which he has
once beheld, and his pictures of natural scenery have often an individuality, a literal
accuracy of characterisation, which proclaims their general fidelity to truth, however much
they may be heightened by the informing eye of a poet, or clad in the atmosphere of
romance and passion. Pie told an English artist and art-critic that he could mentally