GUSTAVE DORE'S ELAINE.*

THERE are only four illustrations out of the nine in this splendid edition of Tennyson's Elaine which seem to us to be fully worthy

of Gustave Dore's genius,— the two pictures of Elaine's body in the barge floating down the river, especially that in the frontis- piece,—the skeletons of the fratricides in the glen of horror,— and the picture of Lancelot's remorse as he sits watching the high reed wave. But in these four M. Dore seems to us to have com- bined a very high degree of delicacy of effect with his usual weird force. And yet even in these, in spite of the exceeding delicacy of the line engraving, we miss the broader effects which Gustave Dore gives so much more perfectly to drawings on wood. Deli- cacy and finish such as he has given to the dead body of Elaine in the frontispiece (where the purity of love in death is brought out with singular brilliancy against the gloom of the valley through which Elaine takes her last voyage) are not only not incompatible with his genius, but heighten its effects wherever he can throw, as he does here, a general expression of its own over the whole picture ; but where he fails of a general expression for his landscapes, and relies only on his drawing of social groups, we recognize M. Dore's proper genius no longer. It seems to us that while he has proved in these illustrations how finely he can draw, he has proved also that he should use his more finished power of drawing only to set off his far greater genius for weird general effects. The pale solemnity and delicate pathos of the two sunrise scenes, in which

"the dead, Steered by the dumb, went upwards with the flood,"

can hardly be surpassed, but the mere beauty of the pallid corpse in the morning light would not affect us much, without that grim background of shadow and gloom out of which it is passing.

It is a pity, however, that Gustave Dore has missed one of his own most characteristic effects, in his picture of the dumb servitor, whom Tennyson describes as "winking his eyes and twisted all his face," and evidently meant as a foil to the marble beauty of the dead maiden. No one could give the grotesque effect of long dumbness on an aged face better than M. Dore, yet he has given us nothing but a grave, weather-beaten boat- man. So, too, he has missed a great point in his picture of the glen of the fratricides,—otherwise a conception of truly ghastly splendour. Tennyson tells us that Arthur came across the crown of the kingly skeleton thus :—

"For here two brothers, one a king, had met,

And fought together ; but their names were lost.

And each had slain his brother at a blow, And down they fell and made the glen abhorred: And there they lay till all their bones were bleached And lichen'd into colour with the crags ;

And he that once was king had on a crown

Of diamonds, one in front and four aside.

And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass

All in a misty moonshine, unawares,

Bad trodden that crown'd skeleton, and the skull

Broke from the nape, and with the skull the crown Rolled into light, and turning on its rims Fled like a glittering rivulet to the tara : And down the shingly scaur he plunged and caught And set it on his head, and in his heart Heard murmurs, '1,o! thou likewise shalt be King.'"

It is clear from this that Tennyson means Arthur to be on foot, and to have broken with his own foot the neck of the skeleton king. In the picture he is on horseback. The rolling crown has left the skull, without any severance of the skull from the neck, and Arthur is watching its course from his horse without appar- ently any idea of jumping off, which, indeed, he could scarcely do in time to save it from the tarn. The grim effect of having per- sonally set his foot on the dead king's neck is thus lost, and the whole horror somewhat diminished by the elevation from which Arthur views the skeletons, and from the companionship of his horse.

As a substitute,—no doubt a fine but quite unauthentic substi- tute,—M. Dore has given us the skeleton horses of the dead fratri- cides lying near their masters. The whole effect of the misty moonlight in the valley of death is grand and grim in the highest degree, and the bullet-shaped skull of the non-royal brother is so set on his head, and the position of the sitting skeleton so managed, as to give a fierce revolutionary and regicide impres- sion, while that of the dead king only expresses the ghastliness and prostration of decay. The fourth picture worthy of Dore's genius,—Lancelot in his remorse, as he sat

• Elaine. By Alfred Tennyson. Illustrated by Gustave Lord. London: Moxon. 1867.

"by the river in a cove, and watch'd The high reed wave,"

is the only one in which Lancelot is painted as Tennyson describes him,—

" The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, In battle with the love he bare his lord,

Had marred his face, and marked it ere his time."

Or again, in these lines :— "His mood was often like a fiend, and rose And drove him into wastes and solitudes For agony,—who was yet a living soul."

Dore has here pictured very finely one of these moods of agony, the marred face of sell-conflict; while the exquisite repose of the landscape, the soft pile of summer cloud in the horizon, the flowering reed bending softly towards him, as if to mock him with a symbol of perfect beauty and peace, the ripple of the waves among the reeds,—all produce an effect on which the contrast of Lancelot's scarred nature and fierce passions is grandly written. But in the other five illustrations, mostly or altogether social groups, Dore is not himself. Elaine is never the symbol of fragile, loving purity Tennyson intends, except in her death ; Guinevere is solely a sensual beauty ; Arthur only a dignified knight. The four engravings we have mentioned would, however, alone give a very high artistic value to the book. And three of them at least, those of the funeral voyage and Lancelot's re- morse, are critical pictures,—pictures that embody with the genius of a fresh and vigorous mind the leading points of Termyson's beautiful tale.