GUSTAVE DORE'S PURGATORY AND PARADISE.* GUSTAVE DORE has, on the
whole, succeeded in illustrating the Purgatory. The drawings are a little too like those in the Inferno, too dreadful, too little penetrated by the idea of hope, to realize perfectly the idea which one attaches to the Catholic Purgatory, the place of purification, rather than of punishment only, but still they are very wonderful drawings. In some, as, for example, in the one opposite page 64, where Arachne is seen stretched out intoa gigantic spider, the infernal idea, punishment for the sake of punishment, is too manifest ; but in others, the higher notion of an infinite dreariness, through which souls all but lost pass on to Paradise, is realized as only Dore could have realized it. We would give the picture opposite page 14 as a proof of this. There is very little in it, nothing indeed but one of those dark shadowy depths which only Gustave Dore has learned perfectly to draw ; but above the ravine flits or marches the veiled shadowy host, half angelic, which somehow one feels rather than sees will reach heaven, but is now in misery, a misery not utter, not fatal to reflection, or even to a faint interest in things around, but still misery of an intense kind. The use of shadowy forms with lighted outlines is apparently the instrument by which Gustave Dore hopes to produce his effect (vide page 36), a grand idea of endurance which would not be endurance, which would almost be happiness, were there only Light (vide page 24) ; and he does produce it most effectually, even when, as in page 36, he strains the thought almost beyond the grasp of ordinary mankind ; or when, in page 62, he throws us violently back upon a purely physical conception of toil. Labour in itself is scarcely punishment, and, for all that appears, labour in itself is the punishment present here. His greatest defect is that, again and again punishment takes that form of pure malignity, of bootless infliction of suffering which is the farthest from the catholic and from the true idea of God's providence in dealing with His creatures. The spirit of torture rises and rises,—as also it does in the poem, —till in the figures which the flames lick but cannot burn, exciting an agony of fear rather than an agony of physical pain, we have men to whom hell with its permanence were almost redemption. And yet criticism of this kind on the Purgatory is not criticism. Look the drawings through slowly, meditatively, thinking of Dante, and not either of theology or Dore ; and slowly, as we deem, it will somehow dawn upon you, unwilling to accept it, that in these heights and these depths, these tricks of the perpendicular— for they are tricks—these gleams of an invisible sun and hints of present angels, in this deep gloom over all which yet leaves men human and souls beautiful, in these clouds which do not hide rays, but hide their source, in these processions without a shrine—the monkish idea of acts has caught Gustave Dore—processions in which there is a sub-idea sometimes of horror, sometimes of grotesquerie (vide page 164, where beasts with the bat-wings which Dore gives the Devil, and women's breasts, and heads of animal or bird, are driving the sages of mankind), the true thought of a half
inspired poet has found an expression almost as full as itself ; less near perhaps to our hearts ; more near to those physical emotions within us, those horrors, repulsions, disgusts, of which the nearest and the truest we can say is that they are instinctive, that they are co-ordinate in origin with the reason which judges them, and therefore beyond perfect analysis by an equal power. The illustrations which can effect this impression are great, even though a minute study of them might reveal the small adroitnesses by which the impression is created.
The Paradise does not strike us equally. The leading idea of the series of drawings,—figures bathed in light wheeling in eccentric circles round a half visible centre, figures usually winged, —in itself a somewhat feeble notion,—has a striking but rather indistinct effect (in 352 it is decidedly operatic), and the bevies of saintly women, in long dresses falling perpendicularly, fail to impress us at all. They are serious and beautiful, but not divine. The Cross borne by wreaths of angels, who are not,—if we may be allowed so mundane a criticism,—all flying the same way, would be a wonderful hint for Dieppe workers in ivory, but is too material altogether for the idea it is intended to convey, at least to minds which feel in Jesus something more than the Being extended on the Cross and suffering untold agony to be repaid by triumph beyond words. Nothing shocks us in Gustave Dore's Paradise, and nothing can be said to fail ; but nothing succeeds fully, nothing satisfies the longing in every heart to conceive of what " Paradise" the home of the redeemed may be. There are fair landscapes, and saintly figures, and glorious ideas of a new relation to something above ourselves ; but of peace, and light, and beatitude, of the peace which passeth expression, of the light which comes from His presence, of the beatitude which should be in the souls of those who are with Him, there is no trace. Some faint gleam of joy, of the rapture of satisfied benevolence, ought surely to be apparent in the face of the watching Dante, and is not, though once it is irradiated by angelic light. The artist would say we are demanding too much. Possibly, but then we are not demanding more than Dante; by the consent of mankind, has iu some more or less materialistic way succeeded in giving. We cannot say, and we speak as admirers of M. bore's genius, that we think he also has succeeded. It was not open to him, perhaps, to give us the true Paradise, the place,—for to Dante it was a place— beyond all human imagination, to fix the divine dreams that floated before the author of the Apocalypse, but it was open to him to do what Southey did, to draw a place in which at least the human heart could rest satisfied that the highest human ideal, earth without sin, had been excelled. This M. Dore has not done, and while his Inferno will live while Dante's lives, and the Purgatorio will share, without quite deserving, its immortality, the Paradise will, we fear, be quoted only as a proof how close the inexorable limits draw around genius, even when it is as great as that of M. Gustave Dore.
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