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.
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 illustrations 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 Doré gallery. The
Doré 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.
Doré 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,
Doré must be regarded as an anticipator of the Entente cordiale.
"Gustave Doré," 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 passages 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
Prætorium,' 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 classed 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 Prætorium,' The painter
is the world-renowned Gustave Doré."
A journal devoted to art-criticism wrote--
"In 'The Christian Martyrs' we have a striking, thrilling and
ennobling picture."
And so on, and so on. Yet at this time among "the dwarfs" of Burlington
House then exhibiting was Millais, and contemporaneously with Doré in
our midst, 1870-1, was Daubigny, whose tiniest canvases now fetch their
thousands!
It was during Doré's apogee in England that a well-known French amateur,
also visiting our shores, 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. Doré
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."
Doré knew well how matters stood, and bitterly resented the attitude 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 associates 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 Doré gallery indeed proved his Capua, the long-stop to his fame.
IV
As a personality the would-be Titian, Dürer, 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 fêtes were worthy
of a millionaire, and, alike in those private theatricals, _tableaux
vivants_ or concerts, he ever took a leading part. An accomplished
violinist, Doré 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. Doré, still handsome and alert in her old age, proudly
doing the honours of what was now called the Hôtel Doré. 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 illustrator 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 illustrate 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 _début_ as a sculptor. The marble group, "La
Parque et l'Amour," signed G. Doré, won a _succès d'estime_, no more.
In the following year was opened the great international exhibition on the
Champ de Mars, Doré's enormous monumental vase being conspicuously
placed over one of the porticoes. This astounding achievement in bronze,
appropriately named the "Poème 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 passed 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 passive. It was in the midst of these
unnecessarily crushing defeats--for why, indeed, should any mortal have
craved more than mortal success?--that Mme. Doré'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, Doré 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 snatch 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 anticipated 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, Doré 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 illustrator remains high as ever in France. And one, that
one, the passionately desired prize of every Frenchman, became his: in
1861 he was decorated with the Red Ribbon. Six of Doré's great religious
subjects retain their place in the Bond Street Gallery, but for reasons
given above his wonderfully imaginative illustrations are here
forgotten.
The superb edition of the _Enid_ (Moxon, 1868), a folio bound in royal
purple and gold, and printed on paper thick as vellum, the volume
weighing four pounds, awakens melancholy reflections. What would have
been poor Doré's feelings had he lived to see such a guinea's worth, and
cheap at the price, gladly sold, rather got rid of, for three shillings!
Doré's last work, the unconventional monument to the elder Dumas, was
left unfinished.
Completed by another hand, the group now forms a conspicuous object in
the Avenue Villiers, Paris.
The striking figure of the great quadroon, with his short crisped
locks, suggests a closer relationship to the race thus apostrophized by
Walt Whitman--
"You, dim descended, black, divine souled African...."
He surmounts a lofty pedestal, on the base being seated a homely group,
three working folks, a mob-capped woman reading a Dumas novel to two
companions, evidently her father and husband, sons of the soil, drinking
in every word, their attitude of the most complete absorption.
Classicists and purists in art doubtless look askance at a work which
would certainly have enchanted the sovereign romancer.
"Will folks read my stories when I am gone, doctor?" he asked as he lay
a-dying. The good physician easily reassured his patient. "When we have
patients awaiting some much-dreaded operation in hospital," he replied,
"we have only to give them one of your novels. Straightway they forget
everything else." And Dumas--"the great, the humane," as a charming poet
has called him--died happy. As well he might, in so far as his fame was
concerned. _La Tulipe Noire_ would alone have assured his future.
VI
QUISSAC AND SAUVE
One should always go round the sun to meet the moon in France, that is
to say, one should ever circumambulate, never make straight for the
lodestar ahead. The way to almost any place of renown, natural, historic
or artistic, is sure to teem with as much interest as that to which we
are bound. So rich a palimpsest is French civilization, so varied is
French scenery, so multifarious the points of view called up at every
town, that hurry and scurry leave us hardly better informed than when we
set out. Thus it has ever been my rule to indulge in the most
preposterous peregrination, taking no account whatever of days, seasons
or possible cons, hearkening only to the pros, and never so much as
glancing at the calendar. Such protracted zigzaggeries have been made
easy to the "devious traveller" by one unusual advantage. Just as
pioneers in Australasia find Salvation Army shelters scattered
throughout remotest regions, so, fortunately, have I ever been able to
count upon "harbour and good company" during my thirty-five years of
French sojourn and travel.
To reach a certain Pyrenean valley in which I was to spend a holiday
would only have meant a night's dash by express from Paris. Instead, I
followed the south-eastern route, halting at--Heaven knows how
many!--already familiar and delightful places between Paris and Dijon,
Dijon and Lyons, Lyons and Nîmes; from the latter city being bound for
almost as many more before reaching my destination.
Quite naturally I would often find myself on the track of that "wise and
honest traveller," so John Morley calls Arthur Young.
Half-way between Nîmes and Le Vigan lies the little town of Sauve, at
which the Suffolk farmer halted in July 1787. "Pass six leagues of a
disagreeable country," he wrote. "Vines and olives."
But why a disagreeable country? Beautiful I thought the landscape as I
went over the same ground on a warm September afternoon a century and
odd years later, on alighting to be greeted with a cheery--
"Here I am!"
As a rule I am entirely of Montaigne's opinion. "When I travel in
Sicily," said the philosopher of Gascony, "it is not to find Gascons."
Dearly as we love home and home-folk, the gist of travel lies in
oppositeness and surprises. We do not visit the uttermost ends of the
globe in search of next-door neighbours. That cordial "Here I am!"
however, had an unmistakable accent, just a delightful suspicion of
French. My host was a gallant naval officer long since retired from
service, with his English wife and two daughters, spending the long
vacation in his country home.
High above the little village of Quissac rises the residence of
beneficent owners, master and mistress, alas! long since gone to their
rest. From its terrace the eye commands a vast and beautiful panorama, a
richly cultivated plain dotted with villages and framed by the blue
Cévennes. Tea served after English fashion and by a dear countrywoman,
everywhere _"le confortable Anglais"_ admittedly unattainable by French
housewives, could not for a single moment make me forget that I was in
France. And when the dinner gong sounded came the final, the
unequivocal, proof of distance.
Imagine dining out of doors and in evening dress at eight o'clock in the
last week of August! The table was set on the wide balcony of the upper
floor, high above lawn and bosquets, the most chilly person having here
nothing to fear. It is above all things the French climate that
transports us so far from home and makes us feel ourselves hundreds,
nay, thousands of miles away.
I have elsewhere, perhaps ofttimes, dwelt on the luminosity of the
atmosphere in southern and south-western France. To-night not a breath
was stirring, the outer radiance was the radiance of stars only, yet so
limpid, so lustrous the air that cloudless moonlight could hardly have
made every object seem clearer, more distinct. The feeling inspired by
such conditions is that of enchantment. For the nonce we may yield to a
spell, fancy ourselves in Armida's enchanted garden or other "delightful
land of Faëry."
Not for long, however! Pleasant practical matters soon recall us to the
life of every day. That laborious, out-of-door existence, which seems
sordid in superfine English eyes, but which is never without the gaiety
that enchanted Goldsmith and Sterne a hundred and fifty years ago.
Whilst host and guest dined on the balcony, the farming folk and such of
the household as could be spared were enjoying a starlit supper
elsewhere. Later, my hostess took me downstairs and introduced her
English visitor to a merry but strictly decorous party having a special
bit of sward to themselves, bailiff, vintagers, stockmen, dairywoman,
washerwoman and odd hands making up a round dozen of men, women and
boys. All seemed quite at home, and chatted easily with their employer
and the visitor, by no means perturbed, rather pleased by the intrusion.
And here I will mention one of those incidents that lead English
observers into so many misconceptions concerning French rural life.
Little things that seem sordid, even brutifying to insular eyes, really
arise from incompatible standards.
The Frenchman's ideal of material comfort begins and ends with solvency,
the sense of absolute security from want in old age. Small comforts he
sets little store by; provided that he gets a good dinner, lesser
considerations go. I do not hesitate to say that the comforts enjoyed by
our own farm-servants half a century ago were far in excess of those
thought more than sufficient by French labourers and their employers. On
the following day my hosts took me round the farmery, fowl-run,
piggeries, neat-houses and stalls being inspected one by one. When we
came to the last named, I noticed at the door of the long building and
on a level with the feeding troughs for oxen, a bed-shaped wooden box
piled up with fresh clean straw.
"That is where our stockman sleeps," explained the lady.
Here, then, quite contentedly slept the herdsman of a large estate in
nineteenth-century France, whilst his English compeers two generations
before, and in much humbler employ, had their tidy bedroom and
comfortable bed under the farmer's roof. What would my own Suffolk
ploughmen have said to the notion of spending the night in an ox-stall?
But _autres pays, autres moeurs_. In Déroulède's fine little poem, "Bon
gîte", a famished, foot-sore soldier returning home is generously
entreated by a poor housewife. When she sets about preparing a bed for
him, he remonstrates--
"Good dame, what means that new-made bed,
Those sheets so finely spun?
On heaped-up straw in cattle-shed,
I'd snore till rise of sun."
The compensations for apparent hardship in the case of French peasants
are many and great. In Henry James's great series of dissolving views
called _The American Scene_, he describes the heterogeneous masses as
having "a promoted look". The French proletariat have not a promoted
look, rather one of inherited, traditional stability and self-respect.
One and all, moreover, are promoting themselves, rising by a slow
evolutionary process from the condition of wage-earner to that of
metayer, tenant, lastly freeholder.
Although the immediate environs of Quissac and Sauve are not remarkable,
magnificent prospects are obtained a little farther afield--our drives
and walks abounded in interest--and associations! Strange but true it is
that we can hardly halt anywhere in France without coming upon historic,
literary or artistic memorials. Every town and village is redolent of
tradition, hardly a spot but is glorified by genius!
Thus, half-an-hour's drive from our village still stands the château
and birthplace of Florian, the Pollux of fabulists, La Fontaine being
the Castor, no other stars of similar magnitude shining in their
especial arc.
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian was born here in 1755, just sixty years
after the great fabulist's death. Nephew of a marquis, himself
nephew-in-law of Voltaire, endowed with native wit and gaiety, the young
man was a welcome guest at Fernay, and no wonder! His enchanting fables
did not see the light till after Voltaire's death, but we will hope that
some of them had delighted his host in recitation. Many of us who loved
French in early years have a warm corner in our hearts for "Numa
Pompilius", but Florian will live as the second fabulist of France, to
my own thinking twin of his forerunner.
How full of wisdom, wit and sparkle are these apologues! Take, for
instance, the following, which to the best of my ability I have rendered
into our mother tongue--
VANITY (LE PETIT CHIEN).
I
Once on a time and far away,
The elephant stood first in might,
He had by many a forest fray
At last usurped the lion's right.
On peace and reign unquestioned bent,
The ruler in his pride of place,
Forthwith to life-long banishment
Doomed members of the lion race.
II
Dispirited, their best laid low,
The vanquished could but yield to fate,
And turn their backs upon the foe
In silence nursing grief and hate.
A poodle neatly cropped and clipped,
With tasselled tail made leonine,
On hearing of the stern rescript,
Straightway set up a piteous whine.
III
"Alas!" he moaned. "Ah, woe is me!
Where, tyrant, shall I shelter find;
Advancing years what will they be,
My home and comforts left behind?"
A spaniel hastened at the cry,
"Come, mate, what's this to-do about?"
"Oh, oh," the other gulped reply,
"For exile we must all set out!"
IV
"Must all?" "No, you are safe, good friend;
The cruel law smites us alone;
Here undisturbed your days may end,
The lions must perforce begone."
"The lions? Brother, pray with these,
What part or lot have such as you?"
"What part, forsooth? You love to tease;
You know I am a lion too."
[Footnote: The first translation appeared with others in _French Men,
Women and Books_, 1910. The second was lately issued in the
_Westminster Gazette_.]