Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/148

 300 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS the Rabelais, is not really funny — to many minds it is even painful — but it is unmistakably caricature of a dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that by which he is most likely to live. At least it is the work that formed him and fixed his characteristics, and an understanding of it is essen- tial to any judgment of him. The qualities and the defects of his later work — that which is most praised and most blamed in his production — are inherent in the work of this period, and are best explained by a reference to the latter. Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this as if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps, with Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of executions and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer sensationalism what they could not by gentler means. It is surprising that his critics have not seen that Dord's battles are always, even to the end, the battles of a caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven heads, smoking hearts, arms still fighting though severed from their bodies, are simply a debauch of grim humor. There is never the slightest attempt to realize carnage — only to convey, by the caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of colossally impossible bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of fun, but to take it seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic genius, is absurd. The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Dore* has; received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his painting, as a great il- lustrator who identified himself with the minds of one great writer after another. But Dore identified himself with no one ; he was always Dore. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep to the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better than many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad ffayety and "Gallic wit" in the "Contes DrOlatiques," but it was not broad enough for Dore, and he has converted its most human characters into impossi- ble grotesques. Another thing for which Dore is praised is his wonderful memory. Mr. Jer- rold repeats more than once Dore's phrase, " I have lots of collodion in my head," and recounts how he could scarcely be induced to make sketches from nature, but relied upon his memory. He also speaks of Dore's system of divid- ing and subdividing a subject, and noting the details in their places, so that he could reproduce the whole afterward. This question of work from memory is one of the most vital for an understanding of Dore, and one of general interest in all matters of art, and is worth attention. Of course, a man who made hun- dreds of drawings every year could not work much from nature, and came to rely upon his memory. But what is the nature of artistic memory, and how does it perform its task ? We think the truth is, that the artist who habitually works from memory, fills in his details, not from memory of the object, but from mem- ory of the way he has formerly drawn similar objects. He reverts to a series of formulae that he has gradually accumulated. This man must have a cloak This is the way a cloak is done. A hand ? Nothing can be easier ; the hand formula is ready. The stock in trade of the professional illustrator and caricaturist is