Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/228

Ideas of Good and Evil. artist of no great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892—that the illustrations of Gustave Doré, 'in spite of glaring artistic defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art.' One can only account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work of what he called 'the graceful and affected Botticelli,'—although 'Doré was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by anything sternly in sympathy with the supreme poet's soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom,'—but preferring them because 'he created a 218