Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Masterpieces From the Works of Gustave Doré Selected From the Doré Bible, Milton, Dante's Inferno, Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso, Fontaine, Fairy Realm, Don Quixote, Baron Munchausen, Croquemitaine, &C., &C
The rarest quality in the modern msthetlc system is imagination. It is the fashion to-day to sneer at the creative faculty as it-existed in earlier phases of art. Among artists of the modern school, especially in France, literary art, that is, creative and imaginative art, is regarded as naive, rustic, crude. It was among painters of this class that D'oré found his worst enemies. But the people loved him - the people of France and the people of England. He told them world-old tales in a new, sweet, brilliant way, adorning them with the beauty and glamour of his genius. Art that appeals to the heart, the intellect, the love of humanity, and the aspiration of the human soul towards grand ideals, is the art that outlasts change and fashidn, death and decay; and this was the art of Gustave Doré. In his lighter moods, as in those more serious, he shows in even the smallest details of creation the universality of genius. There is something that reminds one of Goethe in the many-sidedness of Doré's productive faculties. The quality of sympathy, which is the attribute only of the rarest creative natures, made of him a German mystic at one moment, a gay Gaulois the next. It was doubtless to Doré's Alsatian ancestry, birth and early education, that was due this union of French and German temperamental characteristics. The archi tecture of Strasburg, the landscape of Alsace, the German folk-lore of nurses and peasants, were the formative artistic influences of his youth. Then came Paris, with its thousand hints and suggestions reacting on the eager young mind and stimulating it to constant exertion. Travel in foreign countries completed the cycle of experience that made Doré the great master of human souls that he was. He was not only a creator in the highest sense, but he was an interpreter, of a kind rare in the world's history. He acted as a link between the humanity of books and history and the humanity of every-day life - of the London streets and the Paris cafés.
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