Men, Mice & Hell

Gustave D ore's Inferno has been the standard visualization of Hell ever since 1861. For graphic-minded moderns, as for Victorians, the illustrations have three sure-fire hellfire appeals: they tell the story, make a clear moral point, radiate the literal horror of a waxworks.

Published last fortnight was The Terrible Gustave Dore (Marchbanks Press; $2.50), a thoughtful reflection on that "agreeable terror." It is an unpretentious, revealing study. By comparing his subject with the surrealists, Author Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Manhattan teacher and bibliophile, deftly indicates the psychological sources of Dore's work. By recalling his lesser-known achievements in cartooning, the book rounds out the French giant of 19th-Century illustration for those who know him only in his solemn Inferno and Bible, farcical Rabelais and Droll Stories.

Man as Mouse. The grandiose works were concerned with the bigness--and the grossness--of man. A different, delicately hilarious Dore talent found expression in his cartoon history of Holy Russia with its Lilliputian kings and knights.

Imaginations had long since found release in popular, illustrated broadsides. The tradition of this imagerie populaire, passed on by Geneva cartoonist Rudolph Topffer, was rekindled by Dore. His little-known little kings of Russia, emerging from the same folk sources as Otto Soglow's present-day Little King and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, have a verve and gaiety that is hard to reconcile with his brooding plates for the classics.

Mouse as Man. Those plates, chief foundation of Dore's fame, pictured a mythology already "sanctioned in literature." They also expressed some of the undertows of unsanctioned emotion--no less than do the dream-found images of modern surrealism. Over-attached to his mother, Gustave Dore had a thousand half-faced adult fears to put at the disposal of his talent for the macabre.

Foreshadowing the fruition of that talent is the earliest of the 23 drawings with which Author Lehmann-Haupt records the growth of Dore's style. It is the childhood vision of his Strasbourg schoolroom. Its squirming, unposed action bespeaks an eye that never let go of much (an asset unmistakable in a later-year impression of a London crowd, which echoed the same theme of hellishly snarled humanity). In the early schoolroom satire there is also more than a suggestion of how little the artist was ever able to let go of his mother. When she died in 1881, Dore wrote to a friend: "I am without force . . . overpowered by ... fear of the future." The future was only two years.

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