Gustave Dore’s misinterpreting of Milton’s epic.

                     

            Gustave Dore's romantic style of illustration, imaginative and richly detailed, was ideally suited to literary subjects. His wood-engraved illustrations for John Milton's monumental epic poem Paradise Lost are incredibly beautiful and impressive but mistakable.  His Satan’s Misery seems to be based on the superficial reading of the epic.  Dore uses the romantic Satan’s image, which looks perfect on the gravure but is not really related to the Milton’s subject.

              John Milton was a puritan and so were his works.  It’s a well known fact that puritans deny images, whence the item is impossible to be seen or correctly illustrated, and when this item is beyond human visualization.    Puritans iconoclast in their poetry refers either to G-d and everything that attaches him, or to Devil etc.  Dore was completely incorrect, when illustrating Paradise Lost because it should not be visualized but rather understood verbally.  If leaving this argument behind and turning to the epic itself, we can also recognize the error in the artist’s analyzing of Satan through the close reading of the text.

          After landing on Earth, Satan laments his fall and his future scheme for corrupting creation.  “Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?” (IV. 73-74).  But basing on this short quotation is hardly enough for the complete understanding of the subject; it suggests the indifferent attitude towards the rest of the text, which is truly big.  Dore’s Satan looks fairly miserable; he desperately stares at Havens, leaning on the Earthly rock.  The wings are outstretched as if he landed a moment ago, and he still hopes to take off and to fly back to the start point.  The most impressive proofs of his despair and misery are his terrified eyes, looking upwards and begging for forgiveness, and his hand, pulling out the hair in the gust of repentance.  The background is dark and empty, and the rock is huge and stony-cold.  His clothes reminds of a Greek warrior’s armor and the style of the body illustration reminds of the classic Greek sculptures with their little heads and unbelievably beautiful built up muscled bodies.   

            It is true that sometimes Satan’s army is described heroically and classically, almost like in  Oedipus Rex: “patience and heroic martyrdom” (IX. 32), “imblazon'd shields” (IX. 34) “gorgeous knights” (IX.36), “which justly gives heroic name” (IX. 40).  But Milton’s Satan doesn’t have any concrete form, but only a size, which is tremendously big.  Using the images from Books IV and IX, Dore disregards the opening chapter, which describes Satan himself but not his warriors. He is talking to his servant “with head uplift above the wave, and eyes /That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides /Prone on the flood, extended long and large” (I. 193-196).  He’s got eyes and the “other parts” which are not necessarily legs and arms.  The only criterion that is clearly described by the author is his “monstrous size” (I. 196), when he “stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay” (I. 209).  The creature is of completely inhuman form but of “his own dark designs” (I. 213) as the narrator remarks.

           Dore’s picture is rightly called Satan’s Misery if to judge only according to the gravure image, but it’s incorrect to address Milton’s hero with such an epithet. A miserable and broken creature will hardly be able to arrange the resistance against G-d and his creation almost immediately after the fall.  Satan tells to Beelzebub that he wants “with rallied arms to try what may be yet / Regained in Heaven” (I. 270).

            The way that he is reproduced in Dore’s gravure suggests that the only thought that occupies his mind is coming back to the Creator and being rescued from this terrible coldness of Earth.  But Milton shows us Satan, who, dreaming of revenge, appears to Eve and convinces her to eat from the Forbidden Tree and to induce Adam to also taste it. “Ah! gentle pair, ye little think how nigh / Your change approaches, when all these delights / Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe” (IV. 365-368); he decides to ruin G-d’s beloved creation, instead of begging for forgiveness. 

             Gustave Dore’s Satan’s Misery rather represents the artist’s own opinion towards Satan’s figure than John Milton’s epic image.  A wonderful piece of lithography is more successfully perceived as a separate and an independent work of art than as a reproduction of the Paradise Lost main character.