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from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December, 1883.
The most magnificent book of the year, and in many cardinal particulars the most superb volume that has ever issued from the press of this or any other country, is the stately and luxurious folio, The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which the Messrs. Harper have sagaciously chosen for publication as a holiday gift-book and souvenir. Regarded from the typographical and bibliographical stand-point it is literally a chef-d'oeuvre, the realization of the perfection of the art, and the far more than fulfillment of the most radiant dreams of the most ambitious publishers of a century, a half-century, or even a decade ago. Such a book, considered merely as a manufactured product, would have been an impossibility a generation ago, and is now made possible only by the unexampled resources that have been placed at the command of publishers by the inexhaustible inventiveness of modern times in the realm of science and of the mechanic and elegant arts.
It is unnecessary to enter here upon a critical estimate and analysis of the character and quality either of Poe as a poet or of Doré as an artist, since that subject has been discussed by Mr. Stedman, with his accustomed grace, subtilty, and vigorous good sense, in an essay prefixed to the poem and its illustrations in the volume under notice. Thus much is certain, that both have made a powerful impression upon the popular mind and taste, and that this impression is wider, deeper, more general, and promises to be more lasting than any that has been made by numbers who were far greater poets or painters than either. Poe's genius, such as it was, found its counterpart in that of Doré. Both were similarly endowed with an active and daring but erratic and undisciplined imagination. Both revelled in the weird, time ghastly, the grotesque, the wild, the gloomy, the shadowy, and all their conceptions were more or less morbid. Both were nothing if not extravagant and melodramatic. But none the less each was habitually companioned by grand and poetic fancies bearing the stamp of genuine originality. Possessing these qualities and idiosyncrasies in common, it is not remarkable that Doré was attracted by Poe's "Raven." Indeed, with his literary range and limitations it was inevitable that he should be so attracted. And to the operation of this law of mutual intellectual gravitation we owe his unique interpretation and amplification of the poem now before us: amplification, we say, since, while strictly conforming to the prevalent spirit and general tendencies of Poe's conception, Doré not infrequently adds to or materially enlarges its weird fantasies by pursuing them indefinitely on affiliated liucs. It is an interesting fact, and one which imparts a peculiar value to the volume, that this was Doré's last work. The poet's "nevermore" proved a prophetic refrain to the brooding painter. The text of "The Raven" as collated and settled in this volume by Mr. Stedman in conformity with the poet's later readings and corrections, is undoubtedly, as Mr. Stedman modestly suggests, the most correct and effective version of the poem yet given. It is printed, without any interruption of its continuity by the illustrations, immediately after Mr. Stedman's acute and scholarly "Comment." Then follow Doré's imposing illustrations, twenty-six in number, being one, and sometimes two, for each verse of the eighteen composing the poem. Each is a full-page illustration, printed on one side only of a sumptuous leaf of richly tinted card-board paper of the finest texture, fourteen inches in breadth by eighteen in length. Each engraved leaf is protected by an interleaf of fine white paper, delicately thin, but very strong, on which are printed in the form of a legend the lines that are the subject of the illustration following. The illustrations thus form a separate continuous gallery of nearly a score and a half of Doré's latest and most characteristic designs. The engravings from these designs are in the highest style of the art in America, having been intrusted to and executed by the following well-known artists: F. Juengling, H. Clandius, G. F. Buechner, R. A. MUller, R. G. Tietze, W. Zimmerman, F . S. King, T. Johnson, R. Staudenbaur, Frank French, R. Schelling, Gustav Kruell, Victor Berustrom, and Robert Hoskin.
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