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Every great writer and every great artist makes vigorous use of his childhood impressions. Childhood does not know it is storing up for the days to come, but its memories sink deep into the soul, and when called upon to express, the man reaches out and prints from the plates that are bitten deep; and these are the pictures of his early youth–or else they tell of a time when he loved a woman.

The first named are the more reliable, for sex and love have been made forbidden subjects, until self-consciousness, affectation and untruth creep easily into their accounting. All literature and all art are secondary sex manifestations, just as surely as the song of birds or the color and perfume of flowers are sex qualities. And so it happens that all art and all literature is a confession; and it occurs, too, that childhood does not stand out sharp and clear on memory’s chart until it is past and adolescence lies between. Then maturity gives back to the man the childhood that is gone forever.

Many of the world’s best specimens of literature are built on the impressions of childhood. Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and I’ll name you another–James Whitcomb Riley–have written immortal books with the autobiography of childhood for both warp and woof.

Gustave Dore’s best work is a reproduction of his childhood’s thoughts, feelings and experiences–all well colored with the stuff that dreams are made of.

The background of every good Dore picture is a deep wood or mountain-pass or dark ravine. The wild, romantic passes of the Vosges, and the sullen crags, topped with dark mazes of wilderness, were ever in his mind, just as he saw them yesterday when he clutched his father’s hand and held his breath to hear the singing of the wood-nymphs ‘mong the branches.

His tracery of bark and branch, and drooping bough held down with weight of dew, are startlingly true. The great roots of giant trees, denuded by storm and flood, lie exposed to view; and deep vistas are given of shadowy glade and swift-running mountain torrent. All is somber, terrible, and tells of forces that tossed these mountain-tops like bowls, and of a Power immense, immeasurable, incomprehensible, eternal in the heavens.

Dore’s first exhibition in the Salon was made when he was eighteen, and a few years later, when he was presented with the Cross of the Legion of Honor, the decoration made his work exempt from jury examination. And so every year he sent some large painting to the Salon.

His work was the wonder of Paris, and on every hand his illustrations were in demand, but his canvases were too large in size and too terrible in subject to fit private residences.

Patrons were cautious.

To own a “Dore” was proof of a high appreciation of art, or else a lack of it–buyers did not know which.

They were afraid of being laughed at.

His competitors began to hoot and jeer. Not being able to make pictures that would compete with his, they wrote him down in the magazines.

His name became a jest.

Various of his illustrations for the Bible were enlarged into immense canvases, some of which were twenty feet long and twelve feet high. All who looked upon these pictures were amazed by the fecundity in invention and the skill shown in drawing; but the most telling criticism against them was their defect in coloring. Dore could draw, but could not color, and the report was abroad that he was color-blind.

The only buyers for his pictures came from England and America. Paris loved art for art’s sake, and the Bible was not popular enough to make its illustration worth while. “What is this book you are working on?” asked a caller.

It was different in London, where Spurgeon preached every Sunday to three thousand people. The “Dores” taken to London attracted much attention–“mostly from the size of the canvases,” Parisians said. But the particular subject was the real attraction. Instead of reading their daily “chapter,” hard-working, tired people went to see a Dore Bible picture where it was exposed in some vacant storeroom and tuppence entrance-fee charged.