III


In an evil hour for his peace of mind and his fame, Dore decided to
leave illustration and become a historic painter. He evidently regarded
genius as a Pandora's gift, an all-embracing finality, an endowment that
could neither be worsened nor bettered, being complete in itself.

A reader of Ariosto, he had not taken to heart one of his most memorable
verses, those mellifluous lines in which the poet dwells upon the
laboriousness of intellectual achievement. Nor when illustrating the
_Arabian Nights_ had the wonderful story of Hasan of El-Basrah
evidently brought home to him the same moral.

Between a Dore and his object--so he deemed--existed neither "seven
valleys nor seven seas, nor seven mountains of vast magnitude." A Dore
needed no assistance of the flying Jinn and the wandering stars on his
way, no flying horse, "which when he went along flew, and when he flew
the dust overtook him not."

Without the equipment of training, without recognition of such a
handicap, he entered upon his new career.

In 1854 for the first time two pictures signed by Dore appeared on the
walls of the Salon. But the canvases passed unnoticed. The Parisians
would not take the would-be painter seriously, and the following year's
experience proved hardly less disheartening. Of four pictures sent in,
three were accepted, one of these being a historic subject, the other
two being landscapes. The first, "La Bataille de l'Alma," evoked
considerable criticism. The rural scenes were hung, as Edmond About