This is the true literary gospel of art, but it is one that no artist, and no critic who has any true feeling of art, has ever accepted or will ever accept. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, may enhance the value of a work of art, provided it is first of all a piece of beautiful art in itself, but they have never preserved, and never will preserve from oblivion bad painting or bad sculpture. The style is the artist, if not the man; and of the two, beautiful painting with no idea at all (granting, for the sake of argument, that it exists), will ever be infinitely more valuable to the world than the lame expression of the noblest thoughts. What may be the real value of Doré's thoughts is therefore a question with which we have no concern. As painter and sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical imperfections--his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude color--relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those altogether ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability to trumpet abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as surely fade away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters as Van Der Meer or Chardin will continue to grow, while painting as an art is loved and understood. COMPOSERS HANDEL By C. E. BOURNE (1685-1759) George Frederick Handel, of whom Haydn once reverently said, "He is the master of us all," was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on February 23, 1685. His father was a surgeon, and sixty-three years of age at the time of his birth--a terribly severe old man, who, almost before his son was born, had determined that he should be a lawyer. The little child knew nothing of the fate before him, he only found that he was never allowed to go near a musical instrument, much as he wanted to hear its sweet sounds, and the obstinate father even took him away from the public day-school for the simple reason that the musical gamut was taught there in addition to ordinary reading, writing, and arithmetic. But love always "finds out the way," and his mother or nurse managed to procure for him the forbidden delights; a small clavichord, or dumb spinet, with the strings covered with strips of cloth to deaden the sound, was found for the child, and this he used to keep hidden in the garret, creeping away to play it in the night-time, when everyone was asleep, or whenever his father was away from home doctoring his patients. [Illustration: Handel.]