worthless, drunken, and pretentious
scoundrel, who seriously believed himself to be the most neglected man
of genius in London. I employed him to repeat what he called his _chief
de hover_ on cardboard, and paid him half a crown for it. He called this
work 'The Guard Ship Attacked.' It represented a Dead Sea of Reckitt's
Blue with two impossible ships wedged tightly into it, each broadside on
to the spectator. From the port-holes of each issued little streaks of
vermilion, and puffs of smoke like pills. The artist gloated over
this work, and was ready to resent criticism of it like another Pietro
Vanucci. He told me he was unappreciated; that he was a man of the
supremest talent, and was kept out of the great theatres, where he could
have shone as a scene-painter, by nothing but the pettiest and shabbiest
jealousies. I don't know where he had picked up the phrase, but he had
something to say about the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain,
and he returned to it fondly as long as I would allow him to talk to
me. His artistic labours and his art invention were dissipating the grey
matter of _his_ brain. All he asked for was a fair field and no favour.
If I would give him three pound ten he could buy an easel, a canvas,
and a set of painting tools, and would at once proceed to show the Royal
Academy what was what I was well to do by this time, but yet not quite
wealthy enough to venture on such an experiment. The most amusing thing
this vagabond said was when he found in my room the painting materials
and sketches of an artistic friend of mine with whom I was chumming at
the time. His nose wrinkled with an infinite disdain as he turned the
sketches over, and he said, with a delightful air of patronage, 'I see,
I see. A brother of the brush.' He brought with him on his journey
from Gee's Court to the north of London an incredible ghoul of a man, a
creature whose face was muffled in a huge beard alive with vermin. He,
it seemed, was another neglected man of genius; but I declined to be
introduced to him. I looked up the artist's address, however, and got to
know his neighbourhood pretty well. Boulter's Rents, in my first novel,
'A Life's Atonement,' were drawn from Gee's Court.

I thought the picture rather like at the time, within limits; but I
never had the heart--or the stomach--to be a realist. Feebly as I dared
to paint it, I had to re-form it in fancy before the book was finished.
The original horror stands there,