unwillingness to accept help
from anyone lost much time in finding out for himself the
solution of technical problems which preceding generations had
already worked out one by one. He was aiming at something,
I knew not what, and perhaps he hardly knew himself; and I got
again more strongly the impression of a man possessed. He did
not seem quite sane. It seemed to me that he would not show
his pictures because he was really not interested in them.
He lived in a dream, and the reality meant nothing to him.
I had the feeling that he worked on a canvas with all the force
of his violent personality, oblivious of everything in his effort
to get what he saw with the mind's eye; and then, having
finished, not the picture perhaps, for I had an idea that he
seldom brought anything to completion, but the passion that
fired him, he lost all care for it. He was never satisfied
with what he had done; it seemed to him of no consequence
compared with the vision that obsessed his mind.

"Why don't you ever send your work to exhibitions?" I asked.
"I should have thought you'd like to know what people thought
about it."

"Would you?"

I cannot describe the unmeasurable contempt he put into the
two words.

"Don't you want fame? It's something that most artists
haven't been indifferent to."

"Children. How can you care for the opinion of the crowd,
when you don't care twopence for the opinion of the individual?"

"We're not all reasonable beings," I laughed.

"Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women."

"Wouldn't it give you a rather pleasing sensation to think of
people you didn't know and had never seen receiving emotions,
subtle and passionate, from the work of your hands? Everyone
likes power. I can't imagine a more wonderful exercise of it
than to move the souls of men to pity or terror."

"Melodrama."

"Why do you mind if you paint well or badly?"

"I don't. I only want to paint what I see."

"I wonder if I could write on a desert island, with the
certainty that no eyes but mine would ever see what I had
written."

Strickland did not speak for a long time, but his eyes shone
strangely, as though he saw something that kindled his soul to
ecstasy.

"Sometimes I've thought of an island lost in a boundless sea,
where I could live in some hidden valley, among strange trees,
in silence. There I think I could find what I want."

He did not express himself quite like this. He used gestures