me. The landscapes puzzled me even more.
There were two or three pictures of the forest at
Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feeling
was that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver.
I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed to
me extraordinarily crude. It passed through my mind that the
whole thing was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce.
Now that I look back I am more than ever impressed by
Stroeve's acuteness. He saw from the first that here was a
revolution in art, and he recognised in its beginnings the
genius which now all the world allows.

But if I was puzzled and disconcerted, I was not unimpressed.
Even I, in my colossal ignorance, could not but feel that
here, trying to express itself, was real power. I was excited
and interested. I felt that these pictures had something to
say to me that was very important for me to know, but I could
not tell what it was. They seemed to me ugly, but they
suggested without disclosing a secret of momentous
significance. They were strangely tantalising. They gave me
an emotion that I could not analyse. They said something that
words were powerless to utter. I fancy that Strickland saw
vaguely some spiritual meaning in material things that was so
strange that he could only suggest it with halting symbols.
It was as though he found in the chaos of the universe a new
pattern, and were attempting clumsily, with anguish of soul,
to set it down. I saw a tormented spirit striving for the
release of expression.

I turned to him.

"I wonder if you haven't mistaken your medium," I said.

"What the hell do you mean?"

"I think you're trying to say something, I don't quite know
what it is, but I'm not sure that the best way of saying it is
by means of painting."

When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the
understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely
increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea
than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me -- and perhaps even
this was fanciful -- was that he was passionately striving for
liberation from some power that held him. But what the power was and
what line the liberation would take remained obscure. Each one of us
is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can
communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no
common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek
pit