lacked taste and aptitude. But upon this
head he was my father over again; assured me that I spoke in ignorance;
that any intelligent and cultured person was bound to succeed; that I
must, besides, have inherited some of my father's fitness; and, at any
rate, that I had been regularly trained for that career in the
commercial college.

"Pinkerton," I said, "can't you understand that, as long as I was there,
I never took the smallest interest in any stricken thing? The whole
affair was poison to me."

"It's not possible," he would cry; "it can't be; you couldn't live in
the midst of it and not feel the charm; with all your poetry of soul you
couldn't help! Loudon," he would go on, "you drive me crazy. You expect
a man to be all broken up about the sunset, and not to care a dime for a
place where fortunes are fought for and made and lost all day; or for a
career that consists in studying up life till you have it at your
finger-ends, spying out every cranny where you can get your hand in and
a dollar out, and standing there in the midst--one foot on bankruptcy,
the other on a borrowed dollar, and the whole thing spinning round you
like a mill--raking in the stamps; in spite of fate and fortune."

To this romance of dickering I would reply with the romance (which is
also the virtue) of art: reminding him of those examples of constancy
through many tribulations, with which the _role_ of Apollo is
illustrated--from the case of Millet, to those of many of our friends
and comrades, who had chosen this agreeable mountain path through life,
and were now bravely clambering among rocks and brambles, penniless and
hopeful.

"You will never understand it, Pinkerton," I would say. "You look to the
result, you want to see some profit of your endeavours: that is why you
could never learn to paint, if you lived to be Methusalem. The result is
always a fizzle: the eyes of the artist are turned in; he lives for a
frame of mind. Look at Romney now. There is the nature of the artist. He
hasn't a cent; and if you offered him to-morrow the command of an army,
or the presidentship of the United States, he wouldn't take it, and you
know he wouldn't."

"I suppose not," Pinkerton would cry, scouring his hair with both his
hands; "and I can't see why; I can't see what in fits he would be after,
not to; I don't seem to rise to these views. Of course it's the fault of
not having had advantages in early life; but, Loudon, I'm so miserably
low th