had aimed at. It was
this idea of impotence that exasperated him even more than the refusals
of the hanging committee. No doubt he did not forgive the latter; his
works, even in an embryo state, were a hundred times better than all
the trash which was accepted. But what suffering he felt at being ever
unable to show himself in all his strength, in such a master-piece as he
could not bring his genius to yield! There were always some superb bits
in his paintings. He felt satisfied with this, that, and the other. Why,
then, were there sudden voids? Why were there inferior bits, which he
did not perceive while he was at work, but which afterwards utterly
killed the picture like ineffaceable defects? And he felt quite
unable to make any corrections; at certain moments a wall rose up, an
insuperable obstacle, beyond which he was forbidden to venture. If he
touched up the part that displeased him a score of times, so a score of
times did he aggravate the evil, till everything became quite muddled
and messy.

He grew anxious, and failed to see things clearly; his brush refused to
obey him, and his will was paralysed. Was it his hands or his eyes that
ceased to belong to him amid those progressive attacks of the hereditary
disorder that had already made him anxious? Those attacks became more
frequent; he once more lapsed into horrible weeks, wearing himself out,
oscillating betwixt uncertainty and hope; and his only support during
those terrible hours, which he spent in a desperate hand-to-hand
struggle with his rebellious work, was the consoling dream of his future
masterpiece, the one with which he would at last be fully satisfied, in
painting which his hands would show all the energy and deftness of true
creative skill. By some ever-recurring phenomenon, his longing to create
outstripped the quickness of his fingers; he never worked at one picture
without planning the one that was to follow. Then all that remained
to him was an eager desire to rid himself of the work on which he was
engaged, for it brought him torture; no doubt it would be good for
nothing; he was still making fatal concessions, having recourse to
trickery, to everything that a true artist should banish from his
conscience. But what he meant to do after that--ah! what he meant to
do--he beheld it superb and heroic, above attack and indestructible. All
this was the everlasting mirage that goads on the condemned disciples
of art, a falsehood that comes in a sp