as said to be the only
man in England who had a right to his opinion. And this was his
opinion of Maurice Durant:

"He stands in a unique and interesting position. On his right hand,
the hand he paints with, are the heights unattainable by any but
the great artists; on his left, the dizzy verge of popularity. As a
matter of fact, he is neither popular nor great. His just horror of
vulgarity will save him from the abyss; his equal fear of
committing himself, of letting himself go, the fear, shall I say,
of failure, of the fantastic or ridiculous attitudes a man
necessarily assumes in falling from a height, will keep him forever
from the loftier way. It is not that his temperament is naturally
timorous and cold; if he is afraid of anything, he is afraid of his
own rashness, his own heat. There are about him delicacies and
repugnances, a certain carefully cultivated restraint, and a
half-critical, half-imaginative caution which, we submit, is
incompatible with greatness in his art. But he has imagination."

A little more praise or a little more blame, and he would have
suspected himself of genius; as it was, he was content to stand
distinguished from the ruck of the popular and the respectable by
virtue of that imagination which his critic had allowed to him. He
was not a great painter, and he knew it; but he was a brilliantly
clever one, and he knew that also, and in the fact and his intimate
knowledge of it lay the secret of his success. He kept a cool head
on his shoulders, and thus his position and the personal dignity
depending on it were secure. He would never tumble from his height
through the giddiness of vanity; and when the same high authority
kept on assuring the world, on the word of a critic, that Maurice
Durant was branded with the curse of cleverness, that he was the
victim of his own versatility, and that he had just missed
greatness, Maurice merely remarked that he was glad to hear it, for
he was sure that greatness would have bored him.

Whether it was the same ungovernable terror that restrained him from
marrying, or whether he was the friend of too many women to be the
lover of one, or whether he really was self-contained and
self-sufficient, all this time he had remained single. His
singleness had many advantages; it kept him free; it made it easy
for him to get about from place to place and obtain an uninterrupted
view of the world; it left an open way for his abrupt incalculable
movements, his p