“Not for the world!”

“What shall I do, then?”

“Do better.”

“But, if I have done my best already?”

“Still do better; and when you have done that, do better again.  So genius toils higher and ever higher, and like the climber of the glacier, plants his foot where only his hand clung the moment before.”

“Humph! but what of my picture?”

“Well,” I said, hesitatingly, “I am no critic—­”

“Thank Heaven!” muttered Mueller, parenthetically.

“But there is something noble in the disposition of the figures.  I should say, however, that you had set to work upon too large a scale.”

“A question of focus,” said the painter, hastily.  “A mere question of focus.”

“How can that be, when you have finished some parts laboriously, and in others seem scarcely to have troubled yourself to cover the canvas?”

“I don’t know.  I’m impatient, you see, and—­and I think I got tired of it towards the last.”

“Would that have been the case if you had allowed yourself but half the space?”

“I’ll take to enamel,” exclaimed Mueller, with a grin of hyperbolical despair.  “I’ll immortalize myself in miniature.  I’ll paint henceforward with the aid of a microscope, and never again look at nature unless through the wrong end of a telescope!”

“Pshaw!—­be in earnest, man, and talk sensibly!  Do you conceive that for every failure you are to change your style?  Give yourself, heart and soul, to the school in which you have begun, and make up your mind to succeed.”

“Do you believe, then, that a man may succeed by force of will alone?” said Mueller, musingly.

“Yes, because force of will proceeds from force of character, and the two together, warp and woof, make the stuff out of which Nature clothes her heroes.”

“Oh, but I am not talking of heroes,” said Mueller.

“By heroes, I do not mean only soldiers.  Captain Pen is as good a hero as Captain Sword, any day; and Captain Brush, to my thinking, is as fine a fellow as either.”

“Ay; but do they come, as you would seem to imply, of the same stock?” said Mueller.  “Force of will and force of character are famous clays in which to mould a Wellington or a Columbus; but is not something more—­at all events, something different—­necessary to the modelling of a Raffaelle?”

“I don’t fancy so.  Power is the first requisite of genius.  Give power in equal quantity to your Columbus and your Raffaelle, and circumstance shall decide which will achieve the New World, and which the Transfiguration.”