‘All right; it’s an understood thing—­I’ll die at the task.’

However, although his obstinate courage seemed to increase, he now and then gradually relapsed into his former doubts, consumed by the struggle he was waging with nature.  Every canvas that came back to him seemed bad to him—­above all incomplete, not realising what he 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 spirit of tenderness and compassion, and without which production would become impossible to those who die of their failure to create life.