world.  You opened my eyes; and, though the truth is bitter, I bear you no grudge.  Amen!  I have been sitting here for a week, face to face with the truth, with the past, with my weakness and poverty and nullity.  I shall never touch a brush!  I believe I have neither eaten nor slept.  Look at that canvas!” he went on, as I relieved my emotion in an urgent request that he would come home with me and dine.  “That was to have contained my masterpiece!  Isn’t it a promising foundation?  The elements of it are all here.”  And he tapped his forehead with that mystic confidence which had marked the gesture before.  “If I could only transpose them into some brain that has the hand, the will!  Since I have been sitting here taking stock of my intellects, I have come to believe that I have the material for a hundred masterpieces.  But my hand is paralysed now, and they will never be painted.  I never began!  I waited and waited to be worthier to begin, and wasted my life in preparation.  While I fancied my creation was growing it was dying.  I have taken it all too hard!  Michael Angelo didn’t, when he went at the Lorenzo!  He did his best at a venture, and his venture is immortal. That’s mine!” And he pointed with a gesture I shall never forget at the empty canvas.  “I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme—­we talents that can’t act, that can’t do nor dare!  We take it out in talk, in plans and promises, in study, in visions!  But our visions, let me tell you,” he cried, with a toss of his head, “have a way of being brilliant, and a man has not lived in vain who has seen the things I have seen!  Of course you will not believe in them when that bit of worm-eaten cloth is all I have to show for them; but to convince you, to enchant and astound the world, I need only the hand of Raphael.  His brain I already have.  A pity, you will say, that I haven’t his modesty!  Ah, let me boast and babble now; it’s all I have left!  I am the half of a genius!  Where in the wide world is my other half?  Lodged perhaps in the vulgar soul, the cunning, ready fingers of some dull copyist or some trivial artisan, who turns out by the dozen his easy prodigies of touch!  But it’s not for me to sneer at him; he at least does something.  He’s not a dawdler!  Well for me if I had been vulgar and clever and reckless, if I could have shut my eyes and taken my leap.”

What to say to the poor fellow, what to do for him, seemed hard to determine; I chiefly felt that I must break the spell of his present inaction, and remove him from the haunted atmosphere of the little room it was such a cruel irony to call a studio.  I cannot say I persuaded him to come out with me; he simply suffered himself to be led, and when we began to walk in the open air I was able to appreciate his pitifully weakened condition.  Nevertheless, he seemed in a certain way to revive, and murmured at last that he should like to go to the Pitti Gallery.