Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years
of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum
with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream
stroke. . . .
"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the
first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed
his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with
any of my things? They hadn't been born of me--I had just adopted
them. . . .
"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it--_I had
never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of
colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces. . .
. Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see
through--see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't
you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says
half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was
the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing
they called my 'technique' collapsed like a house of cards.
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