People who go out of the beaten road, wandering away to right or left, up any of the pleasant by-paths, are sure to be looked upon as lost by those relations and friends who, stiffnecked, can see no thoroughfare save that where the crowd jostles and the dust rises. Probably friends and relations are in the right. A good man, as a good dog, should follow at the heels of something that precedes it. That is the height of its best breeding. It is only your cur who leaps the hedge and takes to the lanes. Nevertheless, for curs, there are loadstone mountains at the end of these lanes, which they cannot resist. The well-conditioned dogs do not feel the power of the magnet: the attraction for them is to the heels of the well-conditioned dogs preceding. The well-conditioned are the

wisest.

I have gained little money and little fame by taking to the by-path. My uncle was senior partner in a large linen-drapery establishment. The linen-drapery business was the line of life cleared before me. Whether from the designs of the prints in stock (I think not, however; there was little in them to seduce in those days), or whether from the elegant attitudes of the young men in attendance behind the counters (I think not: I think disgust of them, above all, drove me into the by-path), I, early in life, became passionately fond of drawing. This taste was encouraged in me while a boy. My cleverness in that way was paraded, and the taste fostered. When 1 produced a portrait of my little sister, true and yet untrue-true in giving an abstraction of her, untrue in that every detail of the face was wrong; for I did not know how to draw-when I produced this, my uncle gave me half-a-crown. I have this early sketch by me still (as I have the finished painting, the story of which I tell here), and I wonder that the obtuse men who praised it could see in it any faintest likeness to the original. It represented the notion of my sister which I had in my own mind-a possibility such as she might have been, but certainly was not. My sister ran away with a becurled counter-jumper. The sketch which I retain, ill-drawn as it is- Well, it could not have done that.

When I grew beyond the boy, and was just beginning to feel the weight and dignity of the talent entrusted to me, then I was told that I must put away this childish thing, and take to the linen-drapery manner of life. I feel again,

as I recal that time, an ache of the cruel pain that I felt then. I have been stricken by no such sore wound in all my life since; the grief and the shame, and the uncertainty as to whether the talent which had come to be my sole aim might not be, after all, the mere childish pastime which they called it!

However, I need not dilate on this early struggle. Through strenuous opposition I became an artist: I took to the lane. Stones were thrown after me according to the desert of a cur. Still I met with friends. A local artist saw my sketches and took me by the hand: then I got to London, and found the kindest of friends in a great painter there. I became a student in the Academy; I went to Italy for threequarters of a year; finally I set up as an artist in a tiny studio, in a quiet street not far from Rathbone Place, where the colour-sellers dwell. It is of an incident of my early days there that I now write.

Having taken to that by-path of the artistprofession, I was acknowledged by my friends, and belaboured with their advice. The only part of the artist-profession which paid was portraiture. It was not so lucrative a trade as linen-drapery, but still portrait-painting might be made to pay. To this I must apply myself: all else was child's-play. Everything is child'splay which does not bring in so much money for so much work done.

I kicked against the notion of portraitpainting. Had I not my grand ideas to work out? The transformation of Medusa, the golden hair changing into serpents, the divine beauty into fatal horror? Isabella, from "Measure for Measure," in the fury of her chaste rage? Vulcan the strong, stricken with the weakness of a helpless jealousy? Virginia with the first blush called up by lewd eyes on her child-face? Peter weeping bitterly? The Christ in his garden agony? I kicked against the notion of portrait-painting.

While I yet resisted my fate, my first commission for a portrait came to me. The sketch of my Medusa was on the easel. I had been at work at it that morning, and had hit upon the indefinable expression of face of which I had dreamed for so long. The face changed as you looked at it: it was all beauty; it was all a chaos; it was all horror: the golden hair glistened into snakes: the warm loving light of the eyes died in the cold magical fascination; the sweet lips stiffened into fear, into pain, into

S

death, into a devilish resuscitation. I was in the hour of my triumph, gulping down tears -for I did shed tears, as I think impressionable people mostly do in such moments. Just at this time a carriage drove up to the door of the house where I lodged: I had heard it rumbling up the quiet street. The cessation of sound startled me from my reverie, and brought to an end my hurried pacings to and fro. A lady was descending from the carriage as I looked out. I had no suspicion that she came to visit me. I had not yet entered upon portrait-painting, and my studio was visited by few people save brother-artists.

The small maid-of-all-work flung open my door, forgetting to knock in her trepidation.

"Please, sir, a lady wants to see you," The lady had been left upon the stairs, but before I had time to answer she had entered. "Good morning, Mr. Mazarine," she said. "I wish to speak with you professionally."

The door was closed, and the servant had gone. I was busy in clearing a chair for the lady to sit down,

"I would rather walk up and down," she said: "I can speak more easily so. You paint portraits

"You

Here she stopped suddenly opposite my easel, and I remained silent, while for a full minute she stood gazing on my "Medusa." "What a ghastly face!" she cried. "What is the subject?" Then, without waiting for an answer, she went on: have imagination, I see. I don't care for the subject of the picture. You never saw that face, never could have seen it; and yet it is true. I recognize a truth in it. I interpret it according to my own fancy; so would everyone else. It has a thousand meanings; but the secret of it is just this, that there is a real touch of humanity

in it."

The lady spoke in a rambling manner as she walked restlessly to and fro. Her accent was slightly foreign, though she spoke very quickly, as people seldom speak a language not their own. Her thoughts seemed preoccupied. She appeared as if she were accustomed to talk fluently while thinking of other things. She gesticulated with her hands, and her features had a wonderful mobility, while her eyes remained dreamy and vague. She was tall and slim, and straight as an arrow; elastic, and full of exquisite life to her finger-tips. The blood came and went in her face; her footfall had changeful intonations like a voice; her black hair stirred and waved as she moved; her beautiful hands (she carried her gloves in, not on them)-thin, fine, long-were more expressive in their undulations and expansions and contractions than most people's faces. I never saw any person to whom the body was so little an encumbrance. It seemed merely the expression of the life-principle. She gave one an idea of nudity-I mean that she did not strike one with that intolerable obtrusion of being dressed and hidden and fettered and tortured, by which one is instantly stricken on

sight of all other persons. Dress, whether of stolid flesh or cumbrous drapery, fell away from her, and left her disfogged!

"You have imagination," she said: “ have you the mastery of it? Can you give it rein, and at the same time keep it well in hand?"

I stammered and blundered in answer. I felt a very secondary person in my own studio. Brought down suddenly from my empyrean, my abstract Medusa faced and outfaced by this exquisite vision of life, I was bewildered and confused. This woman, with her perfection of nature, made me feel no longer a genius, but a

slave.

"You paint portraits ?" she asked again, still pacing up and down.

"No," I said; "I am not a portait-painter. My aims in art are higher and better."

She gave a swift glance round the room. On the walls, on easels, on chairs, leaning against the wainscot, or tumbling from portfolios, were my sketches.

A motion of her hand asked me "What are these?"

"Not a single portrait," I answered. "All portraits," she exclaimed with an emphasis of the foot; every one."

She pointed to a Virginia; to a Miranda, dreaming of Ferdinand; to a Marguerite, deviltempted in the church; to an Angelo, his cold blood hissing into burning lust; to a Leontes, stung by jealousy; to an Edipus, looking his last upon the light of day.

As I explained, she said of each one, "A portrait."

I

I had never before observed, a peculiarity-I suppose an imperfection-of my artist-talent. All of these sketches consisted of one figure only. I had not the power then, I have not the power now, of painting a dramatic scene. should never have thought of painting the lewd eyes of Appius in the same picture with the blush on Virginia's face. Appius might have been a separate study; but the two passions, even though they thus came together as immediate cause and effect, I could not have painted upon the same canvas. I honestly confess that I approve of my own practice. An ordinary picture is to me but a collection of incongruous figures. The passion of one creature is enough to fill the whole soul of an artist while he bodies it forth. Having perfected the one figure, when he passes on to others the tone of his mind has changed he paints in a different key. Even the sight of the complete figure, the knowledge that face is separated from face by only the space of a few inches, that drapery crosses and contrasts with drapery-this knowledge would utterly prevent me from concentrating my powers on the new passion and the new figure. The crimson of Virginia's face would tame down the bestial fire in the eyes of Appius.

In the concentration of thought entirely on one passion and one face, each picture of mine was, in a sense, a portrait. As the lady said, pointing to one after another, "A portrait-a

portrait," this peculiarity struck me forcibly for the first time.

"I want you to paint a portrait for me," she went on, as she resumed her pacings to and fro.

I was silent. The temptation was great. To have painted this glorious woman would have created a new era in my art-life.

"You must devote yourself to your work," she continued. "You shall name your own price-a hundred guineas, five hundred guineas, what you like. But until the portrait is complete you must put your hand to nothing else." "I do not want money for such work," I answered; and I spoke from the heart, and not impudently; as an artist, not as a young man. "I would give you money to let me paint you, if I had money."

"My poor boy !" she said, with a beautiful compassion for my enthusiasm. "It is not my own face that I want painted. It is the face of a dead man."

In my surprise I was silent for a time. Then I said, earnestly, "I will do what you tell me; I would do anything for you."

"A dead man-a dead man-a dead man," she repeated to herself as she went to and fro. "I am to paint," I asked, hesitatingly "I am to paint from the-the corpse ?" "No," she answered. "Buried long ago, and lying hundreds of miles from here," Again surprise made me silent.

"You have a likeness of him-some miniaature or chalk sketch, or—”

"None," she cried. "Why should I come to you, if I had a portrait of him already?"

After a long pause of consternation, I said: "What, then, do you wish me to do?"

"You think me mad," she said. "I do not wonder at it. You have not thought of the possibility of this as I have. But it is possible; it can be done, and shall be done, and you must do it. Hush!" she went on, silencing me with a motion of the hand. "Do not speak until you have thoroughly grasped this notion. You are to paint the portrait of this dead man, whom you have never seen, whose dead face you cannot see, of whom there is no likeness left. The sole record that remains of him is one little lock of hair."

I was full of bewilderment and amazement. I had passed through extraordinary revulsions of feeling in the interchange of these few sentences. The sudden giving up of all my determinations against portrait-painting; the delight in anticipation of painting so exquisite a creature; the diappointment of this anticipation; the shock on the supposition that I was to paint from the face of a corpse. I cannot describe how the contrast affected me, between my first hope of having for my model this woman so brimful of the essence of life, and the idea of copying the stark dead face. Lastly, the blank astonishment and dismay that the lady's final explanations caused me all these conflicting emotions struck me dumb and helpless.

"It is impossible," I said, at last. “You ask what neither I nor anyone else can do."

"It is not impossible," she cried, with another emphasis of the slender foot. "This dead man has more life for me than you have. I can see him now more plainly than I can see you. All the world is full of him to me. I see portions of him in other people; I hear echoes of his voice in other voices. I distinguish a foot-fall like his among all the thousand foot-falls of the streets. Patterns on carpets and on walls take for me the outline of his features. His face starts out of the darkness; his figure haunts me in long avenues of dreary country places. In crowded rooms, I see his reflection in the glasses. What do you talk of life and death? For me this man alone lives, and all others are ghosts." "You can draw?" I asked. "If ever so little, you can draw?"

"Not a stroke.

I have tried to learn .... Should I come to you if I could do for myself what I demand of you?"

"You must learn to draw," I said. "I will teach you."

"I cannot learn," she cried vehemently. "That is denied me by the curse of God. Do you think I have not tried all means before I sought out you? I have had better masters than you can be. You are not to be my tutor, sir, but my slave. I will have you do this thing

for me."

The lady was in the right. It was more impossible for me to disobey her commands than to attempt the impossibility she commanded. After vainly re-asserting the impracticability, I came to the helpless inquiry, how the thing was to be done.

"Are there any relations of this dead man whom I can see ?" I asked. "Anyone with any faintest resemblance to him?"

"None."

"Any chance likeness of him in another person? Chance likenesses are very common." "None; at least none that can serve your purpose."

"Impossible!" I said again.

"You artists, whether you write or whether you paint," she broke out bitterly, "you artists pretend to a magical insight. You conjure up an Othello; and you say this is the man whom Shakespeare saw this, and no other. This creature of a poet's brain, which never had an existence, which comes to you through a few antiquated words, half of which you cannot understand, this shadow of a shadow you fashion forth. Look at your own pictures:-Miranda you call this one, Marguerite that, and you say that they are the veritable creatures, which Shakespeare and Goëthe thought into being. I tell you to paint a man who really lived on this earth. I am here to be questioned-I am here to describe-to tear out of my heart every word he ever spoke to me-to tell you what he was to me. Perhaps I saw him untruly. That is nothing; I tell you to paint him as I knew and know him. Look into my eyes; your insight will find something of him there. Look at my