knowings, falling whence or how it is impossible to say, but falling
somehow into the brain, instead of growing rarer, become more and more
frequent; indeed, I think that if the really great man were to confess
to the working of his mind, we should see him constantly besieged by
inspirations...inspirations! Ah! how human thought only turns in a
circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge of a new thought, we
slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth. But I say again, let
general principles be waived; it will suffice for the interest of these
pages if it be understood that brain instincts have always been, and
still are, the initial and the determining powers of my being.




III


But the studio, where I had been working for the last three or four
months so diligently, became wearisome to me, and for two reasons.
First, because it deprived me of many hours of Marshall's company.
Secondly--and the second reason was the graver--because I was beginning
to regard the delineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, etc., as a very
narrow channel to carry off the strong, full tide of a man's thought.
For now thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were
in active fermentation within me and sought for utterance with a strange
persistency of appeal. I yearned merely to give direct expression to my
pain. Life was then in its springtide; every thought was new to me, and
it would have seemed a pity to disguise even the simplest emotion in any
garment when it was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The
creatures whom I met in the ways and byeways of Parisian life, whose