advertising policy of the Vulcan, must inevitably become national. For
the lithographers he designed all manner of holocausts; at times he made
tours through the counties and fixed the incandescent mouth of Vulcan's
forge, the figures within being merely indicated, on the face of a
hundred ledges. That was a shame, he freely admitted to me; the rocks
looked better without. In fact, John Campbell's first manner soon came to
be a humiliation and an intolerable bondage. He felt the insincerity of
it deeply. 'You see, it's this way,' he explained to me, 'you don't see
the shapes by firelight or at sunset, but you have seen them all day and
you know they're there. Nobody that don't have those shapes in his brush
can make you feel them in a picture. Everybody puts too little droring
into sunsets. Nobody paints good ones, not even Inness [we must remember
it was in the early '70s], except a Frenchman called Roosoo. He takes 'em
very late, which is best, and he can drore some too.'"

"A very decent critic, your alcoholic friend," the Critic remarked. "He
was full of good ideas, as you shall see," the story-teller replied. "I
quite agree with you, if the bad whisky could have been kept away from
him he might have shone in your profession. Anyhow, he had the makings of
an honest man in him, and when the Vulcan enlarged its cliff-painting
programme, he cut loose bravely. Then followed ten lean years of odd
jobs, with landscape painting as a recreation, and the occasional sale of
a canvas on a street corner as a great event. When his need was greatest
he consented to earn good wages composing symbolical door designs for the
Meteor Coach Company, but that again he could not endure for long. Later
in the intervals of colouring photographs, illuminating window-shades, or
whatever came to hand, he worked out the theory which finally led him to
the feet of Corot. It was, in short, that the proper subject for an
artist deficient in linear design is sunrise.