dead blank, cracked and discoloured by time. This was his immortal work!
Though not surprised, I confess I was powerfully moved, and I think that
for five minutes I could not have trusted myself to speak. At last my
silent nearness affected him; he stirred and turned, and then rose and
looked at me with a slowly kindling eye. I murmured some kind
ineffective nothings about his being ill and needing advice and care, but
he seemed absorbed in the effort to recall distinctly what had last
passed between us. "You were right," he said, with a pitiful smile, "I
am a dawdler! I am a failure! I shall do nothing more in this 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