"What wrong could man or mankind have done him, to be thus fearfully
pursued by the vengeance of the artist's hate?

"Another characteristic of the faces and form which he drew was, that they
were all beautiful in the original idea. The lines of each face, however
distorted by pain, would have been, in rest, absolutely beautiful; and the
whole of the execution bore witness to the fact that upon this original
beauty the painter had directed the artillery of anguish to bring down the
sky-soaring heights of its divinity to the level of a hated existence. To
do this, he worked in perfect accordance with artistic law, falsifying no
line of the original forms. It was the suffering, rather than his pencil,
that wrought the change. The latter was the willing instrument to record
what the imagination conceived with a cruelty composed enough to be
correct.

"To enhance the beauty he had thus distorted, and so to enhance yet
further the suffering that produced the distortion, he would often
represent attendant demons, whom he made as ugly as his imagination could
compass; avoiding, however, all grotesqueness beyond what was sufficient
to indicate that they were demons, and not men. Their ugliness rose from
hate, envy, and all evil passions; amongst which he especially delighted
to represent a gloating exultation over human distress. And often in the
midst of his clouds of demon faces, would some one who knew him recognise
the painter's own likeness, such as the mirror might have presented it to
him when he was busiest over the incarnation of some exquisite torture.

"But apparently with the wish to avoid being supposed to choose such
representations for their own sakes, he always found a story, often in the
histories of the church, whose name he gave to the painting, and which he
pretended to have inspired the pictorial conception. No one, however, who