I think that Nettleship himself would have
liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We
had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude
philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action
or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions,
very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as
for instance--"Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman--was
walking round Regent's Park barefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort
of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a
burglar and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not
let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next
policeman."

He was very proud and shy and I could not imagine anybody asking him
questions and so I was content to take these stories as they came:
confirmations of what I had heard of him in boyhood. One story in
particular had stirred my imagination for, ashamed all my boyhood of my
lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond my imitation. He
thought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of
sin and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on
the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of
order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on
to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled
along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different
window and returned to the table. "My nerves," he said, "are better than I
thought."

Nettleship said to me: "Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the
effect of drink upon my genius?" "No," I answered. "I ask," he said,
"because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical
insight." Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used
these words: "Nettleship drank his genius away." Ellis, but lately
returned from Perugia where he had lived many years, was another old
friend of my father's but some years younger than Nettleship or my father.
Nettleship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned
away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man
of science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle of
the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He
was a painter and poet, b