e his will was weak and the arts
or any other emotional pursuit could but weaken it further.

Presently I went to the modelling class to be with certain elder students
who had authority among us. Among these were John Hughes and Oliver
Sheppard, well-known now as Irish sculptors. The day I first went into the
studio where they worked, I stood still upon the threshold in amazement. A
pretty gentle-looking girl was modelling in the middle of the room, and
all the men were swearing at her for getting in their light with the most
violent and fantastic oaths, and calling her every sort of name, and
through it all she worked in undisturbed diligence. Presently the man
nearest me saw my face and called out, "she is stone deaf, so we always
swear at her and call her names when she gets in our light." In reality I
soon found that everyone was kind to her, carrying her drawing-boards and
the like, and putting her into the tram at the day's end. We had no
scholarship, no critical knowledge of the history of painting, and no
settled standards. A student would show his fellows some French
illustrated paper that we might all admire, now some statue by Rodin or
Dalou and now some declamatory Parisian monument, and if I did not happen
to have discussed the matter with my father I would admire with no more
discrimination than the rest. That pretentious monument to Gambetta made a
great stir among us. No influence touched us but that of France, where one
or two of the older students had been already and all hoped to go. Of
England I alone knew anything. Our ablest student had learnt Italian to
read Dante, but had never heard of Tennyson or Browning, and it was I who
carried into the school some knowledge of English poetry, especially of
Browning who had begun to move me by his air of wisdom. I do not believe
that I worked well, for I wrote a great deal and that tired me, and the
work I was set to bored me. When alone and uninfluenced, I longed for
pattern, for pre-Raphaelitism, for an art allied to poetry, and returned
again and again to our National Gallery to gaze at Turner's Golden Bough.
Yet I was too timid, had I known how, to break away from my father's style
and the style of those about me. I was always hoping that my father would
return to the style of his youth, and make pictures out of certain
designs now lost, that one could still find in his portfolios. There was
one of an old hunchback in vague medieval dress, going through so