ave written so much. With scenes, when I think, what
certitude did I want more?--scenes being the root of the matter,
especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements;
especially, above all, when they flowered at every pretext into the very
optic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly,
from a central point of vision, even as the lashes from an eyelid,
straight down to the footlights. Let this reminiscence remind us of how
rarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty of
composition was naught; the one difficulty was in so placing my figures
on the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without making
lines through them. The odd part of all of which was that whereas my
cultivation of the picture was maintained my practice of the play, my
addiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was capable of learning,
though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not
capable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures; yet I
aspired to this form of design to the prejudice of any other, and long
after those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. I
cared so much for nothing else, and that vaguely redressed, as to a
point, my general failure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or at
least I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolour
brush should once become intense enough it would make up for other
weaknesses of grasp--much as that would certainly give it to do. This
was a very false scent, which had however the excuse that my brother's
example really couldn't but act upon me--the scent was apparently so
true for _him_; from the moment my small "interest in art," that is my
bent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing and
genuine. There were elements in the case that made it natural: the
picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to
me, and was to appeal all my days, and I was only slow to recognise the
_kind_, in this order, that appealed most. My face was turned from the
first to the idea of representation--that of the gain of charm,
interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on
the part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mere
actuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representation
there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the
business of sorting and trying