the keys. When I at last found deep in my
pocket the one I could more or less work, it was to feel, with
reassurance, that the picture was still after all in essence one's aim.
So there had been in a manner continuity, been not so much waste as one
had sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are sweetened for memory
as by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed and from the
vantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been current
and blatant profit. Wasn't the very bareness of the field itself
moreover a challenge, in a degree, to design?--not, I mean, that there
seemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint: as to that there
were always plenty--but for the very reason that there were more than
anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast
about to gratify. The gratification nearest home was the imitative, the
emulative--that is on my part: W. J., I see, needed no reasons, no
consciousness other than that of being easily able. So he drew because
he could, while I did so in the main only because he did; though I think
we cast about, as I say, alike, making the most of every image within
view. I doubt if he made more than I even then did, though earlier able
to account for what he made. Afterwards, on other ground and in richer
air, I admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not in the bareness
of aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased; exhibitions,
illustrations abounded in Paris and London--the reflected image hung
everywhere about; so that if there we daubed afresh and with more
confidence it was not because no-one but because everyone did. In fact
when I call our appetite appeased I speak less of our browsing vision,
which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal
character of our own proceedings. In Europe we knew there was Art, just
as there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges and little boys in
the streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as at
things of derision--just as, to put it negatively, there were
practically no hot rolls and no iced water. Perhaps too, I should add,
we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin Haydon, then clustered at the
Pantheon in Oxford Street, which in due course became our favourite
haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayed
at the Duesseldorf collection in Broadway; whence the huge canvas of the
Martyrdom of John Huss comes back to