novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had
never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in
insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction,
but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of
genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially
critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man.
All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a
little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was,
by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in
a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret
human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who
have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly,
were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the
poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no
matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have
the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you
like, but the essential quality of the artist.

And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those
months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination. He had
never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme,
such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at one elusive vision of
life, after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy
and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal
became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life, he had
told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this
wondrous book. The pity of it!

How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand--that is
to say, if he had retained it. The hypothesis of madness comforted. I
would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with
the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If
he had deceived himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had
sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his
impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted
out, in this world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he
should have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sle