There was that in him which, like the land from which he sprang, could ill brook control. He approved of discipline, but knew exactly where it was deleterious to apply it to himself; and no one, perhaps, had a finer and larger conception of individual liberty. In this way he maintained the best traditions of a calling whose very essence was superiority. In course of conversation he would frequently admit, being a man of generous calibre, that the artist, by reason of long years of devoted craftsmanship, had possibly the most intimate knowledge of his art, but he would not fail to point out, and very wisely, that there was no such unreliable testimony as that of experts, who had an axe to grind, each of his own way of doing things; for comprehensive views of literature seen in due perspective there was nothing--he thought--like the trained critic, rising superior, as it were professionally, to myopia and individual prejudice. Of the new school who maintained that true criticism was but reproduction in terms of sympathy, and just as creative as the creative work it reproduced, he was a little impatient, not so much on the ground that to make a model of a mountain was not quite the same thing as to make the mountain; but because he felt in his bones that the true creativeness of criticism (in which he had a high belief) was its destructive and satiric quality; its power of reducing things to rubbish and clearing them away, ready for the next lot. Instinct, fortified by his own experience, had guided him to that conclusion. Possibly, too, the conviction, always lurking deep within him, that the time was coming when he would strike out for himself and show the world how a work of art really should be built, was in some sort responsible for the necessity he felt to keep the ground well cleared. He was nearly fifty when his clock chimed, and he began seriously to work at the creation of that masterpiece which was to free him from “a dog’s life,” and, perhaps, fill its little niche in the gallery of immortality. He worked at it happily enough till one day, at the end of the fifth month, he had the misfortune to read through what he had written. With his critical faculty he was able to perceive that which gave him no little pain--every chapter, most pages, and many sentences destroyed the one immediately preceding. He searched with intense care for that coherent thread which he had suspected of running through the whole. Here and there he seemed to come on its track, then it would vanish. This gave him great anxiety.