“My poor father, rare artist as he was, was right in this estimate of himself. As a man, as a father, as a citizen, I cannot find a word to say for him. He never brought a moment of happiness to either of his girls. He dwelt in a world of his own; a beautiful and enchanted world, the Promised Land of his art. He was a man of strange ambition; of an ambition that had something ferocious in it; of an ambition that was unfitted to cope with the sordid and material aims, by whose aid persons of not one-tenth part of his quality achieved wealth, respectability, power, and the fame of the passing hour. There was a thread of noble austerity in my poor father’s genius, which remained in it, like a vein of gold embedded in the mud of a polluted river, throughout the whole time of his degradation and his ruin. His pride seemed to grow more scornful with each year that witnessed more completely the consummation of the darkening and overthrow of his nature. I can remember his saying of a picture by the president of the Academy, ‘I would rather have my flesh pecked by daws than prostitute myself with such blasphemies as that;’ and at that time he stood upon the verge of the grave of a drunken madman. “I have said he was not a good citizen. Nor was he a good father to his girls. He did not offer them physical violence; but it never occurred to him to shield them from the indignities thrust upon them by want and debt, and the despair which was sown in their hearts by the foulness of every breath they drew. It would need my father’s own gift to limn the picture of this beautiful talent living its appointed life in its own way, yet indifferent to the most elementary duties of a righteous parent and an honest citizen. As a young man he had been handsome, with a fine, delicate, even an entrancing beauty; it was one of his favorite sayings that the face of every true artist borrowed something from heaven. I can only recall that face in its latter days, when it was that of a petulant, arrogantly imperious, yet hideous and bloated old creature, whose body and soul had been undermined; but from the numerous pictures he painted of himself in his youth he had the divine look of a poet.