"You are very good. I understand perfectly." "Don't be angry, my dear fellow, but understand me rightly. I mean, on the path of dilettantism, on which you have been wandering up to this date, all progress must necessarily be deceptive, even though, outwardly, you have circumnavigated the world; for, after all, all your efforts move in a circle. I am very sorry for it, though." "For what?" "That you really want to take up art in earnest. You might have remained such an enviable dilettante, for you have all the necessary qualifications to an uncommon degree." "And they are?" "Self-confidence, time, and money. No, don't be angry. I am truly serious when I say this to you, and of course it would be needless for me to assure you that I mean well when I say it. Seriously: these traveling sketches of yours are done so skillfully that any of the illustrated papers might consider themselves lucky if they had such special artists. And yet I wish, since you are determined to be an artist, that they were not half so skillful." "If it is nothing more than that, a remedy can easily be found. You will soon see how much talent I have for unskillfulness, when you give me something to model." The sculptor shook his head gently. "It is not the hands," he said. "It is the mind that has already attained a very respectable maturity and facility in you; only, unfortunately, in a wrong direction. For the truth is, my dear fellow, the very things that please you best, and have probably most impressed unprofessional persons, the dash and readiness, the so-called artist's touch, those are the very things that stand most in the way of your getting back into the right track. It is just as if, instead of learning to write in the ordinary way, one should begin with stenography. He never in all his life will have a good handwriting. For the spirit of dilettantism, take it for all in all, is, like that of stenography, in the art of abbreviation; in substituting a symbol for the _form_, just as in the other case we substitute one for the letter, so that in the course of time all real feelings--yes, the very want of and appreciation of the rightly-developed natural form--are hopelessly lost. Why is it then that the dilettanti attain their end so much more quickly than the true artists? Because, with this system of abbreviation, they steer straight for those results which seem to them of the most importance: resemblance, spirit, elegance of execution. For that reason they are often marvelously skillful in mastering the proportions of a face, for instance, and setting it off by a few dots and strokes so that everybody cries: 'Oh! how like! how speaking! and how quickly done!' The true artist knows that the length of time spent in the production is by no means a measure of excellence; and as he has not only a general sense of proportion, but also a feeling for the true form itself, he does not rest until he has done it full justice--until, so