This was taken by Mendel and his family to mean that he was now an artist. In all good faith he established himself in a room below the workshop at home, called it his studio, and set to work. For a few months he painted apples, fish, oranges, portraits of his mother, brothers, and sisters, and for a time was able to sell them among his acquaintance. He had one or two commissions for portraits and could always make a few shillings by painting from photographs. But appreciation of art among his own people was limited; he soon came to an end of it, and there was that other world calling to him. Art lay beyond that other world. He felt sure of that. It lay beyond Mr. Sivwright. If he stayed among his own people he would stop dead; for he knew now that it was true that the Jews stopped dead. And then to his horror he stopped. For no reason at all his skill, his enthusiasm, his eagerness left him. He forced himself to paint, transferred innumerable idiotic faces from photographs to cigar-box lids, made his mother neglect her work to sit to him, bribed Lotte to be his model, but hated and loathed everything that he did. He was listless, sometimes feverish, sometimes leaden and cold. Often he thought he was going to die--to die before anything had happened, before anything had emerged from the chaos of his painful vivid impressions. To make things worse, his father came home and said that he would give him six months in which to make his living, and at the end of that time, if he had failed, he would have to go into the workshop. He felt hopeless. He went to see Mr. Sivwright and poured out his woes to him, who wrote a letter to Jacob saying that his son was a genius and would be one of the greatest of painters. Jacob said: "What is a genius? I do not know. I know what a man is, and a man works for his living. In six months, if you can make fifteen shillings a week I will believe in this painting. If not, what is there to believe? What will you do when you are to marry, heh? Tell me that. Will your little tubes of paint keep a wife, heh? Tell me that." Mendel could say nothing. He could do nothing. He gave up even trying to paint, for he might as well have played with mud-pies. He borrowed money from his brothers and prowled about the streets, and went to the National Gallery. Greuze meant nothing to him now. He began to feel, very faintly, the force of Michael Angelo, but the rest only filled him with despair. He knew nothing--nothing at all. He could not even begin to see how the pictures were painted. They were miraculous and detestable. . . . He went home and comforted himself with a little picture of some apples on a plate. He had painted it two years before in an ecstasy--a thrilling love for the form, the colour, the texture of the fruit and the china. It was good. He knew it was good, but he knew he could do nothing like it now--never again, perhaps.