“This,” said he, “is a series of trivial incidents, of disjointed details! To we artists the human figure is a mass of light and shade. It is not made up of legs and hands, and breasts, and ears and teeth. No—by the good God, no!” With which he seized a brush and scrabbled a quantity of flake white over the entire surface. “Good!” he said. “It is finished.” And passed on to the next. Thinking the matter over in bed that night Wynne realized he had learnt a great and valuable lesson: breadth of view—visualizing life as a whole. It was knowledge that could be applied to almost everything. Detail merely existed as part of the whole, but the whole was not arrived at by assembling detail. The same would apply, he perceived, to every art, to business, too, and to life in general. He began to understand how it was possible for people like Wallace and his father to have their place in the scheme of things. They ceased to exist as individual items, brought into undue prominence by enforced propinquity, but became parts of a great machinery whose functions were too mighty to comprehend. These were the shadows which gave tone-value to the high-lights. They were vital and essential, and without them there would be no contrast, no variety, nothing but flat levels—dull and marshy—and never a hill on the horizon showing purple in the morning sun. “I must learn this trade of painting,” said Wynne, “it’s the short road to all knowledge.” He flung himself into the work with an energy truly remarkable. From early morning till midnight he battled with the craft, and thought and talked of nothing else. In the cafés, where students met and thrashed out their thousand ideas, Wynne was well bethought, for although his skill with a brush was small he could advance and support a theory with the liveliest talker in the Quartier. His success in argument was, perhaps, not altogether of advantage to his immortal soul, since it led him to cultivate a cynical attitude toward most affairs. He very readily became conversant with the works of the Masters, old and new, and praised or attacked them with great impartiality. Preferably he would detract from accepted geniuses, and deliver the most scathing criticisms against pictures before which mankind had prostrated itself for centuries. One day he would admit of the value of no artist save Manet, and another would accuse him of possessing neither skill nor artistry, but merely “a singularly adroit knack of expressing vulgarity.” He did not attempt to be honest in regard to his points of view, being perfectly satisfied so long as he could hold a controversial opinion.