“A painter,” my master, Miraut, used to say, “should only think brush in hand.” It is my opinion, from numerous illustrious examples including Miraut himself, that he should not think at all. But I know only too well, I am but half a painter, an artist in intention rather than in temperament, the outline of a Fromentin of the twelfth rank. That is a singular feeling of sadness too: the feeling that one is but an inferior double of another, a small and poor proof of a block already printed, a sample of humanity in the likeness of a model who has already lived, and in whose destiny it is possible to read beforehand one’s own destiny! But not all one’s own destiny! For I am only too well aware that I suffer from the same failings as Fromentin without possessing his brilliance. But the brush was not sufficient for this complex and elaborate master. He wanted, with the nervous hand which transmitted colours to canvas, to put ink upon paper, and what was the result? We other painters said his painting was too literary, and literary men said his literature was too technical, too pictorial, and not intellectual enough. In my own case at each exhibition of my work for years past my fellow-painters’ reserve, and their praise particularly, have signified to me that I lack a real artist’s original and visionary nature. But I do not require my fellow artists’ judgment; what does my own conscience say? If I really expressed myself with my brush alone, should I have brought back from Spain, Morocco, Italy and Egypt as many pages of notes as sketches? I have for fifteen years, wandered between numberless contradictory forms of art and mind. I have wandered from country to country seeking the sun and health; from museum to museum seeking æsthetic revelations, and later from art school to art school seeking an artist’s creed, and from dream to dream in search of a love. My affairs of the heart have all been incipient and abortive for the same reason as my affairs of the mind: my irremediable incapacity to make up my mind and stand firm, in which to-day I recognize the strange originality of my character.