"Florence told me you were here, but I couldn't find you till this moment," said the great painter, giving his cordial hand to the moody struggler. "What have you been doing with yourself all these months? I wanted your help for the background of my Jupiter; but perhaps you are growing too big a man to paint backgrounds." "Not too big a man, Mr. Crawford, but too proud a man. I think the unsuccessful men are always the proudest. Failure is like poverty, it sets a man against his fortunate fellow-creatures. I've been painting seven years; and though I've worked fitfully, I've not been idle. If I don't do any thing to make my name known amongst painters in the next three years, I'll make a bonfire of my easel and all the rubbish of my studio, and take to my father's trade." "What was that?" "He was a lieutenant in the 82nd foot, and died of cholera on a forced march in the hottest month of the East-Indian summer. There was a fuss made at the Home Office about that march, and it turned out to have been one of those official blunders by which lives are so often wasted. I dare say my father had rather a hard time of it altogether in his brief military career, but his life wasn't _all_ disappointment and failure. He didn't know what it was to give his heart and soul to the work he loved--to think of it by day and to dream of it by night, until he woke from his bright dreams to find it all so much wasted labour. He never knew that." "No, Philip," answered William Crawford gravely, "but I have known that; and you know as well as I do that I have gone through the struggles, and endured the disappointments, that seem so hard to you now. Do you remember that mystical story of Bulwer Lytton's, in which the student, who would fain have made himself master of a mighty science, was arrested at the outset by a hideous spectre that haunted the threshold of the shadowy temple? At the portal of every temple you will meet the same forbidding spirit. I have faced the Dweller on the Threshold, Philip, and have wrestled with and vanquished him. For me he has borne the shape of toil and poverty, failure and humiliation. He has dressed himself in the clothes of the hanging-committee, and has rejected my pictures; he has made himself an art-critic, and has demolished me in a malevolent criticism. In every form I have encountered him, and have mastered him--only because I loved my art better than I loved myself, and worshipped my art as something apart from myself. There was some method in poor Haydon's madness when he said, 'In me the solitary sublimity of high art is not gone.' With an execution in his house, and a cook dunning him for her wages, the poor enthusiast was able to rejoice that there was one person left in the world to paint big classic unsaleable pictures. I believe that poor fellow was a real artist. There are men who paint great pictures who are not true artists; and there are true artists who never paint great pictures.