But what then?  Has the man no mind, no cultivation, no taste?  Things do not indicate any such want.  The walls of the room in which he is just now lounging have their crimson and gold almost covered with pictures,—­copies of rare Murillos and Raphaels, and an original head of a boy, by Greuze, with the lips as fresh as they were a hundred years ago.  An exquisite “Dying Stork,” in bronze, stands on a bracket below Sassoferrato’s sweetest Madonna, and Retzsch’s “Hamlet” lies open on a side-table.  The three Canovian Graces stand in a corner opposite him, and he glances at the pedestal which stands ready to receive “Eve at the Fountain.”  The pedestal has been there two weeks already, waiting for the “Oxford” to arrive with its many precious Art-burdens.  It stands near the window; it will be a good light for it.  Fred wishes, for the hundredth time, that it would come along.  There are books, surely?  Oh, yes, one side of the room is a complete bookcase,—­tasteful, inside and out.

The small room which opens into this luxurious sitting-room has a high north window, and near it stands Fred’s easel, with a half-finished head on a canvas.  Already it has changed its aspect twenty times.  Sometimes it is a Nymph, sometimes a Naiad, sometimes Undine.  Once, he dashed all the green of the wood-nymph’s forest, with one stroke, into green water, intending to put in Undine, with a boat.  He has not fulfilled his intention; but he works on, with the luxurious abandonment of genius to its spell, be it what it may.  He does not care what it ends in.  One of Fred’s theories is, that the imagination, by constant and intense exercise, may so project the image it conceives, as to make it the subject of ocular contemplation and imitation.  Why not?  All objects of sight are painted on a flat surface, and it is by experience, comparison, nay, in some measure by the will, that we get our ideas of their shape and distance.  Poor Blake’s insane painting of imaginary heads, which he saw three or six feet from him, was the only true and rational method of painting at all.  Think of your thought,—­intensify it,—­create it,—­create it perfectly,—­define it carefully,—­group it gracefully, —­color it exquisitely,—­project it, by an intense effort of the will, into the space before you.  There it stands.  Now paint it.

He is fond of dwelling on this theory; and as nobody takes the trouble to contradict him, he has come to believe it truth, through hearing it often repeated.  He has explained it to Minnie more than twenty times, and says he is almost ready to paint.  Not quite.  He must lie on the sofa a year, perhaps two years longer, before he will be able to satisfy himself.  But then, what is a year, two, ten years, in an eternity of fame?

The conception being completely projected from the brain in a visible form, what remains but the mechanical imitation of it?  Anybody can do that.  The thing is the conception.  In vain Minnie suggests the vulgar notion of acquiring facility by drawing and copying things in general.