The situation would have been instantly changed if only his artistic power had recovered itself.  And if Eugenie had been within his reach it might have done so.  She had the secret of stimulating in him what was poetic, and repressing what was merely extravagant or violent.  But she was far away:  and as he worked at the completion of his series of ‘Months,’ or at various portraits which the kindness or compassion of old friends had procured for him, he fell headlong into all his worst faults.

His handling, once so distinguished through all its inequalities, grew steadily more careless and perfunctory; his drawing lost force and grip; his composition, so rich, interesting, and intelligent in his early days, now meant nothing, said nothing.  The few friends who still haunted his studio during these dark months were often struck with pity; criticism or argument was useless; and some of them believed that he was suffering from defects of sight, and was no longer capable of judging his own work.

The portrait commissions, in particular, led more than once to disaster.  His angry vanity suspected that while he was now thought incapable of the poetic or imaginative work in which he had once excelled, he was still considered—­’like any fool’—­good enough for portraits.  This alone was enough to make him loathe the business.  On two or three occasions he ended by quarrelling with the sitter.  Then for hours he would walk restlessly about his room, smoking enormously, drinking—­sometimes excessively—­out of a kind of excitement and desoeuvrement—­his strong, grizzled hair bristling about his head, his black eyes staring and bloodshot, and that wild gypsyish look of his youth more noticeable than ever in these surroundings of what promised soon to be a decadent middle age.

One habit of his youth had quite disappeared.  The queer tendency to call on Heaven for practical aid in any practical difficulty—­to make of prayer a system of ’begging-letters to the Almighty’—­which had of ten quieted or distracted him in his early years of struggle, affected him no longer.  His inner life seemed to himself shrouded in a sullen numbness and frost.

And the old joy in reading, the old plenitude and facility of imagination, were also in abeyance.  He became the fierce critic of other men’s ideas, while barren of his own.  To be original, successful, happy, was now in his eyes the one dark and desperate offence.  Yet every now and then he would have impulses of the largest generosity; would devote hours to the teaching of some struggling student and the correction of his work; or draw on his last remains of credit or influence—­pester people with calls, or write reams to the newspapers—­on behalf of some one, unduly overlooked, whose work he admired.