As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst of Adrian’s artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the mind-shattering facts.  Here was a man whose whole literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of genius.  And he had no imaginative capacity.  His mind was essentially critical; and the critical mind is not creative.  He was a clever man.  All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a little less than clever, they wouldn’t be critics.  Perhaps Adrian was, by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret human life on canvas.  It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly, were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait.  It did not seem to enter the poor fellow’s head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you like, but the essential quality of the artist.

And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination.  He had never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme, such as all novelists must do.  He had grasped at one elusive vision of life, after another.  His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy and tragedy of human things.  The more confused, the more universal became the poor limited vision.  The whole of illimitable life, he had told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this wondrous book.  The pity of it!

How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand—­that is to say, if he had retained it.  The hypothesis of madness comforted.  I would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine.  If he had deceived himself, God had been merciful.  But if not, if he had sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted out, in this world, greater punishment for sin.  It is incredible that he should have lasted so long alive.  No wonder he could not sleep.  No wonder he drank in secret.  Barbara, who had gone through the household accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant’s bills for whisky.  Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after night for the last few months?  I cannot but hope that he did.  At any rate God was merciful at last.  He killed him.