That mother, now absent, when she had blindly found her way to him, asking to pose, had fallen into good hands.  He was a great teacher and he was a remarkable man, remarkable even to look at.  Massively built, with a big head of black hair, olive complexion, and bluntly pointed, black beard, and with a mold of countenance grave and strong, he looked like a great Rembrandt; like some splendid full-length portrait by Rembrandt painted as that master painted men in the prime of his power.  With the Rembrandt shadows on him even in life.  Even when the sun beat down upon him outdoors, even when you met him in the blaze of the city streets, he seemed not to have emerged from shadow, to bear on himself the traces of a human night, a living darkness.  There was light within him but it did not irradiate him.

Once he had been a headlong art student himself, starting out to become a great painter, a great one.  After years abroad under the foremost masters and other years of self-trial with every favorable circumstance his, nature had one day pointed her unswerved finger at his latest canvas as at the earlier ones and had judged him to the quick:  you will never be a great painter.  If you cannot be content to remain less, quit, stop!

Thus youth’s choice and a man’s half a lifetime of effort and ambition ended in abandonment of effort not because he was a failure but because the choice of a profession had been a blunder.  A multitude of men topple into this chasm and crawl out nobody.  Few of them at middle age in the darkness of that pit of failure can grope within themselves for some second candle and by it once more become illumined through and through.  He found his second candle,—­it should have been his first,—­and he lighted it and it became the light of his later years; but it did not illumine him completely, it never dispelled the shadows of the flame that had burned out.  What he did was this:  having reached the end of his own career as a painter, he turned and made his way back to the fields of youth, and taking his stand by that ever fresh path, always, as students would rashly pass him, he halted them like a wise monitor, describing the best way to travel, warning of the difficulties of the country ahead, but insisting that the goal was worth the toil and the trouble; searching secretly among his pupils year after year for signs of what he was not, a great painter, and pouring out his sympathies on all those who, like himself, would never be one.

Now he sat looking across at his class, the masterful teacher of them.  They sat looking responsively at him.  Then he took up his favorite theme: