hours, he can be jealous and generous, egotistic and loving, grasping and prodigal, chaste and incontinent, ascetic and inebriate, prolific and idle. He may fast for a week, and for the next week eat from morning until night. He may weep in despair for the death of a friend, and share the merriment of a group of companions before the day is out. He may be timid as a whipped dog, and forthwith valiant as a paladin.
His character is not yet formed, nor will it ever attain the cold and reasoned stability of the successful. It is still plastic, like that of children, or of primitive folk, or of women. He is a bundle of passions and of impulses, of manias and of fixed ideas, of superstitions and naïvetés. But his dominant passion is painting: he marvels at the beauty of the visible world, he yearns continually to copy it, to make it over, to transfer its color and its charm to bits of canvas. In his most constant essence he is a man enamored of reality, and served by two eyes and a hand. He hungers for visual reality as a libertine for his prey, as a scholar for books, as a peasant for land.
He paints as he eats: from necessity, and with more or less appetite according to the time of day and the state of his soul. He has none of the traits of the salaried employee of beauty and profundity. He is as greedy as a child, greedy not only for meat and wine, but for color and
