"Thank Heaven!" muttered Müller, parenthetically.
"But there is something noble in the disposition of the figures. I should say, however, that you had set to work upon too large a scale."
"A question of focus," said the painter, hastily. "A mere question of focus."
"How can that be, when you have finished some parts laboriously, and in others seem scarcely to have troubled yourself to cover the canvas?"
"I don't know. I'm impatient, you see, and--and I think I got tired of it towards the last."
"Would that have been the case if you had allowed yourself but half the space?"
"I'll take to enamel," exclaimed Müller, with a grin of hyperbolical despair. "I'll immortalize myself in miniature. I'll paint henceforward with the aid of a microscope, and never again look at nature unless through the wrong end of a telescope!"
"Pshaw!--be in earnest, man, and talk sensibly! Do you conceive that for every failure you are to change your style? Give yourself, heart and soul, to the school in which you have begun, and make up your mind to succeed."
"Do you believe, then, that a man may succeed by force of will alone?" said Müller, musingly.
"Yes, because force of will proceeds from force of character, and the two together, warp and woof, make the stuff out of which Nature clothes her heroes."