It was thus always with him.
He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals he was humane, to women gentle, to men serene; but his art was before all things with him, and with humanity he had little sympathy: and if he had passions, they had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the hot hush of noon, half indifferent, half lustful, to strike fiercely what comes before her, and then, having slain, couches herself and sleeps again.
But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had as yet recompensed him nothing.
Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them; they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.
His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world, which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art, would have none of them.
So for these twelve long years his labor had been waste, his efforts been fruitless. Those years had been costly to him in purse;—travel, study, gold flung to fallen women, sums spent on faithless friends, utter indifference to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors; all these did their common work on wealth which was scanty in the press of the world, though it had appeared inexhaustible on the shores of the north sea. His labors also were costly, and they brought him no return.
The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a man of the world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a stupor he was shaken one day to find himself face to face with beggary.
His works were seen by few, and these few were antagonistic to them.
All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy of other painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies of the nations themselves. In all lands he was repulsed; he roused the jealousy of his compeers and the terror of the multitudes. They hurled against him the old worn-out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain; and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, at his own cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they and he were alike obliterated from the public marts; they had always denied him fame, and they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it without remorse, and even with contentment.
He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch that he possessed, have easily purchased a temporary ease, an evanescent repute, if he had given the world from his pencil those themes for which it cared, and descended to the common spheres of common art. But he refused utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him was his honesty to the genius wherewith he was gifted; he refused to prostitute it; he refused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.