His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every jeu d'esprit seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.
While he was talking he kept on painting, and I said to him, 'I can't understand how you can keep up a conversation while you are at work.'
I took care not to tell him that I was an amateur painter.
'It is only when the work that I am on is in some degree mechanical that I can talk while at work. These flowers, which were brought to me this morning for my use in painting this picture, will very soon wither, and I can put them into the picture without being disturbed by talk; but if I were at work upon this face, if I were putting dramatic expression into these eyes, I should have to be silent.'
He then went on talking upon art and poetry, letting fall at every moment gems of criticism that would have made the fortune of a critic.
After a while, however, he threw down the brush and said,
'Sometimes I can paint with another man in the studio; sometimes I can't.'
I rose to go.
'No, no,' he said; 'I don't want you to go, yet I don't like keeping you in this musty studio on such a morning. Suppose we take a stroll together.'
'But you never walk out in the daytime.'