He was a clever man.
All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics.

Perhaps Adrian was, by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret human life on canvas.

It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly, were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait.

It did not seem to enter the poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you like, but the essential quality of the artist.
And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination.

He had never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme, such as all novelists must do.