Many who undertake to change

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, 8-12 November 1885

Now as to that acquaintance of mine and his opinion of pictures; when someone with a clear intelligent head paints still life and works out-of-doors every day, if only for a year, he need not therefore be an art critic, neither does he feel he is a painter yet, but for all that he will observe more originally than many others.

Besides, his character is not just like everybody's, for instance, he was originally intended to become a priest, at a certain moment he flatly refused this, and carried his point, in which not exactly every one in Brabant succeeds. And there is something broad-minded and loyal about him.

Zola once referred to this something in a conversation between Mouret and his school-fellow, when he let Mouret get serious and say that it had cost him a great deal to free himself from that time and its influence, but that he had wanted to live and that he had lived. Many who undertake to change fall back, don't come any further than a certain insipid methodism because they don't take their measures energetically enough.

Letter 431
Translation courtesy of Robert Harrison.
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