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Chapter 12
Anna and Vronsky had long been exchanging glances, regretting
their friend's flow of cleverness. At last Vronsky, without
waiting for the artist, walked away to another small picture.
"Oh, how exquisite! What a lovely thing! A gem! How
exquisite!" they cried with one voice.
"What is it they're so pleased with?" thought Mihailov. He had
positively forgotten that picture he had painted three years ago.
He had forgotten all the agonies and the ecstasies he had lived
through with that picture when for several months it had been the
one thought haunting him day and night. He had forgotten, as he
always forgot, the pictures he had finished. He did not even
like to look at it, and had only brought it out because he was
expecting an Englishman who wanted to buy it.
"Oh, that's only an old study," he said.
"How fine!" said Golenishtchev, he too, with unmistakable
sincerity, falling under the spell of the picture.
Two boys were angling in the shade of a willow-tree. The elder
had just dropped in the hook, and was carefully pulling the float
from behind a bush, entirely absorbed in what he was doing. The
other, a little younger, was lying in the grass leaning on his
elbows, with his tangled, flaxen head in his hands, staring at
the water with his dreamy blue eyes. What was he thinking of?
The enthusiasm over this picture stirred some of the old feeling
for it in Mihailov, but he feared and disliked this waste of
feeling for things past, and so, even though this praise was
grateful to him, he tried to draw his visitors away to a third
picture.
But Vronsky asked whether the picture was for sale. To Mihailov
at that moment, excited by visitors, it was extremely distasteful
to speak of money matters.
"It is put up there to be sold," he answered, scowling gloomily.
When the visitors had gone, Mihailov sat down opposite the
picture of Pilate and Christ, and in his mind went over what had
been said, and what, though not said, had been implied by those
visitors. And, strange to say, what had had such weight with
him, while they were there and while he mentally put himself at
their point of view, suddenly lost all importance for him. He
began to look at his picture with all his own full artist vision,
and was soon in that mood of conviction of the perfectibility,
and so of the significance, of his picture--a conviction
essential to the most intense fervor, excluding all other
interests--in which alone he could work.
Christ's foreshortened leg was not right, though. He took his
palette and began to work. As he corrected the leg he looked
continually at the figure of John in the background, which his
visitors had not even noticed, but which he knew was beyond
perfection. When he had finished the leg he wanted to touch that
figure, but he felt too much excited for it. He was equally
unable to work when he was cold and when he was too much affected
and saw everything too much. There was only one stage in the
transition from coldness to inspiration, at which work was
possible. Today he was too much agitated. He would have covered
the picture, but he stopped, holding the cloth in his hand, and,
smiling blissfully, gazed a long while at the figure of John. At
last, as it were regretfully tearing himself away, he dropped the
cloth, and, exhausted but happy, went home.
Vronsky, Anna, and Golenishtchev, on their way home, were
particularly lively and cheerful. They talked of Mihailov and
his pictures. The word talent, by which they meant an inborn,
almost physical, aptitude apart from brain and heart, and in
which they tried to find an expression for all the artist had
gained from life, recurred particularly often in their talk, as
though it were necessary for them to sum up what they had no
conception of, though they wanted to talk of it. They said that
there was no denying his talent, but that his talent could not
develop for want of education--the common defect of our Russian
artists. But the picture of the boys had imprinted itself on
their memories, and they were continually coming back to it.
"What an exquisite thing! How he has succeeded in it, and how
simply! He doesn't even comprehend how good it is. Yes, I
mustn't let it slip; I must buy it," said Vronsky.
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