Anna Karenina
first. Besides, he saw that if it came to talking about technique, it
was impossible to praise him for it. In all he had painted and
repainted he saw faults that hurt his eyes, coming from want of care in
taking off the wrappings—faults he could not correct now without
spoiling the whole. And in almost all the figures and faces he saw,
too, remnants of the wrappings not perfectly removed that spoiled the
picture.
“One thing might be said, if you will allow me to make the remark....”
observed Golenishtchev.
“Oh, I shall be delighted, I beg you,” said Mihailov with a forced
smile.
“That is, that you make Him the man-god, and not the God-man. But I
know that was what you meant to do.”
“I cannot paint a Christ that is not in my heart,” said Mihailov
gloomily.
“Yes; but in that case, if you will allow me to say what I think....
Your picture is so fine that my observation cannot detract from it,
and, besides, it is only my personal opinion. With you it is different.
Your very motive is different. But let us take Ivanov. I imagine that
if Christ is brought down to the level of an historical character, it
would have been better for Ivanov to select some other historical
subject, fresh, untouched.”
“But if this is the greatest subject presented to art?”
“If one looked one would find others. But the point is that art cannot
suffer doubt and discussion. And before the picture of Ivanov the
question arises for the believer and the unbeliever alike, ‘Is it God,
or is it not God?’ and the unity of the impression is destroyed.”
“Why so? I think that for educated people,” said Mihailov, “the
question cannot exist.”
Golenishtchev did not agree with this, and confounded Mihailov by his
support of his first idea of the unity of the impression being
essential to art.
Mihailov was greatly perturbed, but he could say nothing in defense of
his own idea.
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.
Chapter 13
Mihailov sold Vronsky his picture, and agreed to paint a portrait of
Anna. On the day fixed he came and began the work.
From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially
Vronsky, not only by its resemblance, but by its characteristic beauty.
It was strange how Mihailov could have discovered just her
characteristic beauty. “One needs to know and love her as I have loved
her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul,” Vronsky
thought, though it was only from this portrait that he had himself
learned this sweetest expression of her soul. But the expression was so
true that he, and others too, fancied they had long known it.
“I have been struggling on for ever so long without doing anything,” he
said of his own portrait of her, “and he just looked and painted it.
That’s where technique comes in.”
“That will come,” was the consoling reassurance given him by
Golenishtchev, in whose view Vronsky had both talent, and what was most
important, culture, giving him a wider outlook on art. Golenishtchev’s
faith in Vronsky’s talent was propped up by his own need of Vronsky’s
sympathy and approval for his own articles and ideas, and he felt that
the praise and support must be mutual.
In another man’s house, and especially in Vronsky’s palazzo, Mihailov
was quite a different man from what he was in his studio. He behaved
with hostile courtesy, as though he were afraid of coming closer to
people he did not respect. He called Vronsky “your excellency,” and
notwithstanding Anna’s and Vronsky’s invitations, he would never stay
to dinner, nor come except for the sittings. Anna was even more
friendly to him than to other people, and was very grateful for her
portrait. Vronsky was more than cordial with him, and was obviously
interested to know the artist’s opinion of his picture. Golenishtchev
never let slip an opportunity of instilling sound ideas about art into
Mihailov. But Mihailov remained equally chilly to all of them. Anna was
aware from his eyes that he liked looking at her, but he avoided
conversation with her. Vronsky’s talk about his painting he met with
stubborn silence, and he was as stubbornly silent when he was shown
Vronsky’s picture. He was unmistakably bored by Golenishtchev’s
conversation, and he did not attempt to oppose him.
Altogether Mihailov, with his reserved and disagreeable, as it were,
hostile attitude, was quite disliked by them as they got to know him
better; and they were glad when the sittings were over, and they were
left with a magnificent portrait in their possession, and he gave up
coming. Golenishtchev was the first to give expression to an idea that
had occurred to all of them, which was that Mihailov was simply jealous
of Vronsky.
“Not envious, let us say, since he has _talent_; but it annoys him that
a wealthy man of the highest society, and a count, too (you know they
all detest a title), can, without any particular trouble, do as well,
if not better, than he who has devoted all his life to it. And more
than all, it’s a question of culture, which he is without.”
Vronsky defended Mihailov, but at the bottom of his heart he believed
it, because in his view a man of a different, lower world would be sure
to be envious.
Anna’s portrait—the same subject painted from nature both by him and by
Mihailov—ought to have shown Vronsky the difference between him and
Mihailov; but he did not see it. Only after Mihailov’s portrait was
painted he left off painting his portrait of Anna, deciding that it was
now not needed. His picture of mediæval life he went on with. And he
himself, and Golenishtchev, and still more Anna, thought it very good,
because it was far more like the celebrated pictures they knew than
Mihailov’s picture.
Mihailov meanwhile, although Anna’s portrait greatly fascinated him,
was even more glad than they were when the sittings were over, and he
had no longer to listen to Golenishtchev’s disquisitions upon art, and
could forget about Vronsky’s painting. He knew that Vronsky could not
be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and
all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was
distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a
big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll
and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover
caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just
such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of
Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both
pitiable and offensive.
Vronsky’s interest in painting and the Middle Ages did not last long.
He had enough taste for painting to be unable to finish his picture.
The picture came to a standstill. He was vaguely aware that its
defects, inconspicuous at first, would be glaring if he were to go on
with it. The same experience befell him as Golenishtchev, who felt that
he had nothing to say, and continually deceived himself with the theory
that his idea was not yet mature, that he was working it out and
collecting materials. This exasperated and tortured Golenishtchev, but
Vronsky was incapable of deceiving and torturing himself, and even more
incapable of exasperation. With his characteristic decision, without
explanation or apology, he simply ceased working at painting.
But without this occupation, the life of Vronsky and of Anna, who
wondered at his loss of interest in it, struck them as intolerably
tedious in an Italian town. The palazzo suddenly seemed so obtrusively
old and dirty, the spots on the curtains, the cracks in the floors, the