Anna Karenina

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
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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
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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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