758 759
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 pic-
ture 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 convic-
tion of the perfectibility, and so of the significance, of his picture—a
conviction essential to the most intense fervor, excluding all other in-
terests—in which alone he could work.
Christ’s foreshortened leg was not right, though. He took his pal-
ette 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 par-
ticularly 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 memo-
ries, 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.