Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 12
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
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