The artist hardly knew how to undeceive the ladies in their agreeable mistake. He hung his head, and, with an apologetic air, said, in a low voice, "This is Psyche."
"Painted as Psyche! C'est charmant!" said the mother, with a smile, faithfully repeated by the daughter. "Don't you think so, Lise? it's just the thing for you. Painted as Pysche! Quelle idée délicieuse! But what a picture! Quite a Correggio! I have heard and read much about you, but I had not the least idea of your talent."
"What the deuce am I to do with them?" thought the artist. "Well, if they will have it so, Psyche shall go;" and he said aloud—"I must trouble you to give me a few minutes more—I should like to add a few touches."
"You cannot improve it. Pray leave it as it is."
The painter guessed that they apprehended some more yellow tones, and he hastened to remove their fears, saying that he was only going to increase the brilliancy and expression of the eyes. In reality he desired to give his picture a closer resemblance with the original—fearing, if he did not, that he should be taxed with unblushing flattery. In spite of the lady's reluctance, the pallid damsel's features began to come out more clearly amid the outlines of the Psyche.
"That will do," said the mother, less pleased by the picture as the resemblance grew closer. The artist was rewarded for his labour with smiles, money, compliments, a most affectionate squeeze of the hand, and a pressing invitation to dinner; in a word, he was overwhelmed with recompenses. The portrait made much noise in the town. The lady showed it to all her acquaintance. Every body admired the skill with which the painter had succeeded in preserving the resemblance, and at the same time in giving beauty to the original. The last remark, of course, was not made without a slight tinge of malice. Tchartkóff was besieged with commissions. The whole town was mad to be painted by him. His door-bell rang incessantly. Unfortunately his sitters were of the class most difficult to manage; either persons very much occupied, or fashionable people, who having in reality nothing to do, were, of course, far busier than anybody else, and hurried and impatient in the highest degree. Every body expected a good picture in less time than was necessary to do a slovenly one. The artist saw that high finish was quite out of the question, and that all he could do was to dazzle by the facility, rapidity, and smartness of his execution. He had to content himself with catching the general expression, neglecting the more delicate details, and not attempting to attain the individuality and reality of nature. Besides this, every sitter had some fresh fancy. The ladies required that only their sentiment and character should be represented in their portraits; that all the rest should be smoothed and softened; sharp angles rounded off; defects mitigated, and even, if possible, altogether concealed. They required, in short, to be made attractive in their portraits, whether nature had made them so or not. Consequently many, when they seated themselves in the painting chair, put on such looks and expressions as absolutely astounded the artist. One struggled to give her features an air of melancholy; another of sentimental abstraction; a third tried desperately to make her mouth small, and pursed it up till it resembled a round dot. And in spite of all this they expected striking resemblance, ease, and grace. Nor were the gentlemen more reasonable. One required to be painted with a strong energetic turn of the head; another with uplifted eyes, full of poetic inspiration; an ensign of the Guards declared that he should not be satisfied unless Mars was made visible in his countenance: a civilian delicately suggested that his face should be made as much as possible to express incorruptible probity, mingled with imposing dignity, and that he should be painted leaning his arm on a book, inscribed in legible characters, "I stand for right." At first all these requests frightened and annoyed our painter; there was so much to be harmonised, considered, and arranged, and all in a few hours. At last he began to understand the secret, and went on without troubling his head in the least. From the first two or three words spoken, he perceived how the sitter wished to be painted. The gentleman who wanted Mars was made a Mars of; he who aped Byron received a Byronic attitude. As to the ladies, whether they wished to be Corinnas, or Undines, or Aspasias, he was quite ready to accommodate them, and even added, from his own imagination, a universal air of distinction, which never does any harm, and which sometimes makes people excuse even want of resemblance. He soon began to be astonished at the wonderful rapidity and success of his execution. As to the sitters, they were in ecstasies, and proclaimed him every where a genius of the first water.
Tchartkóff became all the fashion. He drove out every day to dinner parties, escorted ladies to exhibitions and promenades, was a consummate puppy in his dress, and openly declared that an artist ought to be a man of the world; that it was his duty to maintain his dignity; that painters in general dressed like shoemakers; that their manners were excruciatingly vulgar, and that they were people of no education. His studio was a pattern of elegance; he kept a couple of magnificent footmen; took a number of dandified pupils; had his hair curled; dressed half-a-dozen times a-day in various fantastical costumes. He was perpetually rehearsing improvements in his way of receiving visitors; meditating on all possible means of beautifying his person, and of producing an agreeable impression on the ladies. In short, it soon became impossible to recognise in him the modest student who once laboured so fervently in his garret in the Vasílievskü Ostrov. Concerning art and artists he now rarely spoke; he asserted that the merit of the old masters had been outrageously overrated; that, before Raphael, their figures were rather like herrings than human beings; that it was the imagination of the spectator only that could find in their works that air of grandeur and dignity generally attributed to them. Raphael himself, he said, was very unequal, and many of his productions owed their glory only to tradition. Michael Angelo was a boaster, weakly vain of his knowledge of anatomy, and without a particle of grace. Real force of outline, grace of touch, and magic of colouring we must look for, he said, in the present age. Thence the conversation easily glided to his own pictures.
"I cannot conceive," he would say, "the obstinacy of people who drudge at their pictures. A fellow who hangs month after month over one piece of canvass is, in my opinion, an artisan, not an artist. Such a one has no genius, for genius creates boldly, rapidly. Now this portrait, for instance," he would say, "I painted in two days, this head in one day, this in a few hours, and that other in rather more than an hour. I don't call it art to go crawling on, line after line."
Thus he would chatter to his visitors, and the visitors would admire his dashing rapidity, and utter exclamations of wonder when they heard how quickly he worked; and then they would whisper to each other—"This is genius—real genius! How well he talks! What an extraordinary talent!"
Such praise as this the painter greedily drank in, and was as delighted as a child by the encomiums of the press, even when bought and paid for with his own money. His fame continued to spread, and his occupation to increase, till he grew weary of painting portraits and faces with the same tricks and attitudes that he knew by heart. Gradually he worked with less and less good-will, contenting himself with carelessly sketching in the head, and leaving all the rest to be finished by his pupils. Formerly he had taken trouble to seek new attitudes; to strike by novelty—by effect. Now he began to grow weary even of this labour. He entirely left off reflecting; he had neither power nor leisure for it. His dissipated mode of life, and the society in which he played the part of a man of fashion, severed him more and more from labour and from thought. His touch grew cold and dull, and he insensibly confined himself to stale, commonplace, worn-out forms. The stiff, monotonous countenances of officers and civilians, in their graceless modern costumes, were not very attractive subjects for the pencil. He forgot all—his graceful draping, his easy attitudes, his power of representing the passions. As to skilful grouping or dramatic effect in painting, all that was quite out of the question. He had nothing before his eyes but the eternal uniform, corset, or dress-coat—objects chilling to the artist, and affording little scope to imagination. By and by even the most ordinary merits disappeared, one by one, from his productions; and they still enjoyed the highest reputation, though real judges and artists only shrugged their shoulders as they looked at the work of his hand.