The artist was rewarded with everything: a smile, money, a compliment, a warm pressing of the hand, an open invitation to dinner-in short, he received a thousand flattering rewards. The portrait caused a stir in town. The lady showed it to her lady friends; all were amazed at the art with which the painter had managed to keep the likeness and at the same time endow the model with beauty. This last observation they made, naturally, not without a slight flush of envy on their faces. And the artist was suddenly beset with commissions. It seemed the whole town wanted to be painted by him. The doorbell was constantly ringing. On the one hand, this might have been a good thing, offering him endless practice, diversity, a multitude of faces. But, unfortunately, these were all people who were hard to get along with, hurried people, busy or belonging to society-meaning still busier than any other sort, and therefore impatient in the extreme. From all sides came only the request that it be done well and promptly. The artist saw that it was decidedly impossible to finish his works, that everything had to be replaced by adroitness and quick, facile brushwork. To catch only the whole, only the general expression, without letting the brush go deeper into fine details-in short, to follow nature to the utmost was decidedly impossible. To this it must be added that almost all those being painted had many other claims to various things. The ladies demanded that only their soul and character be portrayed in the main, while the rest sometimes should not even be adhered to, all corners should be rounded, all flaws lightened, or, if possible, avoided altogether. In short, so as to make the face something to admire, if not to fall completely in love with. And as a result of that, when they sat for him, they sometimes acquired such expressions as astonished the artist: one tried to make her face show melancholy, another reverie, a third wanted at all costs to reduce the size of her mouth and compressed it so much that it finally turned into a dot no bigger than a pinhead. And, despite all that, they demanded a good likeness from him and an easy naturalness. Nor were the men any better than the ladies. One demanded to be portrayed with a strong, energetic turn of the head; another with inspired eyes raised aloft; a lieutenant of the guards absolutely insisted that Mars show in his look; a civil dignitary was bent on having more frankness and nobility in his face, and his hand resting on a book on which would be clearly written: "He always stood for truth." At first these demands made the artist break out in a sweat: all this had to be calculated, pondered, and yet he was given very little time. He finally worked the whole business out and no longer had any difficulty. He could grasp ahead of time, from two or three words, how the person wanted to be portrayed. If someone wanted Mars, he put Mars into his face; if someone aimed at Byron, he gave him a Byronic pose and attitude. If a lady wished to be Corinne, Ondine, or Aspasia, 13 he agreed to everything with great willingness and added a dose of good looks on his own, which, as everyone knows, never hurts, and on account of which an artist may even be forgiven the lack of likeness. Soon he himself began to marvel at the wonderful quickness and facility of his brush. And those he painted, it goes without saying, were delighted and proclaimed him a genius.
Chartkov became a fashionable painter in all respects. He began going to dinners, accompanied ladies to galleries and even to fetes, dressed elegantly, and openly affirmed that an artist must belong to society, that his estate must be upheld, that artists dressed like cobblers, did not know how to behave, did not keep up a high tone, and were totally lacking in cultivation. At home, in his studio, he became accustomed to great neatness and cleanliness, hired two magnificent lackeys, acquired elegant pupils, changed several times a day into various morning suits, had his hair curled, busied himself with improving all the manners by which to receive clients, with the beautifying of his appearance by every means possible, so as to make a pleasing impression on the ladies; in short, it was soon quite impossible to recognize in him that modest artist who had once worked inconspicuously in his hovel on Vasilievsky Island. He now spoke sharply of painters and of art: he maintained that too much merit was granted to painters of the past, that prior to Raphael they had all painted not figures but herrings; that the notion that some sort of holiness could be seen in them existed only in the imagination of the viewers; that even Raphael himself had not always painted well and many of his works were famous only by tradition; that Michelangelo was a braggart, because he only wanted to show off his knowledge of anatomy, that there was no gracefulness in him at all, and that true brilliance, power of the brush and of colors should be looked for only now, in the present age. Here, naturally, things would turn inadvertently to himself.
"No, I do not understand," he would say, "why others strain so much, sitting and toiling over their work. The man who potters for several months over a painting is, in my opinion, a laborer, not an artist. I don't believe there is any talent in him. A genius creates boldly, quickly. Here," he would say, usually turning to his visitors, "this portrait I painted in two days, this little head in one day, this in a few hours, this in a little more than an hour. No, I… I confess, I do not recognize as art something assembled line by line. That is craft, not art."
So he spoke to his visitors, and the visitors marveled at the power and facility of his brush, even uttered exclamations on hearing how quickly he worked, and then said to each other: "That's talent, true talent! See how he speaks, how his eyes shine! Il y a quelque chose d'extraordinaire dans toute sa figure!"
The artist was flattered to hear such rumors about himself. When printed praise of him appeared in the magazines, he was happy as a child, though this praise had been bought for him with his own money. He carried the printed page around everywhere and, as if inadvertently, showed it to his friends and acquaintances, and this delighted him to the point of the most simple-hearted naivety. His fame grew, his work and commissions increased. He was already tired of the same portraits and faces, whose poses and attitudes he knew by rote. He painted them now without much enthusiasm, applying himself to sketching only the head anyhow and leaving the rest for his pupils to finish. Before, he had still sought to give some new pose, to impress with force, with effects. Now that, too, became boring to him. His mind was growing weary of thinking up and thinking out. It was more than he could stand, and he had no time: a distracted life and the society in which he tried to play the role of a worldly man-all this took him far from work and thought. His brush was becoming cold and dull, and he imperceptibly locked himself into monotonous, predetermined, long worn-out forms. The monotonous, cold, eternally tidied and, so to speak, buttoned-up faces of the officials, military and civil, did not offer much space for the brush: it began to forget luxurious draperies, strong gestures and passions. To say nothing of group composition, of artistic drama and its lofty design. Before him sat only a uniform, a bodice, a tailcoat, before which an artist feels chilled and all imagination collapses. Even the most ordinary merits were no longer to be seen in his productions, and yet they still went on being famous, though true connoisseurs and artists merely shrugged as they looked at his latest works. And some who had known Chartkov before could not understand how the talent of which signs had shown clearly in him at the very beginning could have disappeared, and vainly tried to understand how the gift could die out in a man just as he reached the full development of his powers.
But the intoxicated artist did not hear this talk. He was already beginning to reach the age of maturity in mind and years, had already begun to gain weight and expand visibly in girth. In newspapers and magazines he was already reading the adjectives "our esteemed Andrei Petrovich," "our honored Andrei Petrovich." He was already being offered respectable posts in the civil service, invited to examinations and committees. He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters-not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists. He was already beginning, as is the custom of all those entering that age, to reproach the young without exception for immorality and a wrong turn of mind. He was already beginning to believe that everything in the world is done simply, that there is no inspiration from above, and everything must inevitably be subjected to one strict order of accuracy and uniformity. In short, his life had already touched upon the age when everything that breathes of impulse shrinks in a man, when a powerful bow has a fainter effect on his soul and no longer twines piercing music around his heart, when the touch of beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burnt-out feelings become more accessible to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little allow it imperceptibly to lull them completely. Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it; it produces a constant tremor only in one who is worthy of it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turned toward gold. Gold became his passion, his ideal, fear, delight, purpose. Bundles of banknotes grew in his coffers, and he, like everyone else to whom this terrible gift is granted, began to be a bore, inaccessible to anything but gold, a needless miser, a purposeless hoarder, and was about to turn into one of those strange beings who are so numerous in our unfeeling world, at whom a man filled with life and heart looks with horror, who seem to him like moving stone coffins with dead men instead of hearts in them. Yet one event shook him deeply and awakened all his living constitution.