Anna Karenina - Part 5

For the few seconds during which the visitors were gazing at the

picture in silence Mihailov too gazed at it with the indifferent

eye of an outsider. For those few seconds he was sure in

anticipation that a higher, juster criticism would be uttered by

them, by those very visitors whom he had been so despising a

moment before. He forgot all he had thought about his picture

before during the three years he had been painting it; he forgot

all its qualities which had been absolutely certain to him--he

saw the picture with their indifferent, new, outside eyes, and

saw nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground Pilate's

irritated face and the serene face of Christ, and in the

background the figures of Pilate's retinue and the face of John

watching what was happening. Every face that, with such agony,

such blunders and corrections had grown up within him with its

special character, every face that had given him such torments

and such raptures, and all these faces so many times transposed

for the sake of the harmony of the whole, all the shades of color

and tones that he had attained with such labor--all of this

together seemed to him now, looking at it with their eyes, the

merest vulgarity, something that had been done a thousand times

over. The face dearest to him, the face of Christ, the center of

the picture, which had given him such ecstasy as it unfolded

itself to him, was utterly lost to him when he glanced at the

picture with their eyes. He saw a well-painted (no, not even

that--he distinctly saw now a mass of defects) repetition of

those endless Christs of Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and the same

soldiers and Pilate. It was all common, poor, and stale, and

positively badly painted--weak and unequal. They would be

justified in repeating hypocritically civil speeches in the

presence of the painter, and pitying him and laughing at him when

they were alone again.

The silence (though it lasted no more than a minute) became too

intolerable to him. To break it, and to show he was not

agitated, he made an effort and addressed Golenishtchev.

"I think I've had the pleasure of meeting you," he said, looking

uneasily first at Anna, then at Vronsky, in fear of losing any

shade of their expression.

"To be sure! We met at Rossi's, do you remember, at that _soirée_

when that Italian lady recited--the new Rachel?" Golenishtchev

answered easily, removing his eyes without the slightest regret

from the picture and turning to the artist.

Noticing, however, that Mihailov was expecting a criticism of the

picture, he said: "Your picture has got on a great deal since I saw it last time;

and what strikes me particularly now, as it did then, is the

figure of Pilate. One so knows the man: a good-natured, capital

fellow, but an official through and through, who does not know

what it is he's doing. But I fancy..."