The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

by Nikolai Gogol

  The artist did not know what to do with the agreeably deceived ladies. Embarrassed and looking down, he said quietly: "It's Psyche."

  "In the guise of Psyche? C'est charmant!" the mother said, smiling, and the daughter smiled as well. "Don't you think, Lise, that it's most becoming for you to be portrayed as Psyche? Quelle idee delicieuse! But what work! It's Correge. 12 I confess, I had read and heard about you, but I didn't know you had such talent. No, you absolutely must paint my portrait as well." The lady evidently also wanted to be presented as some sort of Psyche.

  "What am I to do with them?" thought the artist. "If they want it so much themselves, let Psyche pass for whatever they want." And he said aloud:

  "Be so good as to sit for a little while, and I'll do a little touching up.”

  "Ah, no, I'm afraid you might. . . it's such a good likeness now."

  But the artist understood that there were apprehensions regarding yellow tints and reassured them by saying that he would only give more brightness and expression to the eyes. For, in all fairness, he felt rather ashamed and wanted to give at least a little more resemblance to the original, lest someone reproach him for decided shamelessness. And, indeed, the features of the young girl did finally begin to show more clearly through the image of Psyche.

  "Enough!" said the mother, beginning to fear that the resemblance would finally become too close.

  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 s
pace 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.

  One day he found a note on his desk in which the Academy of Art asked him as a worthy member to come and give his opinion of a new work sent from Italy by a Russian artist who was studying there. This artist was one of his former comrades, who from a young age had borne within himself a passion for art, and with the ardent spirit of a laborer had immersed himself in it with his whole soul, had torn himself away from friends, from family, from cherished habits, and rushed to where under beautiful skies a majestic hothouse of the arts was ripening—to that wonderful Rome, at the name of which the ardent heart of an artist beats so deeply and strongly. There, like a hermit, he immersed himself in work and totally undistracted studies. He was not concerned if people commented on his character, his inability to deal with people, his nonobservance of worldly proprieties, the humiliation he inflicted upon the estate of artists by his poor, unfashionable dress. He could not have cared less whether his brethren were angry with him or not. He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings. He did not enter into noisy discussions and disputes; he stood neither for nor against the purists. He granted its due share to everything equally, drawing from everything only what was beautiful in it, and in the end left himself only the divine Raphael as a teacher. So a great poetic artist, having read many different writings filled with much delight and majestic beauty, in the end might leave himself, as his daily reading, only Homer's Iliad,having discovered that in it there is everything one wants, and there is nothing that has not already been reflected in its profound and great perfection. And he came away from this schooling with a majestic idea of creation, a powerful beauty of thought, the lofty delight of a heavenly brush.

  On entering the hall, Chartkov found a huge crowd of visitors already gathered before the painting. A profound silence, such as rarely occurs amidst a gathering of connoisseurs, now reigned everywhere. He hastened to assume the significant physiognomy of an expert and approached the painting—but, God, what did he see!

  Pure, immaculate, beautiful as a bride, the artist's creation stood before him. Modest, divine, innocent, and simple as genius, it soared above everything. It seemed that the heavenly figures, astonished to have so many eyes directed at them, shyly lowered their beautiful eyelashes. With a sense of involuntary amazement, the experts contemplated this new, unprecedented brush. Here everything seemed to have come together: the study of Raphael, reflected in the lofty nobility of the poses; the study of Correggio, breathing from the ultimate perfection of the brushwork. But most imperiously of all there was manifest the power of creation already contained in the soul of the artist himself. Every least object in the picture was pervaded with it; law and inner force were grasped in everything. Everywhere that flowing roundedness of line had been grasped which belongs to nature and is seen only by the eyes of the creative artist, and which comes out angular in an imitator. One could see how the artist had first taken into his soul everything he had drawn from the external world, and from there, from the spring of his soul, had sent it forth in one harmonious, triumphant song. And it became clear even to the uninitiate what a measureless abyss separates a creation from a mere copy of nature. It is almost impossible to express the extraordinary silence that came over everyone whose eyes were fixed on the painting— not a rustle, not a sound; and the painting meanwhile appeared loftier and loftier with every minute; brightly and wonderfully it detached itself from everything, and all transformed finally into one instant—the fruit of a thought that had flown down to the artist from heaven—an instant for which the whole of human life is only a preparation. Involuntary tears were ready to flow down the faces of the visitors who surrounded the picture. It seemed that all tastes and all brazen or wrongheaded deviations of taste merged into some silent hymn to the divine work. Chartkov stood motionless, openmouthed before the picture, and at last, when the visitors and experts gradually began to stir and to discuss the merits of the work, and when at last they turned to him with the request that he tell them what he thought, he came to himself; he was about to assume an indifferent, habitual air, was about to produce the banal, habitual judgment of a jaded artist, something like: "Yes, of course, it's true, one can't deny the artist a certain talent; there's something there; one can see he wanted to express something; but as for the essence . . ."

  And to follow it, naturally, with such praise as no artist would be the better for. He was about to do that, but the words died on his lips, tears and sobs burst out in a discordant response, and like a madman he rushed from the hall. For a moment he stood motionless and insensible in the middle of his magnificent studio. His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes.

  God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to destroy, to extinguish the spark of fire that had perhaps flickered in his breast, that perhaps would have developed by now into greatness and beauty, that perhaps would also have elicited tea
rs of amazement and gratitude! And to ruin all that, to ruin it without any mercy! It seemed to him as if those urges and impulses that used to be familiar to him suddenly revived all at once in his soul. He seized a brush and approached the canvas. The sweat of effort stood out on his face; he was all one desire, burning with one thought: he wanted to portray a fallen angel. This idea corresponded most of all to his state of mind. But, alas! his figures, poses, groupings, thoughts came out forced and incoherent. His brush and imagination were confined too much to one measure, and the powerless impulse to overstep the limits and fetters he had imposed on himself now tasted of wrongness and error. He had neglected the long, wearisome ladder of gradual learning and the first basic laws of future greatness. Vexation pervaded him. He ordered all his latest works, all the lifeless, fashionable pictures, all the portraits of hussars, ladies, and state councillors, taken out of the studio. Locked up in the room by himself, he ordered that no one be admitted and immersed himself entirely in his work. Like a patient youth, like an apprentice, he sat over his task. But how mercilessly ungrateful was everything that came from under his brush! At every step he was pulled up short by want of knowledge of the most basic elements; a simple, insignificant mechanism chilled his whole impulse and stood as an insuperable threshold for his imagination. The brush turned involuntarily to forms learned by rote, the arms got folded in one studied manner, the head dared not make any unusual turn, even the very folds of the clothing smacked of rote learning and refused to obey and be draped over an unfamiliar pose of the body. And he felt it, he felt it and saw it himself!

  "But did I ever really have talent?" he said finally "Am I not mistaken?" And as he said these words, he went up to his old works, which had once been painted so purely, so disinterestedly, there in the poor hovel on solitary Vasilievsky Island, far from people, abundance, and all sorts of fancies. He went up to them now and began to study them all attentively, and along with them all his former poor life began to emerge in his memory. "Yes," he said desperately, "I did have talent. Everywhere, on everything, I can see signs and traces of it. . ."