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 the cloth in his hand, and, smiling blissfully, gazed a long while at the figure of John.  At last, as it were regretfully tearing himself away, he dropped the cloth, and, exhausted but happy, went home.

Vronsky, Anna, and Golenishtchev, on their way home, were particularly lively and cheerful.  They talked of Mihailov and his pictures.  The word talent, by which they meant an inborn, almost physical, aptitude apart from brain and heart, and in which they tried to find an expression for all the artist had gained from life, recurred particularly often in their talk, as though it were necessary for them to sum up what they had no conception of, though they wanted to talk of it.  They said that there was no denying his talent, but that his talent could not develop for want of education—­the common defect of our Russian artists.  But the picture of the boys had imprinted itself on their memories, and they were continually coming back to it.  “What an exquisite thing!  How he has succeeded in it, and how simply!  He doesn’t even comprehend how good it is.  Yes, I mustn’t let it slip; I must buy it,” said Vronsky.

Chapter 13

Mihailov sold Vronsky his picture, and agreed to paint a portrait of Anna.  On the day fixed he came and began the work.

From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially Vronsky, not only by its resemblance, but by its characteristic beauty.  It was strange how Mihailov could have discovered just her characteristic beauty.  “One needs to know and love her as I have loved her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul,” Vronsky thought, though it was only from this portrait that he had himself learned this sweetest expression of her soul.  But the expression was so true that he, and others too, fancied they had long known it.

“I have been struggling on for ever so long without doing anything,” he said of his own portrait of her, “and he just looked and painted it.  That’s where technique comes in.”

“That will come,” was the consoling reassurance given him by Golenishtchev, in whose view Vronsky had both talent, and what was most important, culture, giving him a wider outlook on art.  Golenishtchev’s faith in Vronsky’s talent was propped up by his own need of Vronsky’s sympathy and approval for his own articles and ideas, and he felt that the praise and support must be mutual.