and the house, without help except a
dull, poorly-paid maid. Oftentimes when she seemed most active, she fell
into a sudden languor, complaining of strange, new ailments.

Mariano hardly ever worked at home; he painted out of doors. He despised
the conventional light of the studio, the closeness of its atmosphere.
He wandered through the suburbs of Madrid and the neighboring provinces
in search of rough, simple types, whose faces seemed to bear the stamp
of the ancient Spanish soul. He climbed the Guadarrama in the midst of
winter, standing alone in the snowy fields like an Arctic explorer, to
transfer to his canvas the century-old pines, twisted and black under
their caps of frozen sleet.

When the Exhibition took place, Renovales' name became famous in a
flash. He did not present a huge picture with a key, as he had at his
first triumph. They were small canvases, studies prompted by a chance
meeting; bits of nature, men and landscapes reproduced with an
astonishing, brutal truth that shocked the public.

The sober fathers of painting writhed as if they had received a slap in
the face, before those sketches that seemed to flame among the other
dead, leaden pictures. They admitted that Renovales was a painter, but
he lacked imagination, invention, his only merit was his ability to
transfer to the canvas what his eyes saw. The younger men flocked to the
standard of the new master; there were endless disputes, impassioned
arguments, deadly hatred, and over this battle Renovales', name
flitted, appearing almost daily in the newspapers, till he was almost as
celebrated as a bull-fighter or an orator in the Congress.

The struggle lasted for six years, giving rise to a storm of insults and
applause every time that Renovales exhibited one of his works, and
meanwhile the master, discussed as he was, lived in poverty, forced to
paint water-colors in the old style which he secretly sent to his dealer
in Rome. But all combats have their end. The public finally accepted as
unquestionable a name that they saw every day; his enemies, weakened by
the unconscious effect of public opinion, grew tired, and the master
like all innovators, as soon as the first success of the scandal was
over, began to limit his daring, pruning and softening his original
brutality. The dreaded painter became fashionable. The easy,
instantaneous success he had won at the beginning of his career was
renewed, but more solidly and more definitely, like a c