he
sitters, they were in ecstasies, and proclaimed him every where a genius
of the first water.

Tchartkoff became all the fashion. He drove out every day to dinner
parties, escorted ladies to exhibitions and promenades, was a consummate
puppy in his dress, and openly declared that an artist ought to be a man
of the world; that it was his duty to maintain his dignity; that
painters in general dressed like shoemakers; that their manners were
excruciatingly vulgar, and that they were people of no education. His
studio was a pattern of elegance; he kept a couple of magnificent
footmen; took a number of dandified pupils; had his hair curled; dressed
half-a-dozen times a-day in various fantastical costumes. He was
perpetually rehearsing improvements in his way of receiving visitors;
meditating on all possible means of beautifying his person, and of
producing an agreeable impression on the ladies. In short, it soon
became impossible to recognise in him the modest student who once
laboured so fervently in his garret in the Vasilievskue Ostrov.
Concerning art and artists he now rarely spoke; he asserted that the
merit of the old masters had been outrageously overrated; that, before
Raphael, their figures were rather like herrings than human beings; that
it was the imagination of the spectator only that could find in their
works that air of grandeur and dignity generally attributed to them.
Raphael himself, he said, was very unequal, and many of his productions
owed their glory only to tradition. Michael Angelo was a boaster, weakly
vain of his knowledge of anatomy, and without a particle of grace. Real
force of outline, grace of touch, and magic of colouring we must look
for, he said, in the present age. Thence the conversation easily glided
to his own pictures.

"I cannot conceive," he would say, "the obstinacy of people who drudge
at their pictures. A fellow who hangs month after month over one piece
of canvass is, in my opinion, an artisan, not an artist. Such a one has
no genius, for genius creates boldly, rapidly. Now this portrait, for
instance," he would say, "I painted in two days, this head in one day,
this in a few hours, and that other in rather more than an hour. I don't
call it art to go crawling on, line after line."

Thus he would chatter to his visitors, and the visitors would admire his
dashing rapidity, and utter exclamations of wonder when they heard how
quickly he worked; and then they would whisper to ea