deas and principles. You are too impatient; too apt
to be fascinated by novelty, and to neglect rules hallowed by time and
experience, laws immutable as those of the Medes. Beware, lest you
become a mere fashionable painter. Your colours, I observe, are not
unfrequently selected in defiance of good taste; your drawing is often
feeble, sometimes positively incorrect; your outlines want clearness.
You run after a flashy kind of chiaro-scuro, the lighting up of your
picture is meant only to strike the eye at the first glance. And you
have a passion for the introduction of finery; a taste for dandified
costume. All this is dangerous, and may lead you into the fatal habit of
painting mere fashionable pictures, pretty portraits and the like, which
yield money, but can never give fame. Do that, and your talent is lost
and thrown away. Be patient, wait, reflect, chasten your taste by study,
and wean yourself from that hankering after prettiness and dandyism.
Leave such tricks to those who care but for gold, and propose yourself a
higher aim, the never-dying laurels of a Titian or an Angelo."

The professor meant well, and was right in the main. Tchartkoff was apt
to indulge in the flashy and the superficial. But he had sufficient
strength of mind to control this dangerous tendency, and a purer taste
was gradually but perceptibly developing itself in him. As yet he could
not quite appreciate all the depth of Raphael, but he was strongly
fascinated by the broad and rapid touch of Guido; he would stand
enchanted before Titian's portraits, and had a high appreciation of the
Flemish school. Yet the darkened and sober tone characterising old
pictures did not quite please or satisfy him; nor did he, in his
innermost mind, altogether agree with the professor, when the latter
expatiated to him on that mysterious power which places the old masters
at such immeasurable distance above the moderns. In some respects he
almost fancied them surpassed by the nineteenth century; that the
imitation of nature had somehow become, in modern times, more vivid, and
lively, and faithful: in a word, his mind was in that fluctuating
unsettled state in which the minds of young people are apt to be when
they have reached a particular point of proficiency in their art, and
feel a proud internal conviction of talent. Often was he filled with
rage when he saw some travelling French or German painter, by the mere
effect of trick and habit, by readiness of penci