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good-natured physiognomy of her husband. An uncomfortable
husband he must have been, even less fitted for
matrimony than poets in general, and fully as irregular
as any one to whom it has never occurred to make his
books a series of arguments for mystical religion and
pious asceticism.
A short time after, there was a similar festival in
jubilee-delighting Russia, with speeches and telegrams,
for the old marine painter Aïvasovski, whom they would
thank for “having raised Russian art to the height it
now occupies.” Aïvasovski is chiefly indebted for his
fame to the fact that there are very few Russians who
have thoroughly known the ocean, and many who have
never even seen it. None of them were qualified to
criticise or sit in judgment on his marine views. When he
was young, he may have painted some fine pictures; later,
he has only repeated himself, and manufactured his
seaviews as waffles are served, — hot and fresh on the spot.
Always the same story; always the same waves, seen
from right or left, in sun or moonlight. The exhibition
of his painting, some time ago, in Copenhagen, was a
fiasco not without good cause.
A day or two after the jubilee, he responded with a
dinner to one hundred and fifty persons; consisting of
those who had been present at the festival in his honor,
the whole Academy, the Minister of Education, the
President of the Synod, the Tsar’s tutor, Pobyedonostsef,
and others. Each guest received Aïvasovski’s portrait,
a large photograph, representing him sitting before a
canvas, and this canvas, one-fourth the size of an octavo
page, pasted to the photograph, was a painting by his
own hand. In this manner he distributed to his guests
one hundred and fifty small paintings: waves, shipwrecks,
moonlight effects on the water. The rector of
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