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 conquest made by
rough, hard paths when there is a struggle at every step.
Money, the fickle page, came back to him, holding the train of glory. He
sold pictures at prices unheard of in Spain and they grew fabulously as
they were repeated by his admirers. Some American millionaires,
surprised that a Spanish painter should be mentioned abroad and that the
principal reviews in Europe should reproduce his works, bought canvases
as objects of great luxury. The master, embittered by the poverty of his
years of struggle, suddenly felt a longing for money, an overpowering
greed that his friends had never known in him. His wife seemed to grow
more sickly every day; her daughter was growing up and he wanted his
Milita to have the education and the luxuries of a princess. They now
had a respectable house of their own, but he wanted something better for
them. His business instinct, which everyone recognized in him when he
was not blinded by some artistic prejudice, strove to make his brush an
instrument of great profits.
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