Diligent, the young master applies his strokes to the canvas. One, two: soon the canvas is covered with the foot-thick deft strokes. They form, in his mind, some sort of bird. An eagle. No, a condor with a vulture inside. No, it is an eagle after all. Or is it (and we are shocked) the head of Louis Freier, the haberdasher?
The young master decides not to work in oils so much. They hinder from his canvas, he asserts, the natural balance of life, because of life's horror-vacuous tendency to avoid fat things. He walks through the deep snow to the butcher's, where a set of pastels has been waiting for him since his sixth birthday. Placed there by "friends of the family," they long ago dried to crumbling bits of gaudy hue. A deep and protracted disappointment ensues.
(All this while, the young master ages. He is now seventeen, strapping.)
A plaster bust is asserting its shape beneath his hands. "Plaster: the miracle for our hands," he says. It is a portrait bust of Caligula, the great Roman. It arouses sympathy from the Carl Rothbergs. "What talent!" they say. "My oh my, you could be really something someday." The young master, seeing only the pessimism in these statements, reacts with a moue.
"My son," says his mother, "what is this moue which befalls thee?"
"Oh mother," he replies, "pry not into others' moues. If you must know, this is the moue of eternity, the moue of Schopenhauer, Plato, and Nietzsche: and life must be formed by the master. Seest thou, or must I weep?"
"Behave," says his mother, but in truth she is giddily inconsolable. She wishes to return to Vienna with her genius son, and little can be done. A trauma ensues. In short order the following scene occurs: Mother and father sit quietly at home, tending their business. The young master is upstairs. Soon a polychrome soup flows down and floods the ground floor, wetting the parents' feet. The soup recalls Jacob's coat. Madness ensues and retroactively aggravates the mother's trauma. The cards predict a brilliant future...
... which straightaway begins. A famous, jolly and lecherous artist comes to visit. He is led in the front door and up the stairs. There, surrounded by tableaux, sits the young master. Much taken aback, the old artist gives him his studio, declaring himself worthless and deserving of scorn.
Another artist, better than the first, also comes. He is impressed and asks to see more. "I will see," he says, "a good bit more--if you will let me." All agree that this is a good thing, the road to success, paved with joy. "Beware, though, my son," says the second artist, and this is the crux of the book: "It is easy to be caught up in one's own greatness, to not see the art, its value, to be led astray into silly realms, silly realms. Then it is not art, it is silly realms. You must cling to art. Own it. Make it in the beach-sand. You must do that which your heart impels you to do, and in addition you must crucify your parents to merit the name 'artist.'"
The young master is struck with horror. Crucify his parents? Fasten them to crosses? A strange proposition indeed. But if it is necessary...
The papers praise him and his work; more laud is heaped on him in a month than most artists receive in a lifetime. And remember, he's only a youth.
Soon the master is older and has grown a reddish beard and has cut off his sidelocks. He still wears a yarmulke (he is a Hasid) but only out of habit. The older he grows, the less life seems to bother him. He is truly alone.
It seems that this is a rather serious matter, this development, that he is truly, truly alone.