“You’r’ in on all this, an’ we want you to stick ’round ’ere w’en you ain’t got nothin’ else to do. You knowed us w’en we didn’t ’ave a dollar, an’ you thought jest as much of us, so you quit talkin’ ’bout payin’ fer sky-view glass. There’s nothin’ doin’!”
During the afternoon we heard intermittent strains of “Money-Musk” from the new mouth organ in the kitchen, accompanied by experimental fingering of the ukelele. Narcissus had devised an ingenious framework, which he had put on his head, to hold the mouth organ in place, and enable him to use his hands for the other instrument, but it was only partially successful.
One of the objects of the winter visit was to make some sketches of Saunders and Narcissus for this volume, which had been neglected during the fall. They seemed pleased, and were willing models. Saunders insisted on wetting and combing his hair carefully, and getting into stilted attitudes. He was finally persuaded to let his hair alone and wear his old cap. He was anxious that his ancient meerschaum pipe should be in the picture. It seeped with the nicotine of many years.
“The tobaccy that’s been puffed in that ol’ pipe ’ud cover a ten-acre lot,” he declared, and I believed him. “You can’t show that in the pitcher, but you c’n make it look kind o’ dark like. Gener’ly I smoke ‘Bosun’s Delight’ an’ it’s pretty good. It’s strong stuff an’ none of it ever gits swiped.”
When the drawing was finished he criticized it severely, which was quite natural, for no human being is entirely without vanity. Portrait artists, like courtiers, must flatter to succeed.
Narcissus also wanted a pipe in his picture. He thought it would look better than a mouth organ, and, as it was much easier to draw, I humored him. He posed with unctuous ceremony, and assumed some most serious and baffling expressions.
Sipes watched the proceedings with interest, and enlivened them with running comment.
“I been through all that lots o’ times. You fellers ain’t got nothin’ on me, an’ if you ever git in a book you’ll look like a couple o’ horse thieves. I know wot e’ done to me.”
The disapproval of these particular sketches was probably deserved. It is a fact, however, that, while readily admitting limitations in other fields of knowledge, there are few people who hesitate to criticize any kind of art work authoritatively. Their immunity from error seems to them remarkable, and to be the result of a natural instinct that they have possessed from childhood. “I know what I like” is a common and much abused expression. They who use it usually do not know what they like or what they ought to like. The phrase covers infinite ignorance, with a complacent disposition of the subject. The assumption of critical infallibility is complete before a portrait of the critic.
Many otherwise intelligent critics respect only age and established art dogma. The dead masters haunt pedantic essayists and opulent purchasers, who accept embalmed opinions that they would be incapable of forming for themselves. Extended consideration of this subject is out of place amid the landscapes of Duneland, where the shades of the justly revered old painters may have deserted their madonnas and be wielding spiritual brushes, charged with elusive tints that flow unerringly upon canvases as tenuous as the evening mists. On them filmy portraits of the old dwellers along the shore may take form and vanish with the morning light, for in these rugged faces are the same attributes that made humanity picturesque centuries ago. If one of these portraits could suddenly materialize, it would bring a staggering price, if there was no suspicion that a modern had painted it. Some stray rhymester has aptly said: