They hang on my walls now. They represent nothing in particular; but in certain lights, if you look very closely, you can easily recognize something in them that looks like a lump of something brown. There is one very ugly woman with a convulsive child in her arms, to which Mrs. P. directly takes all her visitors, and asks them to admire the beautiful Shay douver of Giddo’s. When I go out to dinner with people that talk pictures and books, and that kind of thing, I don’t like to seem behind, so I say, in a critical way, that Giddo was a good painter. None of them contradict me, and one day when somebody asked, “Which of his pictures do you prefer?” I answered straight, “His Shay douver,” and no more questions were asked.
They hang all about the house now. The Giddo is in the dining room. I asked the Sennaar Minister if it wasn’t odd to have a religious picture in the dining-room. He smiled, and said that it was perfectly proper if I liked it, and if the picture of such an ugly woman didn’t take away my appetite.
“What difference does it make,” said he, in the Sennaar manner, “it would be equally out of keeping with every other room in your house. My dear Potiphar, it is a perfectly unprincipled house, this of yours. If your mind were in the condition of your house, so ill-assorted, so confused, so overloaded with things that don’t belong together, you would never make another cent. You have order, propriety, harmony, in your dealings with the Symmes’s Hole Bore Co., and they are the secrets of your success. Why not have the same elements in your house? Why pitch every century, country, and fashion, higgledy-piggledly into your parlors and dining-room? Have everything you can get, in heaven’s name, but have everything in its place. If you are a plodding tradesman, knowing and caring nothing about pictures, or books, or statuary, or objets de vertu; don’t have them. Suppose your neighbor chooses to put them in his house. If he has them merely because he had the money to pay for them, he is the butt of every picture and book he owns.”
When I meet Mr. Croesus in Wall street, I respect him as I do a king in his palace, or a scholar in his study. He is master of the occasion. He commands like Nelson at the Nile. I, who am merely a diplomatist, skulk and hurry along, and if Mr. Croesus smiles, I inwardly thank him for his charity. Wall street is Croesus’s sphere, and all his powers play there perfectly. But when I meet him in his house, surrounded by objects of art, by the triumphs of a skill which he does not understand, and for which he cares nothing,—of which, in fact, he seems afraid, because he knows any chance question about them would trip him up,—my feeling is very much changed. If I should ask him what or molu is, I don’t believe he could answer, though his splendid or molu clock rang, indignant, from the mantel. But if I should say, ‘Invest me this thousand dollars,’ he would secure me eight per cent. It certainly isn’t necessary to know what or molu is, nor to have any other objet de vertu but your wife. Then why should you barricade yourself behind all these things that you really cannot enjoy, because you don’t understand? If you could not read Italian, you would be a fool to buy Dante, merely because you knew he was a great poet. And, in the same way, if you know nothing about matters of art, it is equally foolish for you to buy statues and pictures, although you hear on all sides that, as Mrs. P. says, one must love art.
“As for learning from your own pictures, you know perfectly well, that until you have some taste in the matter, you will be paying money for your pictures blindly, so that the only persons upon whom your display of art would make any impression, will be the very ones to see that you know nothing about it.
“In Sennaar, a man is literally ‘the master of the house.’ He isn’t surrounded by what he does not understand; he is not obliged to talk book, and picture, when he knows nothing about these matters. He is not afraid of his parlor, and you feel instantly upon entering the house, the character of the master. Please, my dear Mr. Potiphar, survey your mansion, and tell me what kind of a man it indicates. If it does not proclaim (in your case) the President of the Patagonia Junction, a man shrewd, and hard, and solid, without taste or liberal cultivation, it is a painted deceiver. If it tries to insinuate by this chaotic profusion of rich and rare objects, that you are a cultivated, accomplished, tasteful, and generous man, it is a bad lie, because a transparent one. Why, my dear old Pot., the moment your servant opens the front door, a man of sense perceives the whole thing. You and Mrs. Potiphar are bullied by all the brilliancy you have conjured up. It is the old story of the fisherman and the genii. And your guests all see it. They are too well-bred to speak of it; but I come from Sennaar, where we do not lay so much stress upon that kind of good-breeding.
“Mr. Paul Potiphar, it is one thing to have plenty of money, and quite another to know how to spend it.”
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Now, as I told him, this kind of talk may do very well in Sennaar, but it is absurd in a country like ours. How are people to know that I’m rich, unless I show it? I’m sorry for it, but how shall I help it, having Mrs. P. at hand?
“How about the library?” said she one day.