Part 11 (1/2)

There's a shoemaker I wot of in the mortal realms who can turn the prettiest last you ever saw; and I encountered a carver in a London eating-house last month who turned out a slice of beef that was cut as artistically as I could have done it myself. What I object to chiefly is the tendency of the times. This is an electrical age, and men in my old profession aren't content to turn out one _chef-d'oeuvre_ in a lifetime.

They take orders by the gross. I waited upon inspiration. To-day the sculptor waits upon custom, and an artist will make a bust of anybody in any material desired as long as he is sure of getting his pay afterwards.

I saw a life-size statue of the inventor of a new kind of lard the other day, and what do you suppose the material was? Gold? Not by a great deal. Ivory? Marble, even? Not a bit of it. He was done in lard, sir.

I have seen a woman's head done in b.u.t.ter, too, and it makes me distinctly weary to think that my art should be brought so low.”

”You did your best work in Greece,” chuckled Homer.

”A bad joke, my dear Homer,” retorted Phidias. ”I thought sculpture was getting down to a pretty low ebb when I had to fas.h.i.+on friezes out of marble; but marble is more precious than rubies alongside of b.u.t.ter and lard.”

”Each has its uses,” said Homer. ”I'd rather have b.u.t.ter on my bread than marble, but I must confess that for sculpture it is very poor stuff, as you say.”

”It is indeed,” said Phidias. ”For practice it's all right to use b.u.t.ter, but for exhibition purposes--bah!”

Here Phidias, to show his contempt for b.u.t.ter as raw material in sculpture, seized a wooden toothpick, and with it modelled a beautiful head of Minerva out of the pat that stood upon the small plate at his side, and before Burns could interfere had spread the chaste figure as thinly as he could upon a piece of bread, which he tossed to the shade of a hungry dog that stood yelping on the river-bank.

”Heavens!” cried Burns. ”Imperious Caesar dead and turned to bricks is as nothing to a Minerva carved by Phidias used to stay the hunger of a ravening cur.”

”Well, it's the way I feel,” said Phidias, savagely.

”I think you are a trifle foolish to be so eternally vexed about it,”

said Homer, soothingly. ”Of course you feel badly, but, after all, what's the use? You must know that the mortals would pay more for one of your statues than they would for a specimen of any modern sculptor's art; yes, even if yours were modelled in wine-jelly and the other fellow's in pure gold. So why repine?”

”You'd feel the same way if poets did a similarly vulgar thing,” retorted Phidias; ”you know you would. If you should hear of a poet to-day writing a poem on a thin layer of lard or b.u.t.ter, you would yourself be the first to call a halt.”

”No, I shouldn't,” said Homer, quietly; ”in fact, I wish the poets would do that. We'd have fewer bad poems to read; and that's the way you should look at it. I venture to say that if this modern plan of making busts and friezes in b.u.t.ter had been adopted at an earlier period, the public places in our great cities and our national Walhallas would seem less like repositories of comic art, since the first critical rays of a warm sun would have reduced the carven atrocities therein to a spot on the pavement. The b.u.t.ter school of sculpture has its advantages, my boy, and you should be crowning the inventor of the system with laurel, and not heaping coals of fire upon his brow.”

”That,” said Burns, ”is, after all, the solid truth, Phidias. Take the bra.s.s caricatures of me, for instance. Where would they be now if they had been cast in lard instead of in bronze?”

Phidias was silent a moment.

”Well,” he said, finally, as the value of the plan dawned upon his mind, ”from that point of view I don't know but what you are right, after all; and, to show that I have spoken in no vindictive spirit, let me propose a toast. Here's to the b.u.t.ter Sculptors. May their b.u.t.ter never give out.”

The toast was drained to the dregs, and Phidias went home feeling a little better.

CHAPTER X: STORY-TELLERS' NIGHT

It was Story-tellers' Night at the house-boat, and the best talkers of Hades were impressed into the service. Doctor Johnson was made chairman of the evening.

”Put him in the chair,” said Raleigh. ”That's the only way to keep him from telling a story himself. If he starts in on a tale he'll make it a serial sure as fate, but if you make him the medium through which other story-tellers are introduced to the club he'll be finely epigrammatic. He can be very short and sharp when he's talking about somebody else.

Personality is his forte.”

”Great scheme,” said Diogenes, who was chairman of the entertainment committee. ”The nights over here are long, but if Johnson started on a story they'd have to reach twice around eternity and halfway back to give him time to finish all he had to say.”

”He's not very witty, in my judgment,” said Carlyle, who since his arrival in the other world has manifested some jealousy of Solomon and Doctor Johnson.

”That's true enough,” said Raleigh; ”but he's strong, and he's bound to say something that will put the audience in sympathy with the man that he introduces, and that's half the success of a Story-tellers' Night. I've told stories myself. If your audience doesn't sympathize with you you'd be better off at home putting the baby to bed.”

And so it happened. Doctor Johnson was made chairman, and the evening came. The Doctor was in great form. A list of the story-tellers had been sent him in advance, and he was prepared. The audience was about as select a one as can be found in Hades. The doors were thrown open to the friends of the members, and the smoke-furnace had been filled with a very superior quality of Arcadian mixture which Scott had brought back from a haunting-trip to the home of ”The Little Minister,” at Thrums.