about him, but if there was anything in physiognomy he must have been a ward-heeler who had sandbagged his way to the head of the machine. Miss Allen had not been able to avoid laughing at him outright then, and Miss Mills's look had been all too eloquent.
But the worst was the pig-headed provinciality of his attitude about picture-galleries, his avowal of a regular commercial-traveler's ignorance of paintings and his refusal to try to learn to appreciate them. "There are only, so far as I can make out," he said, "about a dozen canvases in all Europe that I really like to look at. And you don't catch me trailing around till my feet drop off, looking at all the thousands of second-raters that give me a pain. Why should I?"
Livingstone was so shocked and grieved by the crassness of such a statement that he really longed to take Crittenden in hand. He knew so well how to learn to like pictures, because (although he would not have admitted it to any one) he had begun as crassly as Crittenden. He knew what to do; he could tell Crittenden step by step how to pull himself up to a higher level, because he had done it himself. You read esthetic books, lots of them, and all the descriptions of paintings you could lay your hands on, and all the stories you could find in Vasari or any one else about the lives of the painters (Livingstone had a whole shelf of books of that sort that were fascinating reading—as amusing as La Vie Parisienne)—and you read what Ruskin and Symonds had thought about this or that canvas, and what Berenson's researches had proved about its authenticity. If you could, you took the book right along with you to the gallery, reading about the picture as you looked at it; and you kept at it till you did see in it what people said was there. That was the way to form your taste! Even Crittenden could get somewhere along those lines if he tried.
But he seemed to have no interest in anything but history and Michael Angelo; Crittenden was perversely fond of dragging them over to the Sistine Chapel till their heads were ready to drop off with the neck-breaking fatigue of staring up at those sprawling figures.
