Admonishment #814.  Don’t Judge a Painting By What’s In It.

Bobby Service—poet/writer Robert W. Service, to the stiff—who gave us countless classics like “The Ballads of a Cheechako” and “Rhymes of a Red Cross Man,” was a master at distilling the essence of a scene and conveying its texture in a few evocative, lyrical lines that sounded as naturally composed as a neighborly conversation.  Way to go, Bobb-o!  He was a rock star of the early twentieth century, probably too popular to be respected by the snotsigentsia and too entertaining to claim his due as philosopher and incisive social observer.  If to the snotsi he’s just an uppity bank clerk grandiloquently posing but fatally saturated with plebeian sensibilities—just saying if, I can’t confirm it—then they are excused from this Admonishment because it will be to them naught but anathema.

I haled me a woman from the street,
   Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model’s seat
   And I painted her sitting there.    

I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
   I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
   If Worst had been the Best.

She laughed at my picture and went away.
   Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
   “ ’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.”

So I painted a halo round her hair,
   And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hilaire,
   Where you and all may see.