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The portrait-painter has a shrewd eye for character, and is usually the best anecdote-monger in the world. His craft brings him into contact with many faces, and he learns to compare them curiously, and to extract their meanings. He can interpret wrinkles; he can look through the eyes into the man; he can read a whole foregone history in the lines about the mouth.
It is easier to collect ana and to make them into the patchwork pattern of a life than to read the character of the man in his writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of colour than the homespun web of a peasant-poet. Burns has suffered sorely at the hands of the anecdote-monger. One great feature of his poems is their perfect sincerity.
The anecdote-monger began talking at once about Sinfi, Wilderspin, and Cyril Aylwin, speaking of them in the most genial and affectionate terms. In a few minutes, without withdrawing a word he had said about either of them, he had entirely changed the spirit of every word. At first I tried to resist his sophistry, but it was not to be resisted.
'I did, and I thought the gift as entirely gratuitous, mon cher, as giving a scuttleful of coals to Newcastle. The anecdote-monger stood silent, quelled by this man's voice. Then turning to me, the man of the musical voice said, 'I suppose you know something about my friend Lady Sinfi?
That he was a professional anecdote-monger of extraordinary brilliancy, a raconteur of the very first order, was evident enough. I found also that as a story-teller he was reckless and without conscience. He was, I thought, inventing anecdotes to amuse his companion, whose manifest enjoyment of them rather weakened the impression that his own personality had been making upon me.
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