hould hardly have time to go up
there to-day. I'll tell you about it. There are several reasons why
this exhibition is the most human perhaps of all. One is that more
people go than to any other. And these people, taken by and large, are
more human, too, than one sees at most art exhibitions, that is more like
just ordinary people. This may be, for one thing, because the pictures
as a rule are more ordinary pictures. And a very human touch, indeed, is
this: when you see the card "Sold" on a painting it is fairly certain to
be one of the most ordinary pictures of the lot.

That reminds one of museums. People who are called in the world to the
curious pursuit of copying pictures in museums, for some reason or other
which I have been unable as yet to work out, apparently always copy the
most bourgeois pictures there. But museums, with their throngs of
subdued holiday makers and their crowds of weary gaping aliens of the
submerged order, museums comprise a separate study.

At any rate, I hope in our stroll I have been able to give you a new
insight into the fascination of the great world of Art.

IV

A ROUNDABOUT PAPER

No reader of _The Spectator_ will have forgotten an article which
appeared there some years ago entitled "As to Bears." Or ever will
forget it until his shall be "the shut lid and the granite lip of him
who has done with sunsets and skating, and has turned away his face
from all manner of Irish," as William Vaughn Moody says. Not only
because it was one of the finest things ever in _The Spectator_, or
anywhere else (after, possibly, that imperishable dissertation of the
great Dean's--or was it Sir William Temple's?--"On a Broomstick"), but
also because it was one pure flower in our day of a kind of art little
cultivated any more. "As to Bears." All, me! How engaging, simple,
gracious, and at ease; what perfection of literary breeding; what an
amused and genial wave of the finger tips; how marked by good-humoured
acuteness, and animated nonchalance; how saturated with a
distinguished, humane tradition of letters--that title!

That is just the note I would strike in the great book I have been
brooding for years, "Bums I Have Known." It has been my felicity to
have known more bums, I think, than any living man. But I fear I shall
never get that book written. And this is a pity. It is a pity because
this book would be of great value in the years to come. With our
modern passion for