All this chatter, I am aware, has nothing to do with Art, that is to say the “Art of Painting”; that large, severe-looking female you sometimes see crouched in an uncomfortable position on a still more uncomfortable cornice of a public building, wearing a laurel wreath and a granite peplum, and holding in her hand a huge stone palette.
But sometimes this severe female climbs down from her stone perch and takes a day off, Coney Island-wise, on the billboards and street cars, and then if she is not always at her best, she is often very amusing.
And just because a goddess isn’t stuck up it doesn’t prove that she isn’t a goddess—does it?
THE LURE OF THE “AD”
Kipling once, when sojourning in a far country, complained bitterly of the thoughtlessness of his friends at home in sending him a batch of magazines shorn (to save postage) of all the advertisements. Which shows that the most grown-up of artists may still have the heart of a child.
For my part, if I were forced to make choice between the advertising pages and the reading matter (so-called), I should in nine periodicals out of ten choose the former.
To the grown-up child the advertising section of the magazine takes the place of the Shop-Window of infancy through which, with bulging eyes and mouth agape, like some mazed minnow staring at the submerged Rhine-Gold, he once gazed at the tinsel treasure so bitterly beyond his penny’s reach.