So! This profound bow is plainly meant for a particular tribute to one
who wears the richest purple. Lo! He advances with unclasped hands.
Pleasure beams from his countenance. Without such as she Art, and
dealers, and galleries, and the recorded beauty of the world would
perforce pass away. This entertaining personage, who is the great flurry
at art exhibitions, is of the novelists' dowager Duchess type. A short,
obese, and jovial figure, or dried and withered but imperious
distinction, as the case may be. There is much crackling of fine
garments, a brilliant display of lorgnette, and this penetrating and
comprehensive royal critical dictum: "Isn't that interesting! So full of
feeling."

Two outstanding features, you mark, of art exhibitions everywhere are
here presented. Is any one who doesn't know what he is talking about at
art exhibitions (and which of us does?) properly equipped for attendance
there without this happy esoteric phrase "full of feeling"? It is safe,
or as safe as anything can be, to say about any picture. It graphically
indicates in the speaker delicate sensitivity and emotional
responsiveness to Art. And, most beneficently, it subtly evades anything
like the trying ordeal of an analysis of a work of art. It is, indeed,
invaluable.

The other thing is this: There is no place going which is so well adapted
to the exhibition of handsome, fashionable, or eccentric eye-glasses as
an art exhibition. You observe there all that is newest and classy in
glasses, and you are insistently invited to admiring study of the art of
wearing queer glasses effectively, and of taking them off, letting them
bound on their leash, doubling them up, opening them out, and putting
them on with a gesture.