five-ten. Would you say that a book is bound to be bad because it
appeals to Jones? Then again, take Tomlinson: he lives, as you are
well aware, at Forest Gate which is Epping way, and entertains you on
Kakemonos whenever you call upon him. You know what I mean, of
course. I think 'Kakemono' is right. They are long things; they
look like coloured hieroglyphics printed on brown paper. He gets
behind them and holds them up above his head on the end of a stick so
that you can see the whole of them at once; and he tells you the name
of the Japanese artist who painted them in the year 1500 B.C., and
what it is all about. He shows them to you by the hour and forgets
to give you dinner. There isn't an easy chair in the house. To put
it vulgarly, what is wrong with Tomlinson from a high art point of
view?

"There's a man I know who lives in Birmingham: you must have heard
of him. He is the great collector of Eighteenth Century caricatures,
the Rowlandson and Gilray school of things. I don't call them
artistic myself; they make me ill to look at them; but people who
understand Art rave about them. Why can't a man be artistic who has
got a cottage in the country?"

"You don't understand me," retorted my critical friend, a little
irritably, as I thought.

"I admit it," I returned. "It is what I am trying to do."

"Of course artistic people live in the suburbs," he admitted. "But
they are not of the suburbs."

"Though they may dwell in Wimbledon or Hornsey," I suggested, "they