you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who
can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest
houses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing
is, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts
half as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people
he produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them,
and while he talks he seems to make them live, so that I can hardly
believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any one
you ever saw.

Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like
that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but
merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived,
every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a
kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't
matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that
matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture
is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall
away off at Assisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to
a lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and looking
pleased--the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm
or fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person
too, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really
true, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter
helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with 'Let's
pretend'?--well, that's art. Art is pretending, or most of it is.
Pictures take us into a world of make-believe, a world of imagination,
where everything is or should be in the right place and in the right
light and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressed
to match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, and