g Cross? Is the cheesemonger of
Tottenham Court Road of necessity a man of taste, and the Oxford
professor of necessity a Philistine? I want to understand this thing. I
once hazarded the direct question to a critical friend:

"You say a book is suburban," I put it to him, "and there is an end to
the matter. But what do you mean by suburban?"

"Well," he replied, "I mean it is the sort of book likely to appeal to
the class that inhabits the suburbs." He lived himself in Chancery Lane.

May a man of intelligence live, say, in Surbiton?

"But there is Jones, the editor of _The Evening Gentleman_," I argued;
"he lives at Surbiton. It is just twelve miles from Waterloo. He comes
up every morning by the eight-fifteen and returns again by the 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 sing
with the Scotch bard: 'My heart is in the South-West postal district. My
heart is not here.'"

"You can put it that way if you like," he growled.

"I will, if you have no objection,"