always
such nice neat soldiers, and they never have their uniforms mussed up or
their accouterments disarranged, even when they are being shot up or cut
down or something. Corot and Rousseau did some landscapes that seem to
approximate the real thing, and there are several others whose names
escape me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish to say that this is
about as far as I can go at this writing. I must admit that I have never
been held spellbound and enthralled for hours on a stretch by a
contemplation of the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To me she seems
merely a lady smiling about something--simply that and nothing more.

[Illustration: "THE INSCRUTABLE SMILE OF A SALESLADY WOULD MAKE MONA
LISA SEEM A MERE AMATEUR"]

Any woman can smile inscrutably; that is one of the specialties of the
sex. The inscrutable smile of a saleslady in an exclusive Fifth Avenue
shop when a customer asks to look at something a little cheaper would
make Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur as an inscrutable smiler. Quite a
number of us remained perfectly calm when some gentlemen stole Miss Lisa
out of the Louvre, and we expect to remain equally calm if she is never
restored.

As I said before, our little band is shrinking in numbers day by day.
The population as a whole are being educated up to higher ideals in art.
On the wings of symbolism and idealism they are soaring ever higher and
higher, until a whole lot of them must be getting dizzy in the head by
now.

First, there was the impressionistic school, which started it; and then
there was the post-impressionistic school, suffering from the same
disease but in a more violent form; and here just recently there have
come along the Cubists and the Futurists.

[Illustration: "A PERSON WHO FOR REASONS BEST KNOWN TO THE POLICE HAS
NOT BEEN LOCKED UP"]

You know about the Cubists? A Cubist is a person who for reasons best
known to the police has not been locked up yet, who asserts that all
things in Nature, living and inanimate, properly resolve themselves into
cubes. What is more, he goes and paints pictures to prove it--pictures
of cubic waterfalls pouring down cubic precipices, and cubic ships
sailing on cubic oceans, and cubic cows being milked by cubic milkmaids.
He makes portraits, too--portraits of persons with cubic hands and cubic
feet, who are smoking cubed cigarettes and have solid cubiform heads. On
that last proposition we are with them unanimously; we will concede that
the