ical friend and he countered by quoting
Dickens' delightful fraud, "Harold Skimpole":

"This is where the bird lives and sings! They pluck his
feathers now and then, and clip his wings, but he sings, he
sings!... Not an ambitious note, but still he sings!"

And my friend proceeded heartlessly: "'Skimpole' would have made a
perfect Villager!"

It is hard to answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm
poetry. Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the
languages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need an interpreter and
the post is not a sinecure.

I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on these Villagers whom I
love and whom I know to be as alien to the average metropolitan
consciousness and perception as though they were aboriginal
representatives of interior and unexplored China. They are perhaps
chiefly strange because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity.

The artistic instinct, or impulse, is not particularly rare. Many
persons have a real love for beautiful things, even a real aptitude
for designing or reproducing them. The creative instinct is something
vastly different. Creative artists,--great painters or sculptors,
great illustrators, and wizards in pencil and pen and charcoal
effects,--must be both born and made; and there are, the gods know,
few enough of them, all told! Until comparatively recent times,
everyone gifted with the blessing of an artistic sense turned it into
a curse by trying to paint, draw or model, while the world yawned,
laughed, turned away in disgust; and the real artists flung up their
hands to heaven and cried: "What next?"

But lately,--in many places, but preeminently in Greenwich
Village,--these folk who love art, but can't achieve great art
expression, have evolved a new sort of art life. They are developing
the embryo of what was the arts-and-crafts idea into a really fine,
useful and satisfying art form. They have left mission furniture and
Morris designs behind. They are making their own models, and making
them well. They are turning their restless, beauty-loving energies
into sound, constructive channels. The girl who otherwise might have
painted atrocious pictures is, in the Village, decorating
delightful-looking boxes and jars, or hammering metals into quaint,
original shapes that embody her own fleeting fancies. The man who
wanted to draw but could never get his perspective right is carving
wood--a work where perspectiv