while he talked, but he should paint them too.  I want to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaks and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some gold and silver too, and not merely black and white—­though black and white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like.  I could put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid.  Don’t 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 not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game.  That’s the difference between pictures and photographs.  A photograph is almost always wrong somewhere.  Something is out of place, or something is there which ought to be away, or the light is wrong; or, if it’s coloured, the colours are just not in keeping with one another.  If it’s a landscape the trees are where we don’t want them; they hide what we want to see, or they don’t hide the very thing we want hidden.  Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and a wind ruffles the water just where we want to see something