My immortal fellow guest once said that it was ‘funnier to have a nose than to have a Roman nose.’ There are many things like that. For example: it is funnier to be a Catholic than a Roman Catholic—that is to say it is funnier that a man should have any religion than that he should have the true one. Again it is much funnier to wear trousers than to wear Bond Street trousers, and when I sit eating my lunch in a Lyons teashop it becomes abundantly clear that it is much funnier to eat anything at all than it is to eat even the Lyons’ portion.

But, thinking of this meeting, perhaps the funniest thing of all funny things is the thing called art. It is funnier that there should be art than that there should be any particular kind of art, however fantastic.

And this is specially true in these days. The word Art of course means first of all simply skill—human skill. Thus we have the art of the dentist and that of the pickpocket and thus we have the word ‘artful,’ which is much the same as ‘crafty.’ But there is a special sense of the word art which we are concerned with here and in this sense art is not mere skill, though it involves skill (for nothing can be done or made without at least a little skill).