To be told that their sins are of such blackness gives them a pleasing sense of their own importance. It is a sensation worth the buying. It would be hardly, I think, too fanciful to draw a parallel between the artist and the courtesan. The real courtesan, I mean; not the poor drabs who trudge by night down Shaftesbury Avenue. One thinks of “Skittles” driving down Hyde Park in the sixties, to hold a levee by the Achilles statue; “Skittles” who broke hearts and homes and fortunes; Skittles who outlived her friends, her beauty, and her generation to die three years ago unremembered. There is more than a slight resemblance between the life of such a one and of the artist. Like her, he has no social status; like her, he is bought and used and flung away. He pleases as she pleases, for a while, through freshness and vitality and novelty; and those that have had their entertainment, feel no after sense of obligation. As long as he so pleases he is granted a wide licence to flout the conventions with which society has thought it wise to protect itself. Society knows that he is not of her, and she can afford to wait. Everything is forgiven to an “artistic temperament” as long as that temperament is the property of a skilful entertainer. The artist can make what hash he likes of his private life. He can refuse to be accepted without his mistress: and, on the whole, the public prefers its entertainer not to be domesticated like itself. A popular novelist, who had contributed a serial to a Sunday newspaper, was asked to provide the editor with a photograph. He sent a pleasant snap of himself, in his garden, with his wife and children. The snap was returned. “Our readers,” the editor said, “would prefer not to think of you as a married man.”