… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,  Molest her ancient solitary reign.

SOOKE SAYINGS

I fear I may have made a mistake in always taking Little Sookey for one of Old Mother Dorment’s gaggle of goslings down on Telegraph Farm. He is certainly still there in the rick-yard, waddling along after Old Goosey, gabbling away and picking up the scraps, only these days he seems rather more like a Twite, that little brown bird with a pink bottom and a merry cheep. Here he is now,  twittery-twiteing on about the work of The Glasgow Boys, yet another lot of painters he never quite got round to for his GCSE (art app & flwr arr). A ‘nebulous association’ he calls them, which is to say a ‘small, cloudy, foggy, misty cluster of indistinct stars.’ Quite good really, if he meant it. I almost wish I’d thought of it. I suspect he meant ‘loose’.

You have to hand it do him, though: he does have a go at winging it, and talking about anything but painting. “Certain adjectives spring to mind”, he chatters on, “‘Charming’, ‘elegant’ and ‘lovely’ might judiciously describe their paintings” – which is of course what adjectives are judiciously supposed to do, or they’re not judicious. And there’s not much wrong with a spot of charming, elegant loveliness, I’d have thought. But no: our Sookey has a judicious doubt or two on that very point. “Whether or not these are admirable qualities, “he suggests, “depends

Not Found on your point of view.” Well yes: I suppose it does.

Yes indeed: Sookey takes judicious exception to all such admirable qualities, I mean seductive aesthetical traps and snares. We are not put into this wicked world for pleasure alone, he seems to say, and he’ll hammer the point home with every judicious adjective he can. Quite the Johnny Knox, he is. Take Guthrie’s Schoolmates, a ‘rustic scene’ of three ‘impoverished’ children walking along a lane: he doesn’t like it one bit. “Pleasing on the eye, it has been executed with skill, but the sweetness feels overdone: … the children’s faces have been meticulously finished to emphasise their pretty features and flawless, delicate complexions. The result (here we go) is a piece of whimsy (surely not)