The mention of artists’ names has been limited, and a liberal allusion to many works avoided because to multiply them is both confusing and unnecessary.
To the art lover this book may be found of interest as containing the _reasons_ in picture composition, and through them an aid to critical judgment. We adapt our education from quaint and curious sources. It is the apt correlation of the arts which accounts for the acknowledgment by an English story writer that she got her style from Ruskin’s “Principles of Drawing”; and of a landscape painter that to sculpture he owed his discernment of the forest secrets, by daily observing the long lines of statues in the corridor of the Royal Academy; or by the composer of pictures to the composer of music; or by the preacher that suggestions to discourse had come to him through the pictorial processes of the painter.
CHAPTER II - THE SCIENTIFIC SENSE IN PICTURES
The poet-philosopher Emerson declared that he studied geology that he might better write poetry.
For a moment the two elements of the proposition stand aghast and defiant; but only for a moment. The poet, who from the top looks down upon the whole horizon of things can never use the tone of authority if his gaze be a surface one. He must know things in their depth in order that the glance may be sufficient.
The poet leaves his geology and botany, his grammar and rhetoric on the shelf when he makes his word picture. After he has expressed his thought however he may have occasion to call on the books of science, the grammar and rhetoric and _these may very seriously interfere with the spontaneous product._ So do the sentries posted on the boundary of the painter’s art protect it from the liberties taken in the name of originality.
“The progressive element in our art,” says the author of “The Law of Progress in Art,” “is the scientific element. . . . Artists will not be any more famous for being scientific, but they are compelled to become scientific because they have embraced a profession which includes science. What I desire to enforce is the great truth that _within_ the art of painting there exists, flourishes and advances a noble and glorious _science_ which is essential and progressive.”