on of infinite scope? and they are purely
intellectual. What may be done with them may be done, primarily,
without taking into consideration the representation of any material
fact whatsoever. Take as the type, conventional ornament. You can make
the most exquisite combinations, in which the only interest and charm
lies in the fact of those combinations in line and mass and color.

Take architecture. Quite aside from the use of the building is the
aesthetic resultant from combinations of line and mass and color.

And so in the picture the question of _art_, the question of aesthetic
entity, lies in the intellectual qualities of combinations of line and
mass and color which permeate through and through the technical and
material structure that you call the picture, and give it whatever
universal and permanent value it has, and which make it immortal, if
immortal it ever can be.

=Composition.=--The bearing of all this on composition should be
obvious, for composition is the technique of combination. In the
composition of a picture all the elements come into play. It is in
composition that the management of the abstract results in the
concrete.

Let us look at it from a more practical side. Frankly, there are
qualities, which you always look for in a picture,--good drawing, of
course, and good color. But there are such things as these: Harmony,
Balance, Rhythm, Grace, Impressiveness, Force, Dignity. Where do they
come from? Must not every good picture have them, or some of them, to
some extent? How are you going to get them? If you have fifteen or
twenty square feet or square yards of surface, you will not get them
onto it by unaided inspiration. Inspiration is, like any other
intellectual quality, quite logical, only it acts more quickly and
takes longer steps between conclusions perhaps. You will get these
qualities onto your canvas only by so arranging all the objects which
make up the body of your picture that these qualities shall be the
result. It is arrangement then.

=Arrangement.=--But arrangement of what? how? The objects. But on some
principle back of them. Consider another set of qualities: proportion,
i.e., relative size; arrangement, relative position; contrast;
accent,--these are what you manipulate your objects with, and your
objects themselves are only line and mass and color in the concrete.
Objects, figures, bric-a-brac, draperies, houses and trees, skies and
mountains, and every and any other nat