ural fact, you may consider as
so many bits of form and color with which you may work out a scheme on
canvas; and how you do it is to consider them as pawns in your game of
aesthetics.

With these as materials, what you really do is to combine mass and
line and color by means of proportion, arrangement, contrast, and
accent, that a beautiful entity of harmony, balance, rhythm, grace,
dignity, and force may result. And this is composition.

=No Rules.=--Naturally in dealing with a thing like this, which is the
very essence of art, rules are of very little use. Ability in
composition may be acquired when it is not natural, but it calls for a
continuous training of the sense of proportion and arrangement, just
as the development of any other ability calls for training.

The best thing that you can do is to study good examples and try to
appreciate, not only their beauty, but how and why they are beautiful.
Cultivate your taste in that direction; and with the taste to like
good and dislike bad composition will come the feeling which tells you
when it is good and when it is bad, and this feeling you can apply to
your own work, and by experiment you will gain knowledge and skill.

Rules are not possible simply because they are limitations, and the
true composer will always overstep a limitation of that kind, and with
a successful result.

Principles of composition, too, must be variously adapted, according
to the kind of picture you have in hand. The principles are the same,
of course; but as the materials differ in a figure painting and a
landscape, for instance, you must apply them to meet that difference.

=Suggestions.=--The first suggestion that might be made as a help to
the study of composition is to consider your picture as a whole
always. No matter how many figures, no matter how many groups, they
must all be considered as parts of a _whole_, which must have no
effect of being too much broken up.

If the figures are scattered, they must be scattered in such a way
that they suggest a logical connection between them as individuals in
each group, and groups in a whole. There should usually be a main
mass, and the others subsidiary masses. There should be a centre of
interest of some sort, whether it be a color, a mass, or a thing; and
this centre should be the point to which all the other parts balance.

=Simplicity= is a good word to have in mind. However complicated the
composition may seem superficially, you