ely from within, a procedure
which is the exact opposite to that of his first beginnings. He
conceives the length, breadth and depth of an object and all its parts
as solid wholes. To him a body in violent foreshortening is as easy as a
simple profile, and, though it may not be as attractive, it is perhaps
more interesting because its contours are more bound up with, and
dependent upon, the inner modelling; in other words, it has more depth.
The draughtsman's idea of a form in nature is not a "flat idea," but one
containing three dimensions. This idea he seeks to express either by
line alone or by light and shade. If an artist has not a
three-dimensional "grasp" of forms, and, like a child, confines himself
to the primitive tracing of the silhouette, his compositions may be of
excellent flat pattern, and equal to any of the designs of ancient
carpets or early Greek vases; but in the light of the above argument,
and when compared with the productions of mature draughtsmen of all ages
and countries, they cannot be said to be complete drawings, any more
than the early unifacial statues of the Greeks can be called true
plastic, simply because in neither case has the artist yet reached the
highest possible development of corporeous conception, by which truly to
interpret the solid objects of nature as we know them, and as master
draughtsmen see them.

An attempt should be made to explain the psycho-physiological process
that must take place in the mind of the real draughtsman. When we look
at an object in nature we know its length and breadth by the flat image
on the retina; we see also the light and shade, which at once gives us a
correct idea of the object's depth or relief. But we do not, nor could
we, have this idea from the flat image on the retina alone, i.e. from
the mere perception of the light and shade: our knowledge of its depth
is the result of experience, i.e. of our having from infancy remarked a
certain dispensation of light and shade on, and peculiar to, every form
we have touched or traversed, and so, by association and inference,
being early enabled to have ideas of the depth of things by their
various arrangements of lights and darks without having to touch or
traverse them. Nevertheless the act (generally, but by no means always,
an unconscious one) of visually touching a form must necessarily take
place before we can apprehend the third dimension of a form. It is,
then, by the combination of the ideas de