hat one man will divide up a row of eight marbles into groups of four,
and another into five and three? The subjectivity of experience governs
the different conceptions that good draughtsmen will form of the same
object. Accordingly as a draughtsman feels form so will he draw it, and
it is only because our sense apparatuses are more or less similarly
constituted that we can understand and appreciate one another's
conceptions.

But if the master draughtsman gives the true character of his model's
form, why is it that his drawings are not pleasing to all alike? Whence
the doubts and criticism that have been called forth by all original
artists? If we first examine the attitude of the average man, artist or
layman, towards nature, we can better explain his attitude towards works
of art. The average man or artist has not a highly developed
appreciation of form _per se_, whether it be the form of natural or
manufactured objects. And it would seem that he is still less a
disinterested spectator of the forms and features of his fellow beings
and animals, their movements, their colour, their value in a room or
landscape. He has sentimental, moral or intellectual preferences. In
other words, he likes or dislikes only those faces or figures which
hundreds of personal associations have taught him to like or dislike.
The riding man's admiration for the look of a particular horse is based
upon the fact that it looks like "a horse to go," and hence it is what
he calls beautiful, while the artist, in the capacity of artist and not
of sportsman, is not particular in his choice of horse-flesh, but finds
each animal equally interesting for itself alone. Consequently in art
any face, figure or object that does not come into the category of what
the average man cares for is condemned by him even as it would be in
real life, since he is no lover of form for form's sake, but provided
the subject or moral be pleasing the quality of the draughtsmanship is
of small account. The picture of a dwarf, or of an anatomy lesson, or of
a group of ordinary bourgeois folk would not really please him, even
though he were told that the work was by Velazquez, Rembrandt or Manet.
We have only to listen to the common criticism of works of art to know
that it is founded upon personal predilection only. We do not hear such
personal criticism upon drawings of landscape, not because artists do
them better, but because natural landscape has no interest for any one