diminished. If, then, drawing can be judged and
appreciated only by knowledge and experience of the forms of nature, no
critical formula could be made out so as to enable a child or savage or
ordinary civilized adult to estimate or enjoy it. If it be argued that
drawings are to be judged from some abstract or symbolic point of view,
independently of its subtle representation of form, then incompetent
drawing might be as beautiful as the competent, which would be absurd.
However, if the competent characterization of form were admitted as at
least the first condition of beautiful drawing, it would follow that
any abstract value it might have must be wholly dependent upon the
manner in which form is represented, and so it would be superfluous to
judge it by any standard other than the direct, definite and concrete
one of form. Abstract beauty, since no one has yet defined it agreeably
to all, is, apparently, with those who affect a feeling for it, a matter
of individual taste, and therefore cannot be questioned. But the clear
visualization of the forms of nature is based upon a special endowment
and knowledge, and can be criticized by demonstration. People may differ
in their tastes, but they may not, nor do they, differ upon questions of
real knowledge. Drawing, as the activity of giving one's ideas of form,
must therefore be judged not by taste but by knowledge.

In view of the purpose and content of drawing as here demonstrated,
there is no other principle of judgment that is relevant. Yet we often
hear drawing judged by criteria which are founded upon no such concrete
base but upon certain vague abstractions; or, again, upon a literary or
moral base which could be applicable only to symbolic art.

It is said that this or that draughtsman excels in "beauty of line." Now
in spite of the labours of many painters and theorists, it cannot
reasonably be held that one purely abstract line or curve is more
beautiful than another, for the simple reason that people have no common
ground upon which to establish the nature of abstract beauty. It may be,
however, that even as certain simple forms are more easily apprehended
than complex ones, there is the same distinction with regard to lines.
If then an artist of clean vision sees in an object of reality such
clear characteristic lines, he draws them not for their abstract beauty,
but merely because by them alone can he express his idea of the form
before him. The early Greek vase