differences presented by the same thing seen under the excitement of
strong feeling?

[Illustration: Plate V.

FROM A STUDY BY BOTTICELLI

In the Print Room at the British Museum.]

These academic drawings, too, should be as highly finished as hard
application can make them, so that the habit of minute visual expression
may be acquired. It will be needed later, when drawing of a finer kind
is attempted, and when in the heat of an emotional stimulus the artist
has no time to consider the smaller subtleties of drawing, which by then
should have become almost instinctive with him, leaving his mind free to
dwell on the bigger qualities.

Drawing, then, to be worthy of the name, must be more than what is
called accurate. It must present the form of things in a more vivid
manner than we ordinarily see them in nature. Every new draughtsman in
the history of art has discovered a new significance in the form of
common things, and given the world a new experience. He has represented
these qualities under the stimulus of the feeling they inspired in him,
hot and underlined, as it were, adding to the great book of sight the
world possesses in its art, a book by no means completed yet.

So that to say of a drawing, as is so often said, that it is not true
because it does not present the commonplace appearance of an object
accurately, may be foolish. Its accuracy depends on the completeness
with which it conveys the particular emotional significance that is the
object of the drawing. What this significance is will vary enormously
with the individual artist, but it is only by this standard that the
accuracy of the drawing can be judged.

It is this difference between scientific accuracy and artistic accuracy
that puzzles so many people. Science demands that phenomena be observed
with the unemotional accuracy of a weighing machine, while artistic
accuracy demands that things be observed by a sentient individual
recording the sensations produced in him by the phenomena of life. And
people with the scientific habit that is now so common among us, seeing
a picture or drawing in which what are called facts have been expressed
emotionally, are puzzled, if they are modest, or laugh at what they
consider a glaring mistake in drawing if they are not, when all the time
it may be their mistaken point of view that is at fault.

But while there is no absolute artistic standard by which accuracy of
drawing can be judged, as such standard m