ed with the objects represented as real objects, but
alien to the artistic intention of the picture. There is nothing in
these early formulae to disturb the contemplation of the emotional
appeal of pure form and colour. To those who approach a picture with the
idea that the representation of nature, the "making it look like the
real thing," is the sole object of painting, how strange must be the
appearance of such pictures as Botticelli's.

The accumulation of the details of visual observation in art is liable
eventually to obscure the main idea and disturb the large sense of
design on which so much of the imaginative appeal of a work of art
depends. The large amount of new visual knowledge that the naturalistic
movements of the nineteenth century brought to light is particularly
liable at this time to obscure the simpler and more primitive qualities
on which all good art is built. At the height of that movement line
drawing went out of fashion, and charcoal, and an awful thing called a
stump, took the place of the point in the schools. Charcoal is a
beautiful medium in a dexterous hand, but is more adaptable to mass than
to line drawing. The less said about the stump the better, although I
believe it still lingers on in some schools.

Line drawing is happily reviving, and nothing is so calculated to put
new life and strength into the vagaries of naturalistic painting and get
back into art a fine sense of design.

This obscuring of the direct appeal of art by the accumulation of too
much naturalistic detail, and the loss of power it entails, is the cause
of artists having occasionally gone back to a more primitive
convention. There was the Archaistic movement in Greece, and men like
Rossetti and Burne-Jones found a better means of expressing the things
that moved them in the technique of the fourteenth century. And it was
no doubt a feeling of the weakening influence on art, as an expressive
force, of the elaborate realisations of the modern school, that prompted
Puvis de Chavannes to invent for himself his large primitive manner. It
will be noticed that in these instances it is chiefly the insistence
upon outline that distinguishes these artists from their contemporaries.

Art, like life, is apt to languish if it gets too far away from
primitive conditions. But, like life also, it is a poor thing and a very
uncouth affair if it has nothing but primitive conditions to recommend
it. Because there is a decadent art abo