eground or where there is a
monotony in any horizontal sequence. The vertical of the figure means the
balance of these. The principle is one already noted, action balancing
action in contrary direction.

What of the nymphs of Corot, or the laveuses bending at the margin of the
lake, the plowman homeward plodding o'er the lea, the shepherd on the
distant moor, the woodsman in the forest, the farmer among his fields. We
associate our vision of the scene with theirs. When as mere dots they are
discerned, the vastness of their surroundings is realized at their expense
and the exclamation of the psalmist is ours: "What is man that thou art
mindful of him."

The danger in the use of the figure is that it is so frequently lugged in.
The friends that happen to be along are often made to do. There is no
case where the fitness of things is more compulsory than in the
association of figures with landscape. The haymaker creates a sensation
on Broadway but no more so than Dundreary crossing a plowed field in
Oxford ties. As the poetry of a Corot landscape invites the nymphs to
come and the ruggedness of the Barbizon plain befits the toiling peasants
of Millet, so should our landscape determine the chord in humanity to be
harmoniously played with it.

A fault in construction is frequently seen in the lack of simplicity of
foreplane and background. It must first be determined whether it is to be
a landscape with figures or figures in landscape. The half one and half
another picture is a sure failure.

The most serviceable material one may collect in sketching are such
positions which play second or third parts in composition; cattle or other
animals in back or three-quarter view which readily unite with and lead to
their principals.

In the selection of the subject the main object has most of one's thought.
This however usually "goes" without thought, asserting itself by its own
interest. Figures which are less interesting than this and still less,
such as will combine with the subject proper, are what the painter and
illustrator long for. As with the background, those things which are not
of sufficient interest to be worth while in themselves are, owing to their
lesser significance, of the utmost importance to the composer. Note in
the usual Van Marke cattle picture of five cows, the diminishing interest
in the other four, or the degree of restraint expressed in most of the
figures successfully introduced into landsc