tings. _In paintings._ For this
alleged aesthetic desideratum ceases to be a criterion of merit when
we come to sculpture, about which critics are more and more
persistently teaching (and with a degree of reason) that one of the
greatest merits of the artist, and of the greatest desiderata of the
beholder, is precisely the reduction of real cubic existence by
avoiding all projection beyond a unified level, that is to say by
making a solid block of stone look as if it were a representation on a
flat surface. This contradiction explains the origin of the theory
giving supreme pictorial importance to the Third Dimension. For art
criticism though at length (thanks especially to the sculptor
Hildebrand) busying itself also with plastic art, has grown up mainly
in connexion with painting. Now in painting the greatest scientific
problem, and technical difficulty, has been the suggestion of
three-dimensional existences by pigments applied to a two-dimensional
surface; and this problem has naturally been most successfully
handled by the artists possessing most energy and imagination, and
equally naturally shirked or bungled or treated parrot-wise by the
artists of less energy and imagination. And, as energy and
imagination also show themselves in finer perception, more vivid
empathy and more complex dealings with shapes which are only
two-dimensional, it has come about that the efficient and original
solutions of the cubic problem have coincided, _ceteris paribus,_
with the production of pictures whose two-dimensional qualities
have called forth the adjective _beautiful,_ and _beautiful_ in the
most intense and complicated manner. Hence successful treatment
of cubic suggestion has become an habitual (and threatens to
become a rule-of-thumb) criterion of pictorial merit; the more so
that qualities of two-dimensional shape, being intrinsic and specific,
are difficult to run to ground and describe; whereas the quality of
three-dimensional suggestion is ascertainable by mere comparison
between the shapes in the picture and the shapes afforded by real
things when seen in the same perspective and lighting. Most people
can judge whether an apple in a picture "looks as if" it were solid,
round, heavy and likely to roll off a sideboard in the same picture;
and some people may even, when the picture has no other claims on
their interest, experience incipient muscular contractions such as
would eventually interfere with a real apple rollin