s its place" in
relation to the whole; and it is more nearly right than if it had been
made the centre of attention and had been drawn with the most
meticulous precision. The hand is not accurate, but it is true.
Similarly, size is an affair not of physical extent but of proportion. A
figure six inches high may convey the same value as a figure six feet
high, if the same proportions are observed. A statue is the
presentation, not of the human body, but of the human form, and
more than that, of what the form expresses. When I am talking with
my friend I am aware of his physical presence detaching itself from
the background of the room in which we are. But I feel in him
something more. And that something more goes behind the details
of his physical aspect. His eyes might be blue instead of brown, his
nose crooked rather than straight; he might be maimed and
disfigured by some mishap. These accidents would not change for
me what is the reality. My friend is not his body, though it is by his
body that he exists; the reality of my friend is what he essentially is,
what he is of the spirit. A photograph of a man registers certain facts
of his appearance at that moment. The eye and the mind of the artist
discern the truth which underlies the surface; the artist feels his sitter
not as a face and a figure, a mere body, but as a personality; and the
portrait expresses a man.

As grasped by our finite minds, there are partial truths and degrees
of truth. There are, for example, the facts of outer appearance,
modified in our reception of them by what we know as distinct from
what we really see. Thus a tree against the background of hill or sky
seems to have a greater projection and relief than is actually
presented to the eye, because we _know_ the tree is round. Manet's
"Girl with a Parrot," which appears to the ordinary man to be too flat,
is more true to reality than any portrait that "seems to come out of its
frame." Habitually in our observation of objects about us, we note
only so much as serves our practical ends; and this is the most
superficial, least essential aspect. Projection is a partial truth, and to
it many painters sacrifice other and higher truths. Manet, recovering
the "innocence of the eye" and faithful to it, has penetrated the
secrets and won the truth of light. Botticelli saw the world as
sonorous undulations of exquisite line; and his subtly implicated,
evanescent patterns of line movement, "incorrect" as