Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/123

 VII COMPOSITION

are so many millions of good compositions in the world that it seems strange any one should ever waste time on a bad one. The good ones lie about us at every turn of the road. All that is necessary is the eye to see them. There are no fixed and immutable laws of composition at least, none that cannot frequently be broken to advantage by a man of genius. All of the old conventional rules are explanatory rather than constructive. They may prevent an utterly bad arrangement, but they can hardly enable us to create a masterpiece; for the all-essential note of personality would be absent. In my own [89]