Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/123

 the flow of lines. Take a hat, for example, as the decorative theme and observe how definitely, yet how subtly, that theme is four times varied. Note further how the curves of the hats are echoed, always with variety, in the ruffs.

But so many curves would make the picture too rich in quality were it not for the skillful introduction of straight lines to make, as it were, a series of alternating notes. You observe immediately the long straight lines of the windows, of the two flags, and of the table. But you do not at first observe that there are several dozen shorter straight lines, and that, curiously enough, they are nearly all parallel to each other. Take as a key the sash of the first seated officer, counting from the left, and you will find a surprising number of similarities to this motif throughout the composition, all the way from the shadows on the window casing in the upper left hand corner to the edge of the table in the lower right hand corner. Yet, because these similar straight lines are so frequently alternated with varying curves, we get from the picture a stirring sense of a swinging movement.

Here, again, is an arrested moment of action which might conceivably have come out of a motion picture. What the arrangement of the twelve men might have been at other moments of the scene we do not know. Perhaps they were all sitting when the scene opened; perhaps they had all arisen before it closed; but for this one instant, at least, they have resolved themselves into an interesting design of simple patterns in a rhythmical series.

Another source of rhythm in a fixed picture may be the tonal gradations. In a painting there would be