Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/234

194 tions of colour-tones under atmospheric conditions. The simple recognition of three dimensions is almost exclusively an imposition of mind upon sensation—we construct the hollows of valleys and the thicknesses of hills by inference from a thousand points which go directly through vision into memory and imagination.

Is the artist to be only a camera, a machine to give us a fainter and less vibrant nature? Is his space to be that of one particular focus? Or is he to render what his mind has added to the scene, the personal realization and reconstruction?

Mr Butler does not completely overlook the value of the personal equation, but he commits the common academic blunder of separating it from the processes embodied in plastic composition. He does not seem to grasp the fact that our various ways of seeing things, of going up against the world, demand in our different expressions very special interpretations, and that a distorted perspective and a violently forced tonality may be not only adequate, but necessary to enhance certain emotions of depth. My own observation of painters working to attain great depth and high relief has left me with little faith in geometrical perspective, and none whatever in natural tone; I have seen the laws of both constantly violated with an increase rather than a lessening of effectiveness in achieving depth. Impressionism was essentially a tonal method, an art of values (values in the technical sense, the relative intensity of colours according to their constituent amounts of light and dark); it contained little or no drawing, and was destitute of the architectonic qualities which produce high relief; it impresses us to-day as flat—emotionally flat—and yet it is infinitely closer to the values of nature than are the profoundly recessive landscapes of Rembrandt and Rubens.

Mr Butler explains the term values with unusual clarity, but vastly exaggerates the participation of natural values in the construction of the third dimension. The logic of composition—the fundamental need for congruity—demands a balance of light and dark throughout the canvas, a distribution of tonal areas approximately equal in intensity, but entirely at variance with literal values: nature, faithfully transcribed, reveals an unduly prominent foreground and a blurred stretch of distance; and a picture thus composed is inharmonious and unconvincing. Similarly, the proportions arrived at by simple vision cannot function in any design