imaginative accuracy of journalistic description. The drama of the Greeks and the plastic art of the Renaissance are obviously creative symbols and not mere records or imitations of experience—the old writers on aesthetics were less explicit in their use of terms than the psychological critics of the present time.
The completely equipped modern painter must, of course, be familiar with external nature, and to a certain extent with the laws governing it; but to attach much importance to the latter in a book devoted to structural problems is a waste of time. The study of scientific laws belongs to a relatively narrow and insignificant field of painting, a technical field which includes the chemistry of pigments, the permanence of grounds, the qualities of media, and the mechanics of intermixtures in tone and colour. What is needed just now is not a discussion of general descriptive laws—works of this character when applied to artistic activity always turn out to be pseudo-scientific and false—but a psychological inquiry into the relations between our direct perceptions of nature and the consequent aesthetic expression.
Mr Butler's conception of realism has no basis in experience; it is an old and academic set of laboratory deductions, bearing practically no connexion with our emotional contacts, and therefore of little use either to artist or layman. It is a truism that art is born only in our emotional contacts, and that it is forwarded and pushed to completion, however intellectual the processes called into play, by distinctly emotional impulses. To the author's credit it must be said that he understands pure optics; but inasmuch as this branch of science is mainly theoretical, existing only in text-books and testing rooms, his knowledge is of small service to art. It does not occur to him that the peculiarities of optical illusion are part and parcel of our daily experience, and that we build up our world by inference over and beyond them. The artist has no interest in the dead level of scientific law; he aims to give us his own world with all its special characteristics, and to him the important elements of life are the emotional deviations forming the living fibre of experience. The world that confronts us on looking out of a window is not simply an optical phenomenon; concentrate upon it for a moment and the entire range of visual sensations is dissolved in memories and a general psychic awakening absolutely inexpressible by scientific optics as resumed in the laws of perspective and the grada-
