Stability is given by the vertical feeling in the central group of trees and the suggestion of horizontal distance behind the figure.

It is not only in the larger disposition of the masses in a composition that this principle of gradated masses and lost and found edges can be used.  Wherever grace and charm are your motive they should be looked for in the working out of the smallest details.

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In concluding this chapter I must again insist that knowledge of these matters will not make you compose a good picture.  A composition may be perfect as far as any rules or principles of composition go, and yet be of no account whatever.  The life-giving quality in art always defies analysis and refuses to be tabulated in any formula.  This vital quality in drawing and composition must come from the individual artist himself, and nobody can help him much here.  He must ever be on the look out for those visions his imagination stirs within him, and endeavour, however haltingly at first, to give them some sincere expression.  Try always when your mind is filled with some pictorial idea to get something put down, a mere fumbled expression possibly, but it may contain the germ.  Later on the same idea may occur to you again, only it will be less vague this time, and a process of development will have taken place.  It may be years before it takes sufficiently definite shape to justify a picture; the process of germination in the mind is a slow one.  But try and acquire the habit of making some record of what pictorial ideas pass in the mind, and don’t wait until you can draw and paint well to begin.  Qualities of drawing and painting don’t matter a bit here, it is the sensation, the feeling for the picture, that is everything.

If knowledge of the rhythmic properties of lines and masses will not enable you to compose a fine picture, you may well ask what is their use?  There may be those to whom they are of no use.  Their artistic instincts are sufficiently strong to need no direction.  But such natures are rare, and it is doubtful if they ever go far, while many a painter might be saved a lot of worry over something in his picture that “won’t come” did he but know more of the principle of pictorial design his work is transgressing.  I feel certain that the old painters, like the Venetians, were far more systematic and had far more hard and fast principles of design than ourselves.  They knew the science of their craft so well that they did not so often have to call upon their artistic instinct to get them out of difficulties.  Their artistic instinct was free to attend to higher things, their knowledge of the science of picture-making keeping them from many petty mistakes that a modern artist falls into.  The desire of so many artists in these days to cut loose from tradition and start all over again puts a very severe strain upon their intuitive faculties, and keeps them occupied correcting things that more knowledge of some of the fundamental principles that don’t really alter and that are the same in all schools would have saved them.  Knowledge in art is like a railway built behind the pioneers who have gone before; it offers a point of departure for those who come after, further on into the unknown country of nature’s secrets—­a help not lightly to be discarded.