he improbable, and (as we consider) preposterous, and
accepting and therefore "seeing" what our judgment approves even when
it is not there! We accept as "a thing seen" a wheel buzzing round
with something like fifty spokes--but we cannot accept a horse with
eight or sixteen legs! The four-leggedness of a horse is too dominant
a prejudice for us to accept a horse with several indistinct blurred
legs as representing what we see when the horse gallops. The mind
revolts at such a presentation, though it is true, and the whole
scheme and composition of the artist is perverted or fails to gain
attention and to exercise its charm--by the unwelcome presence in his
picture of the revolting truth. It is the consideration of facts of
this kind which enables us to understand the origin and importance of
what are called "conventions" in pictorial or glyptic art. The artist
is, in fact, operating by means of his painted canvas or moulded clay
upon a queer, prejudiced, ill-seeing, dull, living creature--his
brother-man. In order to give if possible to that brother, by means of
a painted sheet, some or all of the delights, emotions, suggestions,
perceptions of beauty, and so on, which he himself has experienced in
contemplating a real scene, the artist has to present that scene, not
as it really is, nor even as he thinks it really is, but in such a way
that his canvas shall appeal to his brother's attention and judgment
with the same emotional and intellectual result as the scene itself
produced in him. Therefore he must not aim at accuracy of reproduction
of natural fact nor even of visual fact, but at the transference to
another mind of his own mental condition--his inner judgment as to
"things seen"--by means of necessarily imperfect pictorial mimicry. He
must therefore avoid startling or abnormal truthfulness of observation
of the unessential and even more strictly must he refuse to make his
picture a scientific diagram demonstrating what "is" rather than what
is "seen" or is "thought to have been seen."

On these grounds I find that the most satisfactory pictures of the
galloping horse are those which combine a phase of the movement of the
front legs with a phase of the movement of the hind legs, not
simultaneous in actual occurrence, but following one another. It is
for the artist to select the combination best suited to producing the
mental result aimed at. Some of the Chinese and Japanese
representations of the galloping horse