a hilltop? The hill
may be uninteresting--on your side,--but there is another. There is a path
winding over it, telling of the passing of few or many; your feet have
touched it and imagination has you in her train, and you follow eagerly to
the beck of her enchantment.

Suppose the scene at twilight on one of the great plains of northern
France where beets are the sole crop. A group of carts and oxen shut out
the background and no figures are seen. If however against the sky are
the silhouetted forms of two handfuls of beets, the sight of a figure or
even a part of him would seem unnecessary to a casual observer who wished
to know if there was any one about. These inanimate things moving through
the air mean life. The painter has created one figure and suggested the
likelihood of others by these few touches. Herein we have the suggestion
of a fact. The suggestion of an act, may further be developed by showing
the figure, having already finished with the handful, bending to pick up
others. Such a position would be an actual statement regarding the
present act but a suggested one concerning the former, the effect of which
is still seen. If then the figure were represented as performing
something in any moment of time farther removed from that governing the
position of the beets than natural action could control, he has forced
into his figure an accelerated action which ranges anywhere between the
startling, the amusing, and the impossible.

The power of implied force or action by suggestion is the basis of the
Greek sculptured art of the highest period. Much of the argument of
Lessing's elaborate essay on the "Laocoon" is aimed at this point, which
is brought out in its completeness in his discussion of Timomachus'
treatment of the raving Ajax. "Ajax was not represented at the moment
when, raging among the herds he captures and slays goats and oxen,
mistaking them for men. The master showed him sitting weary after these
crazy deeds of heroism, and meditating self-destruction. That was really
the raving Ajax, not because he is raving at the moment, but because we
see he has been raving and with what violence his present reaction of
shame and despair vividly portrays. We see the force of the tempest in the
wrecks and the corpses with which it has strewn the beach."

In the photographic realm of the nude, this quality is compulsory. We
don't want to have offered us so intimate a likeness of a nude figure that