afternoon, but at eight in the evening, seen in palpitating outline
against the forest blackness or the low toned sky, it becomes an element
in a scheme of far larger dimensions. The difference between the definite
and indefinite article, when coupled with that house, is the difference in
the quality of the art of which we speak.

Mystery by deception is a misguided use of an art quality.

In photography one man delights in the etching point and cannot stop until
he has made a net work all over his plate and led us to look at this
instead of his picture, which, if good, would have been let alone--a clever
device of throwing dust into our eyes. Another produces what appears to
be a pencil drawing, and a very good imitation some of them are, but at
best a deception. To make something look like something else is a
perversion of a brilliant discovery in photographic processes, which
offers the means for securing unity (and in this word lies every principle
of composition) by adding to or subtracting from the first product.

This may involve the destruction of two-thirds or three-fourths of the
plate or it may demand many an accent subtly supplied before unity is
satisfied, before the subject is stripped of its non-essentials or before
it may be regarded complete. Let such good work go on--and the other sort
too, if you will, the stunts, the summersaults and the hoop performances,
but in the dignity of photographic competitions give the deceptions, the
imitations of other things, no standing or quarter.

No one will deny the interest there is in a sensitive, flexible line and
in the rendition of mass by line. But photography is an art dealing with
finished surfaces of perfect modelling, and workers in this art should
preserve the "nature" of their subject. The man who feels line had better
etch or use a pencil.

SIMPLICITY.

Breadth while fostering suggestiveness gives birth to simplicity; a
subjective quality.

When applied to pictorial art, simplicity's first appeal is a mental one.
We are attracted by neither technique nor color, nor things problematic to
the painter; but by _his_ mental attitude toward his subject. If we
determine that the result has come of elimination, that to produce it,
much has been thrown away and that the artist prefers what he has left at
a sacrifice, to what might have been, acknowledgment for this condensation
is coupled with respect. There is however a type of simplicity, t