e essential affinity. If we pass favorably, our
enjoyment begins leisurely. The picture we are to live with must possess
qualities that will bear close scrutiny, even to analysis. If we are won,
there is a satisfaction in knowing why.

It must be remembered that the actual picture space in nature is that of a
_funnel,_ its size varying according to the extent of distance
represented. The angle of sixty degrees which the eye commands may widen
into miles. The matter of equipoise or unity therefore applies to most
extended areas and no part of this extent may escape from the calculation.

The objection of formal balance over the centre is that it produces a
straddle, as, in hopscotch one lands with both feet on either side of a
dividing line. In all pictures of deep perspective the best mode of
entrance is to triangulate in, with a series of zigzags, made easy through
the _habit of the eye to follow lines,_ especially long and receding ones.
It is the long lines we seize upon in pinning the action of a figure, and
the long lines which stretch toward us are those which help most to get us
into a picture.

The law here is that of perspective recession, and, it being the easiest
of comprehension and the most effective in result, is used extensively by
the scene-painter for his drop-curtain and by the landscapist, whose
subject proper lies often in the middle distance--toward which he would
make the eye travel.

When the opportunity of line is wanting an arrangement of receding spots,
or accents is an equivalent.

The same applies, though in less apparent force, to the portrait or
foreground figure subject.

Where the subject lies directly in the foreground, the eye will find it at
once, but the care of the artist should even then be exercised to avoid
lines which, though they could not block, might at least irritate one's
direct vision of the subject.

Conceive if you can, for one could rarely find such an example in
pictorial art, of the forespace corrugated with lines paralleling the
bottom line of a frame. It would be as difficult for a bicyclist to
propel his machine across a plowed field as for one to drive his eye over
a foreground thus filled with distracting lines when the goal lay far
beyond.

Mr. Schilling, in his well-known "Spring Ploughing," has treated this
problem with great discernment. Instead of a multiplicity of lines
crossing the foreplane, the barest suggestion suffices to designate plow