hat instead of displaying my work
to advantage, it has blurred all its delicate forms into dusky and
chaotic masses, would I not be foolish if I repeated such an experiment?
Rather, I take the opposite extreme, and produce a rose this time which
has but five petals, and one or two sprays of rudimentary foliage.
Somehow the result is better, and it has only taken me a tenth part of
the time to produce. I now find that I can afford, without offending the
genius of light, or straining my eyesight, to add a few more petals and
one or two extra leaves between those I have so sparingly designed, and
a kind of balance is struck. The same thing happens when I try to
represent a whole tree--I can not even count the leaves upon it, why
then attempt to carve them? Let me make one leaf that will stand for
fifty, and let that leaf be simplified until it is little more than an
abstract of the form I see in such thousandfold variety. The proof that
I am right this time is that when I stand at the proper distance to view
my work, it is all as distinct as I could wish it to be. Not a
leaf-point is quite lost to sight, except where, in vanishing into a
shadow, it adds mystery without creating confusion.

We have in this discovery a clue to the meaning of the word
"Conventional": it means that a particular method has been "agreed upon"
as the best fitted for its purpose, i.e., as showing the work to most
advantage with a minimum of labor. Not that experience had really
anything to do with the invention of the method. Strange to say, the
earliest efforts in carving were based upon an unquestioning sense that
no other was possible, certainly no attempts were made to change it
until in latter days temptations arose in various directions, the
effects of which have entailed upon ourselves a conscious effort of
choice in comparing the results of the many subsequent experiments.

Before I continue this subject further, I shall give you another
exercise, with the object of making a closer resemblance to natural
forms, bearing in mind the while all that has been said about a sparing
use of minute detail with reference to its visible effect. We shall in
this design attempt some shaping on the surface of the leaves and a
little rounding too, which may add interest to the work. In my next
lecture to you, I shall have something to say about another important
element in all designs for wood-carving. I mean the shapes taken by the
background between th