necessary to the student.

The primitive force we are in danger of losing depends much on line, and
no work that aims at a sublime impression can dispense with the basis of
a carefully wrought and simple line scheme.

The study, therefore, of pure line drawing is of great importance to the
painter, and the numerous drawings that exist by the great masters in
this method show how much they understood its value.

And the revival of line drawing, and the desire there is to find a
simpler convention founded on this basis, are among the most hopeful
signs in the art of the moment.




V

MASS DRAWING


In the preceding chapter it has, I hope, been shown that outline drawing
is an instinct with Western artists and has been so from the earliest
times; that this instinct is due to the fact that the first mental idea
of an object is the sense of its form as a felt thing, not a thing seen;
and that an outline drawing satisfies and appeals directly to this
mental idea of objects.

But there is another basis of expression directly related to visual