Provided the student realises this, and that art training can only deal with the perfecting of a means of expression and that the real matter of art lies above this and is beyond the scope of teaching, he cannot have too much of it.  For although he must ever be a child before the influence that moves him, if it is not with the knowledge of the grown man that he takes off his coat and approaches the craft of painting or drawing, he will be poorly equipped to make them a means of conveying to others in adequate form the things he may wish to express.  Great things are only done in art when the creative instinct of the artist has a well-organised executive faculty at its disposal.

* * * * *

Of the two divisions into which the technical study of painting can be divided, namely Form and Colour, we are concerned in this book with Form alone.  But before proceeding to our immediate subject something should be said as to the nature of art generally, not with the ambition of arriving at any final result in a short chapter, but merely in order to give an idea of the point of view from which the following pages are written, so that misunderstandings may be avoided.

The variety of definitions that exist justifies some inquiry.  The following are a few that come to mind: 

     “Art is nature expressed through a personality.”

But what of architecture?  Or music?  Then there is Morris’s

     “Art is the expression of pleasure in work.”

But this does not apply to music and poetry.  Andrew Lang’s

     “Everything which we distinguish from nature”

seems too broad to catch hold of, while Tolstoy’s

     “An action by means of which one man, having experienced a feeling,
     intentionally transmits it to others”

is nearer the truth, and covers all the arts, but seems, from its omitting any mention of #rhythm#, very inadequate.

* * * * *

Now the facts of life are conveyed by our senses to the consciousness within us, and stimulate the world of thought and feeling that constitutes our real life.  Thought and feeling are very intimately connected, few of our mental perceptions, particularly when they first dawn upon us, being unaccompanied by some feeling.  But there is this general division to be made, on one extreme of which is what we call pure intellect, and on the other pure feeling or emotion.  The arts, I take it, are a means of giving expression to the emotional side of this mental activity, intimately related as it often is to the more purely intellectual side.  The more sensual side of this feeling is perhaps its lowest, while the feelings associated with the intelligence, the little sensitivenesses of perception that escape pure intellect, are possibly its noblest experiences.

Pure intellect seeks to construct from the facts brought to our consciousness by the senses, an accurately measured world of phenomena, uncoloured by the human equation in each of us.  It seeks to create a point of view outside the human standpoint, one more stable and accurate, unaffected by the ever-changing current of human life.  It therefore invents mechanical instruments to do the measuring of our sense perceptions, as their records are more accurate than human observation unaided.