67
Let us resume: In the annexed figure (67) you perceive the curved line. In proportion as you are able to make this perfectly, you will succeed in drawing gracefully. I must presume that very many of my readers will have no difficulty in copying the few natural objects suggested below. Practice upon your slate or board the figure (67) until you can do it easily. Then, for the purposes of "sport," proceed as follows. You wish to produce a droll "bit" of landscape. Take any simple view, such as submitted in Fig. 68.
68
In this you will readily discover, as I said above, the curved, graceful lines of beauty—in the clouds, the outline of the distant hills, the foliage, the meandering stream. Let me advise you to practice this lesson somewhat perseveringly; apart from the new source of amusement which it is the object of these papers to open up, a beautiful lesson could be impressed upon the mind. Nothing is more calculated to refine the mind, to ennoble the thoughts, than to withdraw one's self from the artificial world, and to gaze upon the fresh face of nature. And if we are able to do this intelligently—in other words, if, having learned the alphabet, we are able to peruse as it were the book of nature—the delight and the advantage is proportionably increased. Now turn to the example shown in Fig. 69. What do we see? The lines of beauty have given place to others less pleasing to the eye, and (except as a source of merriment) less acceptable to the mind. Fig. 69 is a comic landscape; how it has become so must be clearly apparent.
In Fig. 70, the same process is carried out, and the result is similar.
I hope that I shall not be understood to mean, that in order to be graceful everything must be round, or that everything round is graceful, or that every square object is ungraceful; or, again, that by making any curved line into a square or straight one the end we propose is to be obtained. Doubtless many round things are ungraceful, as many others composed entirely of straight lines at various angles to each other are exceedingly graceful. But what is meant is this: that natural objects, in which, left to themselves, the curved line predominates, are made odd and comic-looking when drawn upon the square.