The purpose of this frame is obvious. The eye is caught by the dazzling glitter, and feels immediate relief when it rests upon the quiet grey tone of the painting, the pleasurable sensation resulting therefrom being mistaken for involuntary appreciation of the beauty of the work. As finished paintings these Barbizon sketches are novel, but as studies they are not, for similar work has been executed for two or three centuries, and particularly by the Dutch artists of the seventeenth century. In every considerable collection of drawings such sketches may be found, and there is scarcely a Barbizon painter whose work was not anticipated by a Dutch master. One has only to examine the drawings in the public art institutions of Europe by De Molyn, Blyhooft, Jan de Bischop, Lambert Doomer, Berghem, Avercamp, and others, to find examples which, if executed now, might easily be taken for works by the Barbizon masters. [a] _Notes on the Science of Picture-Making._ NOTE 19. PAGE 52 In recent times attempts have been made to upset the dictum of Aristotle as to the imitative character of the arts generally, exception being taken in respect of music and architecture. The first objection as to music arose with Schopenhauer, though he does not appear to have been quite certain of his position. He stated that while the other arts represent ideas, music does not, but being an art it must represent something, and he suggested that this something is the "Will," the term being used in the Schopenhauer philosophical sense, that is to say, implying the active principle of the universe, not being God. This means nothing at all from the point of view of art, and cannot even be seriously considered. The most notable essay on the subject since Schopenhauer is from the pen of Sidney Colvin who places music and architecture in a non-imitative group by themselves, the former on the principal ground that "it is like nothing else; it is no representation or similitude of anything whatever"; while architecture, he says, "appeals to our faculties for taking pleasure in non-imitative combinations of stationary masses."[a] But what Aristotle meant is that the arts are imitative in character, and not that they necessarily attempt to produce works of similitude with nature, this being evident from the fact that he pointed out that the higher works of art surpass nature, and he divided poetry and painting into three sections, of which the first is better than life, and the third inferior to it.