“Very instructive,” commented Markham, glancing ostentatiously at his watch. “And the Greene case?”
“Now, a photograph, on the other hand,” pursued Vance, ignoring the interruption, “is devoid of design or even of arrangement in the aesthetic sense. To be sure, a photographer may pose and drape a figure—he may even saw off the limb of a tree that he intends to record on his negative; but it’s quite impossible for him to compose the subject-matter of his picture to accord with a preconceived design, the way a painter does. In a photograph there are always details that have no meaning, variations of light and shade that are harmonically false, textures that create false notes, lines that are discords, masses that are out of place. The camera, d’ ye see, is deucedly forthright—it records whatever is before it, irrespective of art values. The inevitable result is that a photograph lacks organization and unity; its composition is, at best, primitive and obvious. And it is full of irrelevant factors—of objects which have neither meaning nor purpose. There is no uniformity of conception in it. It is haphazard, heterogeneous, aimless, and amorphous—just as is nature.”
“You needn’t belabor the point.” Markham spoke impatiently. “I have a rudimentary intelligence.—Where is this elaborate truism leading you?”
Vance gave him an engaging smile.
“To East 53rd Street. But before we reach our destination permit me another brief amplification.—Quite often a painting of intricate and subtle design does not at once reveal its composition to the spectator. In fact, only the designs of the simpler and more obvious paintings are immediately grasped. Generally the spectator has to study a painting carefully—trace its rhythms, compare its forms, weigh its details, and fit together all its salients—before its underlying design becomes apparent. Many well-organized and perfectly balanced paintings—such as Renoir’s figure-pieces, Matisse’s interiors, Cézanne’s watercolors, Picasso’s still-lives, and Leonardo’s anatomical drawings—may at first appear meaningless from the standpoint of composition; their forms may seem to lack unity and cohesion; their masses and linear values may give the impression of having been arbitrarily put down. And it is only after the spectator has related all their integers and traced all their contrapuntal activities that they take on significance and reveal their creator’s motivating conception. …”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Markham. “Paintings and photographs differ; the objects in a painting possess design; the objects in a photograph are without design; one must often study a painting in order to determine the design.—That, I believe, covers the ground you have been wandering over desultorily for the past fifteen minutes.”
“I was merely trying to imitate the vast deluge of repetitive verbiage found in legal documents,” explained Vance. “I hoped thereby to convey my meaning to your lawyer’s mind.”
“You succeeded with a vengeance,” snapped Markham. “What follows?”
Vance became serious again.
“Markham, we’ve been looking at the various occurrences in the Greene case as though they were the unrelated objects of a photograph. We’ve inspected each fact as it came up; but we have failed to analyze sufficiently its connection with all the other known facts. We’ve regarded this whole affair as though it were a series, or collection, of isolated integers. And we’ve missed the significance of everything because we haven’t yet determined the shape of the basic pattern of which each of these incidents is but a part.—Do you follow me?”
“My dear fellow!”
“Very well.—Now, it goes without saying that there is a design at the bottom of this whole amazin’ business. Nothing has happened haphazardly. There has been premeditation behind each act—a subtly and carefully concocted composition, as it were. And everything has emanated from that central shape. Everything has been fashioned by a fundamental structural idea. Therefore, nothing important that has occurred since the first double shooting has been unrelated to the predetermined pattern of the crime. All the aspects and events of the case, taken together, form a unity—a coordinated, interactive whole. In short, the Greene case is a painting, not a photograph. And when we have studied it in that light—when we have determined the interrelationship of all the external factors, and have traced the visual forms to their generating lines—then, Markham, we will know the composition of the picture; we will see the design on which the perverted painter has erected his document’ry material. And once we have discovered the underlying shape of this hideous picture’s pattern, we’ll know its creator.”
“I see your point,” said Markham slowly. “But how does it help us? We know all the external facts; and they certainly don’t fit into any intelligible conception of a unified whole.”
“Not yet, perhaps,” agreed Vance. “But that’s because we haven’t gone about it systematically. We’ve done too much investigating and too little thinking. We’ve been sidetracked by what the modern painters call documentation—that is, by the objective appeal of the picture’s recognizable parts. We haven’t sought for the abstract content. We’ve overlooked the ‘significant form’—a loose phrase; but blame Clive Bell for it.”27
“And how would you suggest that we set about determining the compositional design of this bloody canvas? We might dub the picture, by the way, Nepotism Gone Wrong.” By this facetious remark, he was, I knew, attempting to counteract the serious impression the other’s disquisition had made on him; for, though he realized Vance would not have drawn his voluminous parallel without a definite hope of applying it successfully to the problem in hand, he
