|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: expressed is but half that necessary to express it. Some
understanding must exist in the observer for any work to be
intelligible. It is only a question of degree. The greater the
art-sense in the person addressed, the more had better be left to it.
Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic. In fact, the
artistic appreciation of the masses there is something astonishing
to us, accustomed to our immense intellectual differences between
man and man. Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such a land.
Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itself
taking. To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the
cosmos, like a picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical
|
