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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: exquisite poetic feeling of their landscape paintings the foreign
critics were not at first conscious, because it was not expressed in
terms with which they were familiar.
But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very
apt to turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts.
Flora and fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art,
because they enter as details of the subject-matter of the artist's
thoughts and day-dreams. These birds and flowers are his sujets de
genre. Where we should select a phase of human life for effective
isolation, they choose instead a bit of nature. A spray of grass or
a twig of cherry-blossoms is motif enough for them. To their
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