e practical man sees only a part--the part that serves his purpose.
The camera sees more than that, it sees all the details; but it cannot
see the spirit--that has to be felt.

Most Europeans think of boats as means of locomotion, of apples as
eatables. They recognize such things by their serviceable qualities;
their individuality, the universal in these particulars, escapes them.
In a picture of a boat or an apple they look for those unessential
qualities which minister to their pleasure, and of which alone they are
aware. The cleverness of a man who can paint fruit that tempts urchins
impresses them; but the artist who feels, and tries to express, the soul
of fruit and flowers they take for an incompetent dunce or a charlatan.

"One might say that man has been a monarch, looking to his
subject-world only for service and for flattery, and just because
of this lordly attitude he has failed to understand that
subject-world, and, even more, has failed to understand himself."

In the East men have ever set the spiritual life above the practical,
and artists have excelled in expressing the very essence of material
things because they expressed what they felt, instead of representing
what the ordinary man sees. They have felt that if the spirit informs
all, then all must have individual significance. To see things as means
is to see what is most useful and least important about them. To see
things as ends is to be shockingly unpractical; it is to see God in
everything; it is to exalt the spirit above the flesh; it is not the way
to "get on"; but it is the only way to produce significant art, and,
indeed, it is only on such terms that life itself signifies.

So far we have admitted the superiority of the East: the last word has
yet to be said. Few observant people will deny that there are signs of
an awakening in Europe. The times are great with the birth of some new
thing. A spiritual renaissance may be at hand. Meanwhile, we are not
suffered to ignore the huge strides in material progress that are the
chief glory of modern Japan; nor have we failed to remark that the
latest art to reach us from that country proved, when displayed with
some ostentation at Shepherd's Bush, equal in vulgarity of sentiment,
flashiness of execution, and apelike imitation to the worst that can be
seen at Burlington House. Philistinism, it seems, finds ready converts
on the other side of the globe. Let the spokesmen of th