nored. Acupuncture, or the practice of sticking long pins into any
part of the patient's body that may happen to be paining him, pretty
much irrespective of anatomical position, is the nearest approach to
surgery of which they are guilty, and proclaims of itself the in corpore
vili character of the thing operated upon.

Nor does the painter owe anything to science. He represents humanity
simply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it betokens the
highest powers of generalized observation that he produces the results
he does. In his drawings, man is shown, not as he might look in the
primitive, or privitive, simplicity of his ancestral Garden of Eden, but
as he does look in the ordinary wear and tear of his present garments.
Civilization has furnished him with clothes, and he prefers, when he has
his picture taken, to keep them on.

In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a realist;
it is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal. But by ideal is not
meant here conventional. That term of reproach is a misnomer, founded
upon a mistake. His idealism is simply the outcome of his love, which,
like all human love, transfigures its object. The Far Oriental has
plenty of this, which, if sometimes a delusion, seems also second
sight, but it is peculiarly impersonal. His color-blindness to the warm,
blood-red end of the spectrum of life in no wise affects his perception
of the colder beauty of the great blues and greens of nature. To their
poetry he is ever sensitive. His appreciation of them is something
phenomenal, and his power of presentation worthy his appreciation.

A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture. It portrays an
emotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all its
elaborate complexity. It undertakes to give only so much of it as is
vital to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all irrelevant
details. It is the expression caught from a glimpse of the soul of
nature by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood, passing, perhaps, in
fact, but perpetuated thus to fancy. Being an emotion, its intensity
is directly proportional to the singleness with which it possesses the
thoughts. The Far Oriental fully realizes the power of simplicity. This
principle is his fundamental canon of pictorial art. To understand his
paintings, it is from this standpoint they must be regarded; not as
soulless photographs of scenery, but as poetic presentations of the
spirit o