ve required decades to raise. The
branches, too, of most garden shrubs and trees are trimmed in
fantastic shapes. What is the charm in these distortions? First,
perhaps, the universal human interest in anything requiring skill.
Think of the patience and persistence and experimentation necessary
to rear a dwarf pear tree twelve or fifteen inches high, growing its
full number of years and bearing full-size fruit in its season! And
second is the no less universal human interest in the strange and
abnormal. All primitive people have this interest. It shows itself in
their religions. Abnormal stones are often objects of religious
devotion. Although I cannot affirm that such objects are worshiped in
Japan to-day, yet I can say that they are frequently set up in temple
grounds and dedicated with suitable inscriptions. Where nature can be
made to produce the abnormal, there the interest is still greater. It
is a living miracle. Witness the cocks of Tosa, distinguished by their
two or three tail feathers reaching the extraordinary length of ten or
even fifteen feet, the product of ages of special breeding.

According to the ordinary use of the term, aesthetics has to do with
art alone. Yet it also has intimate relations with both speech and
conduct. Poetry depends for its very existence on aesthetic
considerations. Although little conscious regard is paid to aesthetic
claims in ordinary conversation, yet people of culture do, as a matter
of fact, pay it much unconscious attention. In conduct too, aesthetic
ideas are often more dominant than we suppose. The objection of the
cultured to the ways of the boorish rests on aesthetic grounds. This is
true in every land. In the matter of conduct it is sometimes hard to
draw the line between aesthetics and ethics, for they shade
imperceptibly into one another; so much so that they are seen to be
complementary rather than contradictory. Though it is doubtless true
that conduct aesthetically defective may not be defective ethically,
still is it not quite as true that conduct bad from the ethical is bad
also from the aesthetical standpoint?

In no land have aesthetic considerations had more force in molding both
speech and conduct than in Japan. Not a sentence is uttered by a
Japanese but has the characteristic marks of aestheticism woven into
its very structure. By means of "honorifics" it is seldom necessary
for a speaker to be so pointedly vulgar as even to mention self. There
are few