king the visit so joyous to him. He did
not understand placing; but it interested him and gave him an intense
amount of pleasure, in the same way that superbly fine work always does
even to the most uneducated.

The proper placing of objects is not only an exact science, but also it
forms almost a religion with the Japanese. When you just arrive in Japan
you are at once impressed with the perfect placing of everything about
you. You find yourself surrounded by a series of beautiful pictures;
every street that you see on your journey from the station to the hotel
is a picture; every shop front, the combination of the many streets, the
town in relation to the mountains round about it--everything you chance
to look at forms a picture. In fact, the whole of Japan is one perfect
bit of placing.

[Illustration: HEAVY-LADEN]

"Nature has favoured this place," says the globe-trotter. "I never found
when I lived in Surrey that great trees placed themselves against
hill-sides so as to form perfect pictures. I never saw the lines of a
bush pick up those of a fence with one broad sweep. Nature never behaved
like that in Dorking." Of course Nature didn't; nor does she in Japan.
There the whole country, every square inch of it, is thought out and
handled by great artists. There is no accident in the beautiful curves
of the trees that the globe-trotter so justly admires: these trees have
been trained and shaped and forced to form a certain decorative pattern,
and the result is--perfection. We in the West labour under the delusion
that if Nature were to be allowed to have her own sweet way, she would
always be beautiful. But the Japanese have gone much further than this:
they realise that Nature does not always do the right thing; they know
that occasionally trees will grow up to form ugly lines; and they know
exactly how to adapt and help her. She is to them like some beautiful
musical instrument, finer than any ever made by human hands, but still
an instrument, with harmonies to be coaxed out. And the Japanese play on
Nature, not only in a concentrated way as with a kakemono or a flower in
a room, but also in the biggest possible form, on landscapes; dragging
in mountains, colossal trees, rushing cataracts--nothing is too much or
too great an undertaking for these masters of decoration. Any ordinary
little baby boy that is born in Japan has almost a greater decorative
sense than the finest painter here in the West.

All this beau