y accentuated as it is in the
teaching of it in the great schools of the East and of the West. We
Westerners are taught to draw direct from the object or model before us
on the platform, whereas the Japanese are taught to study every detail
of their model, and to store their brains with impressions of every
curve and line, afterwards to go away and draw that object from memory.
This is a splendid training for the memory and the eye, as it teaches
one both to see and to remember--two great considerations in the art of
drawing. You will often see a little child sitting in a garden in Japan
gazing attentively for perhaps a whole hour at a bowl of goldfish,
watching the tiny bright creatures as they circle round and round in the
bowl. Remarking on some particular pose, the child will retain it in its
busy brain, and, running away, will put down this impression as nearly
as it can remember. Perhaps on this first occasion he is only able to
put in a few leading lines; very soon he is at a loss--he has forgotten
the curve of the tail or the placing of the eye. He toddles back and
studies the fish again and again, until perhaps after one week's
practice that child is able to draw the fish in two or three different
poses from memory without the slightest hesitation or uncertainty.

It is this certainty of touch and their power to execute these bold,
sweeping, decided lines that form the chief attraction of Japanese works
of art. Their wrists are supple; the picture in their minds is sure;
they have learnt it line for line; it is merely the matter of a few
minutes for an artist to sketch in his picture. There are no choppy
hesitating lines such as one detects in even the finest of our Western
pictures, lines in which you can plainly see how the artist has swerved
first to the right and then to the left, correcting and erasing,
uncertain in his touch. The lines will probably be correct in the end;
but when the picture is finished his work has not that bright crisp look
so characteristic of the Japanese pictures. Then, again, when a Japanese
artist draws a bird, he begins with the point of interest--which, let us
say, is the eye. The brilliant black eye of a crow fixed upon a piece of
meat attracts his attention; he remembers it, and the first few strokes
that he portrays upon his stretched silk is the eye of the bird. The
neck, the legs, the body--everything radiates and springs from that
bright eye just as it does in the animal it