peculiarly applicable there. To call a Japanese cook, for
instance, an artist would be but the barest acknowledgment of fact, for
Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at than agreeable to eat;
while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of drapery, if they are
sublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the male or female form.

On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast among
the people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it never
hides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from the
highest prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme.

Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itself
impersonality in the people. At first sight it might seem as if science
did the same, and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset the
other, and that consequently both should be equally impersonal. But in
the first place, our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit,
as theirs are with artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a mason
an impersonal interest in the principles of the arch, or of a plumber
a non-financial devotion to hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong in
crediting the masses in general or European waiters in particular with
much abstract love of mathematics, for example. In the second place,
there is an essential difference in the attitude of the two subjects
upon personality. Emotionally, science appeals to nobody, art to
everybody. Now the emotions constitute the larger part of that complex
bundle of ideas which we know as self. A thought which is not tinged to
some extent with feeling is not only not personal; properly speaking, it
is not even distinctively human, but cosmical. In its lofty superiority
to man, science is unpersonal rather than impersonal. Art, on the other
hand, is a familiar spirit. Through the windows of the senses she finds
her way into the very soul of man, and makes for herself a home there.
But it is to his humanity, not to his individuality, that she whispers,
for she speaks in that universal tongue which all can understand.

Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no mere
coincidence that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia
respectively, the French and the Japanese, are at the same time the most
artistic. Even politeness, which, as we have seen, distinguishes both,
is itself but a form of art,--the social art of living agreeably with
one's fellows.

This impersonalit