Of the “King and Queen” he said, “I like that very much,” and so on, passing from one Cubist picture to another, commenting upon each seriously and intelligently. * * * * * To either copy or be in the slightest degree hampered by nature is a mark of inferiority in Chinese and Japanese art. The very abstract art of the Orient has its elaborate conventions, but those conventions are all in the direction of _pure_ art, whereas the conventions of our art (music always excepted) are all in the direction of imitation. It was a theory of the great Chinese teacher, Chinanpin, and particularly enforced by him, that trees, plants, and grasses take the form of a circle, called in art _Rin kan_; or a semi-circle, _Han kan_; or an aggregation of half circles, called fish-scales, _Gyo sin_; or a modification of these latter, called moving fish-scales, _Go sin Katsu_.[61] * * * * * In regard to painting moving waters, whether deep or shallow, in rivers or brooks, bays or oceans, Chinanpin declared it was impossible for the eye to seize their exact forms because they are ever changing and have no fixed, definite shape; therefore, they cannot be sketched satisfactorily; yet, as moving water must be represented in painting, it should be long and minutely contemplated by the artist and its general character--whether leaping in the brook, flowing in the river, roaring in the cataract, surging in the ocean or lapping the shore--observed and reflected upon, and after the eye and the memory are both sufficiently trained and _the very soul of the artist is saturated_, as it were, with this one subject, and he feels his whole being calm and composed, he should retire to the privacy of his studio and with the early morning sun to gladden his spirit there attempt to reproduce the movement of the flow; _not by copying what he has seen_, for the effect would be stiff and wooden, but by symbolizing according to certain laws _what he feels and remembers_. * * * * * It begins to be plain why the Japanese expert was profoundly interested in the modern pictures and drawings. * * * * *