It is the lack of aerial perspective—in other words, of atmosphere—which so fatally mars the very real beauty of Oriental art. In the paintings of the Chinese artists, and the extravagantly-admired coloured prints of the famous wood engravers of Japan, there is often a rare skill of colour and a firmness of hand worthy of Giotto, especially in the matchless drawing of flowing lines such as drapery. The birds and trees and grasses of the Kano school, the lovely outlines of the landscape painters, the monkeys and deer of Chōsen, are in many respects wonderful. But there is almost always something wanting. For want of aerial perspective the lines remain rigid; there is no soft atmospheric roundness, and on that account the pictures fail to satisfy. The result is like the fascinating work of very clever children. Compare with the vaunted eighteenth-century art of Japan the contemporary work of the French painters, Watteau, Lancret, Fragonard, who, to my mind, have never been excelled in their rendering of the mystery of atmosphere. See how their woodland scenes melt into unfathomable distances like those of the great Dutchmen, such as Cuyp and others. There you have the poetry of nature and of gardens, and when you are laying out your domain and combining your succession of pictures and surprises, ask yourself this question: Would Watteau have found here anything worthy of his brush? To be sure you cannot have his pretty powdered dames, and his musical courtiers, with their viols and tabors and flutes. But they were mere accessories. That which so obviously gave him the greatest joy—that upon which he bestowed his supreme skill—was the scenery in which he placed them to give it life, even though that life should have something of a meretricious and theatrical character. If it be true, according to Phillips, that softness and colour, hardness and form, go together, we can account for the prevalence of the garden of mere colour in the days when the lady of the house ruled the gardener. The garden of colour is feminine and emotional; the garden of form masculine and intellectual—it is the garden of the master. And here we come to something akin to the Chinese doctrine of Yang and Yin, the male and female principles ruling creation. The garden of form belongs to Yang, the garden of colour to Yin. This is not intended in any way to undervalue the woman’s influence. It is only natural that a woman who is all softness and emotion should surround herself with effects which mirror her own sweet nature. The man, on the other hand, strong and hard, will be inclined to try and imitate the sterner pictures of creation. He will work in what Addison called the Pindaric style, “without affecting the nicer elegancies of Art.”