(2) Indirectly, by decoration; and (3) Extra-directly, by arrangement. And if art be truly in a people, even the most ugly and stubborn of useful objects will, by one of these three methods, be made beautiful. I suppose that any one who has ever seen a rice-field will allow that for at least some six months in the year it is one of the ugliest objects in the world. Made of liquid mud, it lies for half the year a slimy, greasy black pond shut in by low mud walls. On its oozy surface gather unwholesome growths that shine with metallic reflections, while the manure, in Japan mostly human, decomposes in the thick mud. There is nothing, I suppose, much uglier, nothing more useful, and its ugliness is the condition of its utility. The Japanese cannot change the thick black ooze, they cannot change the low mud walls which embank the slimy pools. These, with all their ugly consequences, are fixed and determined. But the art of the Japanese people has yet rendered the rice-fields beautiful. They change the shape. Those embanking walls of mud are moulded as a potter moulds his clay. A series of dead square fields I have never seen. Two, three, four, five, six, even eight-sided rice-fields can be found in Japan, and often the curves of the mud wall itself are graceful as the lines of a Greek vase. Beneath the temple of Tesshuji, which looks towards the wonder of Fujiyama, with its two pure lines of exquisite grace, is a great fertile plain, a plain of innumerable rice-fields, one of the richest in the country. When I stood on the steps of that deserted temple and looked down, the fields were all black and naked, and yet the plain was neither ugly nor monotonous, for the peasants had curved their rice-fields into exquisite lines, and not two were alike.