With the sense of the supreme value of space comes an intense feeling for line. Whether this has something to do with the climate, which is clear, and the landscape, which is mountainous, I do not know; but compare the purity of outline in the Italian painters, more especially in the Tuscan and the Umbrian, Botticelli and Perugino, with the Netherlands School, Rembrandt and Rubens, where light and shadow, and colour as colour, play so great a part. But whether it is due to the landscape or not, personally I should be inclined to attach a great deal of importance to the artistic value of Fujiyama, a mountain whose exquisite outlines, visible from thirteen provinces, have simply permeated Japanese art; but landscape or no, the desire for line is a fact. The Japanese draw with everything; with the mud embankments of their rice-fields, with the granite stones of their walls, with the trees in their gardens, with the flowers in their vases. The whole essence of flower arrangement is not colour mass, but line drawing. It is the same with their trees, the dwarf trees in their pots, or the grown trees in their gardens. Both are trained and educated to produce a beautiful outline, and they succeed. It is perhaps interesting in this connection to notice the number of illustrations in Japanese books where the trees are simply silhouettes washed in in Indian ink on a blank background. We should have, I think, a great disinclination to treat our trees in this way. The feeling for line is very strong, and it is perhaps perpetuated by the daily use of those dead pictures, the Chinese ideographs. Several hundred years ago the Japanese invented the phonetic syllabaries called _kana_. It is interesting from an artistic point of view to compare them with our alphabet. A very short contemplation of the alphabet as used in our books and handwriting will show that it is mainly composed of straight lines, often parallel, with a certain admixture of circles. Now, although a straight line is the nearest way between two points, it is rarely or never the most beautiful; did not some one once say, “The line of beauty is a curve”? I do not think any one’s artistic soul has received much nourishment from a contemplation of the letter “m,” three parallel lines, or “t.” Compare them with the corresponding _kana_, and the difference will be felt at once. Indeed, we are all unconsciously well aware of the artistic failing of our ordinary alphabet, for directly we carve or write an inscription, or introduce it in any way into something which claims to be an object of art, then we discard it altogether, and either fall back on the Gothic letters, or adopt some kind of fancy alphabet. As the average Japanese child is taught writing four hours a week for the first three years, and three hours for the next two, and as their writing is really painting, their feeling for line has at least a chance of development.