The whole of the _cha-no-yu_, or tea ceremony, one of the few Japanese things of which Europeans have heard more or less vaguely, is an illustration in point. The tea ceremony, divested of its subsidiary and attendant growths, is in essence nothing more than the proper making and the proper drinking of a simple cup of tea. This, in the course of centuries, has been elaborated into an imposing and very complicated ceremonial. Nowadays the _cha-no-yu_ is regarded mainly as a useful reservoir of etiquette and politeness, and is taught as such. But the whole idea on which it rests is that for every given action there is always one, and only one, right and proper attitude, that is to say, the most graceful. So that the curve of every finger in the mere passing of a tea-cup is the result of careful thought and long experience. Everything has to be considered, the room, the person, the relation of the body to the arm, of the arm to the hand, of the hand to the tea-cup, the position of the person serving, and of the person served, the place of the tea-cups, of the teapot, and the tea-kettle; all have been taken into consideration by the tea ceremonialists, and the proper, the most graceful attitude carefully evolved. That you may not think politeness a matter of social caste in Japan, I may say that the _kurumaya_ when they run into one another at the corners, the coolies hauling carts when they collide, bow profoundly and beg one another’s pardon. And the exquisite cleanliness? Some one once defined dirt as “matter out of place.” Is not much of art just the putting of things in their right places, in their best and most appropriate and consequently their most beautiful place; in the putting of a thing in such a place that you feel it never could have been otherwise. As the child said when lost in admiration of his birthday cake, “It’s so beautiful I think God must have made it.” It is this cleanliness, this neatness, which the Japanese possess, a neatness which has passed beyond mere precision, passed on into its essence--grace. All this may perhaps sound far-fetched to English ears. If we are clean and polite it is on sanitary or on ethical grounds, not for æsthetic reasons, because “it is healthy or right,” not “because it is more beautiful,” and we make a broad distinction between ethics and æsthetics. In Japan, on the contrary, there is the most intimate of relations between them. The whole modern controversy of “art for art’s sake,” all the dearly cherished views of French critics that art has nothing to do with morals, is simply unmeaning to them. You might as well say that the sun had no relation to light.