And this brings me to my last point. John Addington Symonds, in one of his wonderful essays on the Italian Renaissance, says that painting inevitably fell from its high estate among men because modern life is too complex to be expressed by it. That just in the same way as the Renaissance required something less simple than the sculpture of the Greeks to translate its thoughts and feelings into outward form, so we in this century cannot express our own more subtle and complex thought in terms of painting, and therefore never again can we hope to rival the perfection of that old Renaissance art. And he concludes by remarking that it is in music, more plastic and suggestive, that we must seek our best expression. Now Japanese art is not dead but intensely living, and it has always seemed to me that it lives, it holds its place in their life, thought and culture just because it has learnt to express those complex and subtle emotions which make up our world to-day. And it does it, not by imaging them forth defined and definite as our painting seeks to do, but just as our music would by suggestion. To every Japanese painting a man must bring his own soul and his own thoughts, and where he has none or little, then he will turn away complacently, saying, “Here, there is nothing.” For his are not the eyes to see all the dim eternal problems, all the vistas of unwritten poetry which the artist has but shadowed forth; the artist whose part is not to portray, but infinitely to suggest. SCENES IN RAIN AND SUNSHINE “What it is That dwelleth here I know not; Yet my heart is full of gratitude, And the tears trickle down.” SAIGIO. “Japanese Literature,” by W. G. Aston. I THE MOAT It is winter, and yet a summer sky of clearest blue, faint and pure. A white sun rides in the southern sky, winning me to believe it summer until the cold northern wind lifts the edge of my cloak, and I know it winter. It is warm here in the corner of the bridge, full in the sunlight, and I linger. The dark, still waters of the moat creep stealthily along on either side of me; in the distance I can see the rounded arch of a bridge, so arched is the span and so white that I could believe the people had stolen the young crescent of the moon to span their waters. I lean on my bamboo parapet and look. The dark still waters run between brown stone walls all overhung with the twisted limbs of the fir-trees, such big strong branches lying almost along the ground, and twisted as if in a vain endeavour to get back to the earth beneath. I watch the thick strong branches, soberly green, the masses of foliage riotously so, a green line and its shadow.