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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: that, like two lights, destroy one another by mutual interference.
Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that to
appreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as
in the painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when
expressed is but half that necessary to express it. Some
understanding must exist in the observer for any work to be
intelligible. It is only a question of degree. The greater the
art-sense in the person addressed, the more had better be left to it.
Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic. In fact, the
artistic appreciation of the masses there is something astonishing
to us, accustomed to our immense intellectual differences between
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