Though the people of this country, both high and low, are unrivalled in their genuine love of nature, their manner of observation and enjoyment is one peculiar to themselves. It is a taste educated through the medium of their traditional customs, arts, and cults. The national interpretation of nature, stereotyped into motives for their numerous liberal arts, has been continually before the humblest classes, in decorative designs applied to the simplest as well as to the most costly industrial object, and has thus made them familiar with the accepted rendering of every form and combination derived from natural life. Such conventional representations have become the standard by which nature herself is viewed and judged. As with the Greeks, so with the Japanese, even female beauty has its established ideal type. In a similar manner, the pine tree, the plum tree, mountain, lake, and water-fall, possess their ideal standard of comparison.
