We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
12
CLOSE UP
This last phenomenon is explained as the impression of the shadow falling" on the eye from the upper eyelid, caught by the supersensitive observation of the Japanese.
It might be presumed that, we have here, in this configuration the fullest pictorial testimony to the above view of Miles. But once more we must disappoint : in as much as the idea of a framed picture derives not from the limits of the view field of our eyes but from the fact of the usual framedness of the glimpse of nature we catch through the frame of the window or the door — or stage aperture as shown above — equally the composition of the Japanese derives from his lack of door frames, doors being replaced by the sliding panels of the walls of a typical Japanese house opening onto an infinite horizon.
But, even supposing that this shape represents the proportions of the view field, we must yet consider another remarkable phenomenon of Japanese art : the materialisation on paper of the above mentioned absence of side boundaries in the form of the horizontal roll picture born, only in Japan and China, and not ruling elsewhere. I would call it unroll picture, because unwound horizontally from one roll to another it shows interminable episodes of battles, festivals, processions. Example, the pride of the Boston Museum : the many feet long Burning of the Palace of Yedo. Or the immortal Killing of the Bear in the Emperor 's Garden at Bloomsbury. Having created this unique type of horizontal picture out of the supposed horizontal tendency of perception, the Japanese, with their supersensitive artistic feeling, then created, illogical as it may be according to the view of Mr. Miles, the opposite form — as a matter of purely aesthetic need for counter-balance, for Japan (with China) is also the birthplace of the vertical roll picture. The tallest of all vertical compositions (if we disregard the Gothic vertical window compositions). Roll pictures are also found to take the form of curiously shaped coloured woodcuts of upright composition, with the most amazing compositional disposition of faces, dresses, background elements and stage attributes.
This, I hold, shows pretty clearly that even if the diagnosis of perception as horizontal should be correct (which should by no means be regarded as proved), vertical composition also is needed as harmonic counter-balance to it.
This tendency towards harmony, and perceptive equilibrium, is of a nature quite other than a different " harmonic " and " aesthetic " argument introduced by another group of defendants of the horizontal screen.
To quote Mr. Cowan's summary :
" Howell and Bubray (10), Lane (7), Westerberg (11), and Dieterich (8) agree that the most desirable proportions are those approximating 1.618 :1, which correspond to those of the so-called " whirling square " rectangle (also known as the " golden cut "), based on the principles of dinamic symmetry which have predominated in the arts for centuries. For simplicity