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My cook wears a smiling, healthy, rather pleasing face. He is a good-looking young man. . . . One day I looked through a little hole in the shoji, and saw him alone. The face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showed queer lines worn by old hardship. . . . I went in, and the man was all changed—young and happy again. . . . He wears the mask of happiness as an etiquette. (The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn.)
Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts. Being born and growing up are such common experiences that people seldom consider what they involve. As most readers of books pass from cover to cover, realizing not at all that the letters which form the words are the product of painstaking craftsmanship and that the imposition of the type upon the page, the composition of the title-piece, the binding of the volume, are the result of centuries of study and design, so also we take as a matter of course the miracle of being alive, and the comings and goings of the men and women about us.
