Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/348

 332 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tures ; while Mr. K. Okakura has shown, in his Ideals of the East, that Japanese art has been informed with patriotic, religious, and philosophic sentiments as pronounced as those of any other people. Nor has this ample content failed to run through a development correspondent to that in Europe. Thus, a religious period of sculpture, Chinese-derived, in the seventh and eighth centuries was succeeded by one of painting in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The statues really idols, as with the Greeks show a more abstract modeling, as becomes the Buddhist subject, and have a more decorative setting on lotus and glory than was practiced in the West. The painting reached its consummation in Yeishin, who was the Fra Angelico of Japan in tenderness of line and glory of color. Then followed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a national school the Yamato-Tosa mostly with military subjects descriptive of the current civil strife. Then renewed Chinese influence gave rise to a grand idealistic landscape in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- turies, which yielded in turn to realism in the sixteenth and subse- quent centuries, though all pre-existent schools have representa- tives to this day.

A unique phase of this realism was the colored block printing, extra-academic and democratic alike in artists, subjects, and patrons, but attaining a refinement of line and color appreciable by no other pavement populace in the world. The originals were painted by such masters as Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Hokusai ; and the process work done by unnamed engravers and pressmen, whose perfection of craftsmanship is almost incompre- hensible to the westerner. E. F. Strange declares this "the highest form of a purely democratic art the world ever saw." The people's sense for nature also is so keen that Wordsworth could have no message for them ; and their sense for decoration so sound and simple that neither could Morris do them service. Also Morris' maxim, that art should be made by the people and for the people as a joy to the maker and user, is an everyday fact in Japan. In fine, the Japanese are the greatest draftsmen and colorists living, and in decorative composition have given the world that asymmetric style which forms the only alternative