Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/101

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS of the citizens of his capital a charming picture of gentle peace, though its setting was a framework of vast military preparation, so the Japanese of every era has loved to turn from the fencing-school to the arbour, from the field of battle to the society of the rockery and the cascade, delighting in the perils and struggles of the one as much as he admires the grace and repose of the other.

All the great captains of the later military epoch, from Oda Nobunaga downward, sought to combine the artistic beauties hitherto peculiar to the "illustrious mansions" of Kyōtō with the strength and solidity demanded by the new weapons and greatly increased organisations of the era. It is, indeed, a very remarkable fact that pari passû with the growth of strategical ability, with the improvement of tactical methods, and with the development of military resources, the rude austerity of life affected by earlier warriors lost its value, and people ceased to count it incongruous that a leader of soldiers should be a lover of art. Possibly something of the change is attributable to the great strides made by art itself, both pictorial and applied, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth. The painter, the sculptor, the worker in metals, the lacquerer, the keramist, all ascended to a plane not higher, perhaps, from the point of view of nobility of ideal, than that occupied by the glyptic artists of the seventh and eighth centuries, and the pictorial artists of the ninth, but certainly a plane of far greater 77