Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/298

 The sthetic influence of the tea cult was even more remarkable, perhaps, than its social or philosophical aspect. Every man of refinement or opulence may be said to have been a cha-jin, and every cha-jin was, of necessity, a virtuoso of greater or less skill. A collection of art-objects soon came to signify simply a tea equipage so extensive as to offer constant novelties to the connoisseurs who from time to time were bidden to the pavilion, and so choice that each specimen might safely endure the ordeal of close examination by parties of skilled connoisseurs. Nothing faulty or spurious could survive such ordeals,—that is to say, nothing faulty or spurious from the point of view of the tea clubs. This reservation is necessary, because the tea clubs had two distinct and altogether dissimilar points of view. One of their canons prescribed an artistic standard of the highest excellence, though never sanctioning anything florid or meretricious; another passed to the opposite extreme of homeliness, and established rules of taste which attached no value whatever to elegance of form, perfection of technique or beauty of design, but bade the true virtuoso look first for qualities owing their value solely to association and appreciable by courtesy only. This second variety of objects, an extensive class, received from the irreverent an appropriate title, "rusty things" (sabi-mono). They were strictly and logically true to the