Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/112

RV 90 Korean sculptors who worked to meet the demands of the Buddhist religion in their own countries, succeed in producing a single masterpiece comparable with these effigies? Tradition is so confident about the debt owed by Japan's artists to the neighbouring continental countries that the broad fact may not be doubted, especially as there are internal evidences of its partial truth. But the amount of the borrowing is open to query. It is contrary to the suggestions of reason or the teachings of precedent that countries supposed to have been the parents and teachers of a particular art as well as the fields of its earnest exercise through long centuries, should not be able to show any products of that art corresponding with the admirable examples attributed to their emigrant experts working under alien patronage in a neighbouring island. Such was not the case in the field of pictorial art, nor yet in that of keramics, nor yet in that of textile fabrics, and the apparent inference with regard to sculpture is that, though the Japanese obtained technical instruction from their continental neighbours, and motives from the creed which the latter were instrumental in propagating, their own genius soon carried the practice of the art beyond the range of Chinese or Korean conception.

Before pursuing the historical sequence of the development of the sculptor's art in Japan, some special subjects must be briefly discussed.

The chiselling of stone images was practised by the Japanese from an early period of their art history, but it does not seem possible to determine with even approximate accuracy the date when this class of work had its origin. Nor is there much to encourage research. Japanese sculptures in stone have always