Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/147

RV 123 sculpture a devil had they believed that the doomed are tortured and that their sufferings are superintended by such a being. But since they entertained no such belief, since their conception of the eternal consequences of sin was very trivial, there is no reason to infer that they excluded the demon from their art gallery merely because his ugliness disqualified him for admission. The truth is that they never conceived him. Buddhism, however, introduced a devil to Japan with appropriate furniture of horns, claws, and fangs. But he did not find a place in the gallery of sacred sculpture, nor did any of the celebrated artists of ancient or mediæval Japan attempt to chisel a demon, if the deities of thunder and tempest, who are certainly demoniacal types, and the impish lantern-bearers of Kasuga, be excepted. On the other hand, if the devil's place in Japanese sacred sculpture was almost as rare as that of the Harpies in Grecian art, it is not to be assumed that he was ostracised because of his ugliness. He figures prominently in Japanese secular carving, which dates from a later epoch, and there can be no question that in the eyes of the Japanese his ugliness had a beauty of its own, as indeed all fully developed types have.

Nevertheless it is necessary to conclude that, on the whole, the range of the art sculptor in Japan was narrow. He was the exponent of a system of religious belief rather than of the heroic and the pathetic in humanity. He had no rich source of motives like that wide domain peopled by Grecian imagination with mythological heroes and heroines, with Dryads and Hamadryads, with Nymphs and Fauns, with Naiads and Nereids, with Satyrs, Centaurs, and Minotaurs, representatives of noble and tender fancies or pictur-