Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/205

RV 179 well as by the painter. Great skill was exercised in the treatment of the drapery and the pose of the figure. But it was on the chiselling of the face that the artist expended most care, and the result justified his toil; for he succeeded in producing wonderful conceptions of the wrinkled recluse, the semi-savage and wholly appalling dragon-deity, the relentless yet beneficent demon-slayer, the malevolent ogre, the phrensied thunder-god, and the inane elf of the mountains. Very soon he extended his repertoire of motives. Masks naturally suggested themselves as capable of being grouped into various shapes, and netsuke of that form are often of the highest quality. Then followed carvings of the Seven Deities of Fortune, sometimes singly, sometimes grouped together; of saru-gaku dancers; of fishes and aquatic plants; of mermaids; of men in armour; of the twelve signs of the zodiac; of barn-door fowl, and so forth. Foreign influence, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, seems to have temporarily checked the development of Japanese fancy in this branch of art, for it became fashionable to use the handles of Chinese seals, and sometimes the whole seal, as a netsuke. The Japanese, when they obey their own instincts, are seldom guilty of a solecism. They would not have appended a seal to a tobacco-pouch as a proper adjunct. But if the fact be recalled that the inro was originally a receptacle for a seal and for a little box of vermilion-ink paste, it is easy to understand how Chinese seals came to be regarded as appropriate toggles for the inro, and how their employment in that capacity was extended to the tobacco-pouch. In Chinese work of this description there is a total absence of the naturalistic pathos, playful idealism, and human interest, which charac-