Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/252

 Strange conclusions surely, the one involving the hypothesis that the silent vocabulary of a people's shaping art may be richer than the spoken vocabulary of the idealism informing that art; the other, the still more unreasonable assumption that a nation can be blind to the beauties of its own creation. Michitaka's comments on the works of the Goto sculptors dispel all these delusions. Some of his comparisons may sound even extravagant. They are not extravagantly expressed, however. Nothing could be simpler than the language in which they are couched. Nature speaks to the Japanese in words of clearest meaning. Other eyes drink in just as deep a draught of enchantment from sunset on "the happy autumn fields" or from moonlight bathing a cherry grove in spring; but it may be truly said of the Japanese that in the course of long centuries of refined civilisation, they have gradually grouped together nature's fairest combinations into a series of ideograms each of which has come to be intimately associated with conceptions and emotions which the physical aspects of the scene alone could not suggest or inspire. There exists a wide field of thought which, though open to poetry, is closed to the arts of manual imitation. But from what does poetry derive its special sway over regions of the mind that lie beyond the direct influence of imitative art? Is it not from its power of invoking from the recesses of the heart feelings and experiences to which the painter or sculptor can appeal only by accidental association? In Japan, however, poetry has so constantly and faithfully drawn its inspiration from nature's images, and has been so loyally content to limit itself to appreciated interpretations of their suggestions, that mere mention of a particular combination of natural