Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/287

 trapped by a clam; cats catching rats; rats eating mochi; puppy dogs playing with empty shells or holding fans in their teeth; a child setting a dog at a blind man; bulls fighting; oxen ploughing; flower-rafts floating down rivers; carp leaping up waterfalls; various scenes from the twenty-four acts of filial piety, and so on. In short, these records show that the first six Goto masters had a very large repertoire of subjects, and that it is altogether a mistake to speak of their productions as severely classical, or of their range of decorative motives as limited. They differed, of course, in the quality of their work, the third representative, Joshiu, being notably the coarsest and roughest chiseller among them. It is a theory implicitly believed in Japan that an artist's moral nature is reflected in his productions. Joshiu was a big, stalwart soldier. He fell in battle, the end he had always desired, and there is certainly something of the bluff man-at-arms in his style of carving. His most elaborate effort is said to have been a pair of menuki in the form of a procession of golden ants carrying silver eggs. But he preferred fierce dragons and angry shishi. His son Kwōjō, the fourth representative, who worked from 1550 to 1620, is distinguished for precisely the quality which his father lacked, extreme accuracy of detail and delicacy of style. Up to Kwōjō's time, that is to say, during the era of the first three Goto masters, the iroye (literally, colour-picture) process, or "picking out" with metal different from that of the general design, was somewhat clumsy. The preparation of efficient solder not being understood, the expert had to pin each tiny plate of gold, silver, or copper in its place. He accomplished this with such dexterity that the rivets