Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/33

RV 13 been written that the mannerisms of Japanese art are numerous. The decorative limits within which it is for the most part confined render such a result almost inevitable. In the course of time certain tricks of delineation have received the cachet of great masters and been recognised as the ne plus ultra of forceful suggestiveness. A fatal temptation to learn these tricks without attempting to acquire the spirit that suggested them besets the average student. It is so comfortable, so reassuring, to know that waves, bamboos, clouds, flowing water, hair, rock, and a multitude of other objects may be depicted by lines, curves, and washes combined and arranged in ways capable of being memorised as accurately as an ideograph or a syllabary. The result is painful ease of reproduction. The observer is lost in admiration of the directness and facility of a Japanese artist who seats himself among a group of onlookers and paints a dozen pictures in an hour, each presenting some points of excellence. But it may very well happen that a year or two later the same observer is invited to attend a séance where the same artist performs the same tour de force by producing exactly the same pictures in the same time. Of course this criticism applies to the rank and file alone of the profession,—the men who, being without originality of conception, are obliged to substitute skill of pencil, and who find in the mere processes of the great masters a sufficient equipment for the purposes of every-day art. Unfortunately such mechanists of the brush have abounded in every era. Their skill as copyists constitutes a barrier to foreign appreciation of true Japanese art. How many collectors or connoisseurs in Europe or America have had an opportunity of examining genuine works of