Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/353

 the services of the artists had always been in keen request. The sword and all its trappings, the suit of armour and its elaborate decoration, which during long centuries had offered an unlimited field for the exercise of glyptic skill, were discarded permanently. The temple and the mausoleum no longer demanded the services of sculptors, metal-workers, lacquerers, architects, and painters. To keep in even partial repair a few of these magnificent structures seemed to overtax the liberality of a generation whose forefathers had bequeathed to them such noble monuments of art and refinement. Virtually the only clients that offered themselves under the new regimen were foreigners, to whom Japanese art was an unknown land; whose standards of excellence were greatly at variance with Japanese standards; who in most cases approached every Oriental production with a strong pre-disposition to hold it in light esteem, and to insist that wherever its features differed from their own tastes, the fault lay with the features, and who generally regarded the whole question from a mercantile point of view, preferring to dispense with really fine artistic qualities rather than to obtain them at the risk of trafficking in costly articles. It will be understood that these remarks apply mainly to foreign communities who settle in Japan for commercial purposes, and only in a limited degree to connoisseurs in Europe and America. The former certainly helped to find a market for a certain class of Japanese art-products in the years immediately subsequent to the fall of the old system. But for a long time it was a market which exercised a most vitiating influence on those that catered for it. The foreign exporter worked through the Japanese middle