Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/38

RV 18 crude and elementary, had made some progress. A great deal of ingenuity and close research have been devoted to tracing fine lines of division between the periods of Japanese development in those early days, but the resulting differentiation is too subtle to be practical. The problem of real interest is to separate foreign inspiration from native originality; to determine whether this art, which has so greatly pleased the world in modern times, is a mere by-product of inspiration emanating in the first place from Greece, and becoming more and more deflected from the line of identity as it passed through the refracting media of Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese assimilations, or whether any part of it may be regarded as the unmixed offspring of Japanese genius. With that object in view it would certainly be helpful to trace the record back to its very alphabet. But unfortunately the materials are not sufficient for accurate analysis. If the most profound students take the latter half of the sixth century as the opening era, it is not because they believe the preceding cycles to have been entirely barren, but because the spread of Buddhism at that time supplied the first elevating impulse, as well as the first means of preserving and transmitting the art products of the time. There is no apparent possibility of determining, however, whether the scanty specimens transmitted from the sixth century and the first half of the seventh were the work of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean hands. Not until the end of the seventh century does solid ground present itself, and Japan is then found in such close contact with China that a full tide of civilisation flowed from the latter to the shores of her neighbour,—civilisation which, so far as its artistic side is concerned, was