Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/85

RV 63 the founder of his school. These three artists are sufficient in themselves to redeem the Meiji era from any charge of hopeless decadence. Nor is the present time without painters that will certainly be remembered by posterity. Kawabata Gyokusho, Hashimoto Gaho, Ogata Gekko, Imao Keinen, Taki Katei, Kumagaye Naohiko, Nomura Bunkyo, Watanabe Seitei, and Araki Kwampo, not to speak of others whose talent seems full of promise, make a group of artists inheriting many of the highest qualities of the various schools they represent.

But while the old art flourishes, quietly and steadily enriching the nation with its products, there flourishes also a most pernicious outgrowth of foreign influence,—a great crop of wretched pictures; weak, hurried examples of brush tricks which constitute the sole equipment of the purely conventional copyist. It is not implied that such efforts of mere mechanical dexterity have been suggested by contact with the art of the West. The wave of Western ideas, penetrating, as it has done, to the very heart of the nation, could not fail to be felt in the region of the national art. It has been felt, as will be presently explained. But the comment to be made here—a comment that extends to the whole range of modern Japanese art whether pictorial or applied—is that the mercantile demand resulting from foreign intercourse has created an essentially mercantile supply. Multitudes of people whose purses can never bring objects of Western art within their reach, and who lack either innate taste or educated liking for such things, are tempted by cheapness and novelty to purchase Japanese pictures, and naturally the shrewd trader and the needy draughtsman take care that this undiscriminating