Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/38

 originality asserted on behalf of the early Japanese potters by certain European critics. There appears to be some reluctance to admit that the unsympathetic, gain-getting Chinaman could ever have supplied any of the inspirations which America and Europe have of late learned to admire so much. Led away by this loving enthusiasm, Jacquemart attributes to Japan a translucid porcelain older than that of China; that is to say, in his opinion, older than the Christian era. Later writers, Messrs. Audsley and Bowes, place the date of the earliest Japanese porcelain manufacture in the sixth century, and do not hesitate to declare that "the communication between the two countries [China and Japan] evidently failed to affect their respective arts," and that "the Japanese found little in the Chinese from which they could gain practical or artistic instruction, since their own arts and manufactures were equal, and in most cases superior, to those of the latter." Even M. Louis Gonse, who shows generally a sympathetic appreciation of his subject, excludes the Middle Kingdom from any share in the moulding of Japanese genius. He believes that a wave of Aryan culture, flowing eastward, was divided by the unimpressionable rock of Chinese conservatism into northern and southern streams, of which one found its way to Japan with waters as pure as when they left their source. But facts cannot be gainsaid. Whenever Japan needed help in her progress along the path of art, she turned to China. If she often translated the aid thus obtained into language of her own, full of beauty and rhythm, the alphabet nevertheless remained always Chinese. It is of interest therefore to inquire what China had to teach Japan at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-