Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/73

 Their richly lacquered receptacles, their brocade wrappers, and the enormous prices they command—two or three hundred dollars for a patched old cup looking as though it had been cut out of rusty iron—enhance the incongruity and marvel of the whole affair. Here, in short, is another and a very striking example of the conventional side of Japanese æsthetics; the tendency to attach greater weight to tradition and association than to beauty and excellence.

The Japanese, as already noted, have always fully understood that Korean keramic art entered upon a period of apparently permanent decadence after the removal of the capital from Song-do and the accession of the present dynasty at the close of the fourteenth century. When they speak of Chōsen-Hakeme or Chōsen-Unkaku—i. e. wares of the Hakeme and Unkaku types manufactured after the Kingdom received the name of "Chōsen"—they signify faience inferior, in their opinion, to Ko-Hakeme (old Hakeme) and Ko-Unkaku. The difference is easily detected by the distinctly vitreous character of the glaze and comparatively light, porous nature of the pâte in the younger specimens.

After what has been written above, it need scarcely be added that the descriptions given by Jacquemart, and following him by Miss J. Young, about Korean porcelains are myths. The statements contained in the third chapter of M. Jacquemart's "Histoire de la Céramique" must be regarded as a singular assemblage of misconceptions. The Koreans never produced anything bearing the faintest resemblance to the pieces he confidently ascribes to them. Siebold, whose experience was acquired after Japanese keramics had reached a stage of high development, wrote more truly when he said that the products of Korea were coarse and that they exhibited the infancy of the art. Even this verdict, however, though comparatively just, erred, in so far as it was founded on the Japanese chajin's favourite specimens of Korean faience and stone-ware. Looking, indeed, at the squalid, impoverished, and inartistic Korea of to-day, the student is puzzled to imagine that it could ever have given valuable aid to refined and æsthetic Japan. But if he turns to China and contrasts the present outcome of her workshops