Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/13



APAN’S victorious war with the neighbouring Empire in 1894–5 showed the world that she was something more than a kind of pretty toy country, where the trivial tourist might enjoy the sight of people using paper pocket-handkerchiefs, feeding themselves with two sticks instead of a knife and fork, and living in houses without windows; and where the dilettante might find art treasures as charming as they were novel. Up to the eve of that war, the average European or American bestowed upon her no more attention than he accorded to some new phenomenon in the world of physics. A sentiment of curiosity, perhaps academical, perhaps ethnographical, but certainly languid, was awakened in his breast by the intelligence that an Oriental nation had undertaken not merely to discard its Oriental garments, but also to prove that they had always been a misfit. He watched the result much as he would have watched the experiments of a horticulturist seeking to make peonies blow on a briar stem. In the field of art, however, his estimate of her capacities was different. He could not hide from himself that the revival of decorative art in Europe had been stimulated and guided by the study of first-class Japanese work, and that types of the highest sthetic quality were to