Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/390

 Women have come out of their guarded seclusion, and enjoy a social existence and importance and a legal equality, and their educational opportunities are ever enlarging. Marriage laws, divorce laws, and property laws secure to them rights greater than some European women hold. The family life and authority remain unchanged, and the privacy of the home is jealously guarded, no foreigner penetrating to that sacred centre. The family ceremonies and festivals are observed as punctiliously as ever. The nobility and the official class lead the social life of Europeans, but the conservatism of the middle or merchant class still clings to the old order, which another century may find almost unchanged.

The art of Japan has already revolutionized the western world, leaving its impress everywhere. The quick appropriation of Japanese ideas and expressions marks an era in the Occident as distinct as that of the Renaissance. For all her giving with full hands, we can return nothing to this most art-loving of nations. Western examples and teachings, and the ignorant demands of western trade, have wrought artistic havoc in the Island Empire. Wherever foreign orders have been received, the simplest work has so deteriorated, has been so vulgarized and cheapened, that recognized efforts are now making to arrest this degradation of the national art. Cultivated Japanese, appalled at this result of western teachings, encourage artists and artisans in the study of national masterpieces and the practice of the old methods, and the labors of these public-spirited citizens are ably seconded by the Government. The foreign professor of drawing, with his hard pencils and his plaster casts, is a functionary of the past. To-day the youth of Japan holds to his own writing-brush, and begins, as aforetime, with the one stroke, two stroke, and three stroke sketches that lie at the root of the old masters’ matchless art. Strangely enough, all perception of the beauty and relation of 374