Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/509

Rh for a hard day's work, and suggest readiness to answer the calls of any emergency. They are turned out comparatively cheaply to cut-and-dry patterns. The former are the signs of a languid yet not unfruitful existence. But they express the intuitive gracefulness of ideas evolved in a calm fulness of thought that will not be hurried; they show an originality and versatility of fancy whose inspirations may have been sought in the dreamy fumes of opium. Go to the remotest East of Asia, seek the Oriental on his own proper ground, and you seldom take him at a disadvantage. In his own unpretending way, the peasant who weaves mats of bamboo or moulds vessels of common clay in his retired village is as much of an artist as the skilled workman of Yeddo who lacquers cabinets in the most delicate plaques of veneer, or chases the bronze incense-burners that are to swing in the temples. When the Oriental breaks down is when he takes to imitating the European, as he has begun to do in these latter days. The Japanese sometimes turn from their own beautiful specimens of Kago and Satsuma porcelain to reproduce the fashions and colors of Parisian and English crockery, while the Turks back their clumsy machinery against the looms of Mancester in calicoes and cottons. Happily these follies of imitation are as yet rare; and probably the profits of this novel trade will not encourage the enterprising imitators to persevere. The East has much to learn from the West, and the lessons that will prove of most service to it go to the very groundwork of its society. It has yet to be enlightened as to the advantages of civil and religious liberty and education, the value of time, and the necessity of system and method. All this it is now learning, and in some matters of detail its education is going on only too rapidly. Doubtless sooner or later it will come to our markets for machinery which will enable it to make at home what it imports at present from abroad. But some of its tentative advances in this direction are premature and injudicious, to say the least, and, judging by certain samples of its imitative skill, it seems inclined to precipitate a competition whose unfortunate results in price and quality may cause it permanent discouragement.

However, it is not our purpose now to discuss the points on which we may teach the Orientals, but rather to glance at some of those where we are the scholars. There is a great deal in the Eastern departments of the Vienna Exhibition which is chiefly interesting as showing their relative backwardness. Some of them, for instance, send complete samples of their cereals and vegetable productions, and and these are curious as illustrating the advantages of soil and climate which yield them, in spite of the most backward husbandry and the most primitive implements, returns of twenty, fifty, or a hundred fold. But only turn to their show in the arts, and some of them may almost set criticism at defiance. By general consent, and beyond all comparison, the first place must be assigned to Japan. The Japanese does most things unlike the rest of the world. His method of