Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/107

102 of Japan. Imitation is imitation, not the real thing at all.

There are many drawbacks, as I look upon the material side, to the Western art becoming popular; for instance, our Japanese house—frail, wooden, with the light which rushes in from all sides—never gives it an appropriate place to look its best. And the heaviness of its general atmosphere does not harmonise with the simplicity that pervades the Japanese household; it always appears out of place, like a chair before the tokonoma, a holy dais. Besides, the artists cannot afford to sell their pictures cheap, not because they are good work, but because there are only a few orders for them. I believe we must undertake the responsibility of making good artists; there is no wonder that there is only poor work since our understanding of Western art is little, and we hardly try to cultivate the Western taste. If we have no great art of the Western school, as is a fact, one half the whole blame is on our shoulders.

Here my mind dwells in more or less voluntary manner upon the contrast with the Japanese art, while I walk through the gallery of Western art of the Taiheiyo Gakwai Club of this year in Uyeno Park. There are exhibited more than two hundred, or perhaps three hundred pieces—quite an advance in numbers over any exhibition held before; but I am not ready to say how they stand