Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/108

Rh on their merit. I admit, at the outset, that the artists of the Western school have learned well how to make an arrangement no artist of the pure Japanese school ever dreamed to attain; and I will say that it is sometimes even subtle. But I have heard so much of the artistic purpose, which could be best expressed through the Western art. Are they not, on the other hand, too hasty and too direct to describe them? Some of their work most nakedly confesses their artistic inferiority to their own thought. What a poor and even vulgar handling of oil! I have no hesitation to say that there is something mistaken in their perception of realism. (Quite a number of artists in this exhibition make mistakes in this respect.) Indeed there is no word like realism (perhaps better to say naturalism) which, in Japan's present literature, has done such real harm; it was the Russian or French literature that taught us the meaning of vulgarity, and again the artists, some artists at least, received a lesson from these writers. It is never good to see pictures overstrained. Go to the true Japanese art to learn refinement. While I admit the art of some artist which has the detail of beauty, I must tell him that reality, even when true, is not the whole thing; he should learn the art of escaping from it. That art is, in my opinion, the greatest of all arts; without it, art will never bring us the eternal and the mysterious. If you could see some work