Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/65

Rh have the patterns on plates, cushions, and what not, arranged with geometrical accuracy. If on the right hand there was a Cupid looking to the left, then on the left hand there must be a Cupid of exactly the same size looking to the right, and the chief feature of the design was invariably in the exact centre. The Japanese artisan-artists have shown us that this mechanical symmetry does not make for beauty. They have taught us the charm of irregularity; and if the world owe them but this one lesson, Japan may yet be proud of what she has accomplished.

There exists, it is true, nowadays a small band of foreign enthusiasts, who deny that the art of Japan is thus limited in its scope, and decorative rather than representative. Having studied it with greater zeal and profit than they have studied European art, they go so far as to put Japanese art on a level with that of Greece and Italy. These enthusiasts have performed and are still per forming a useful function. They are disseminating a knowledge of Japanese art abroad, disseminating it, too, in Japan itself, where it had been suffered to fall into neglect. But their cult of Japanese art partakes of the nature of a religious faith, and like other religionists, they are apt to be deficient in the sense of humour. They are much too much in earnest ever to smile about such serious matters. For instance, one ardent admirer of Japonism in art informs the public that the late painter Kyōsai "was perhaps the greatest limner of crows that Japan, nay the whole world, has produced." Does this not remind you of the artist in whose epitaph it was recorded that he was "the Raphael of cats?" The Japanese are undoubtedly Raphaels of fishes, and insects, and flowers, and bamboo-stems swaying in the breeze; and they have given us charming fragments of idealised scenery. But they have never succeeded in adequately transferring to canvas "the human form divine;" they have never made grand historical scenes live again before the eyes of posterity; they have never, like the early Italian masters, drawn away men's hearts from earth to heaven in an ecstasy of adoration. In a word, Japanese art, as Mr. Alfred East tersely said, when lecturing on the subject in Tōkyō, is "great in small things, but small in great things."