Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/67

Rh together; the plum-blossom and the nightingale; the bamboo thicket and the tiger; the chrysanthemum and the butterfly; the snow, moon, and blossoms (highly conventionalised); the flute-playing lad on his bull Benkei and his great bronze bell the Gods of Luck each with his tame animal or other appropriate symbol, etc., etc.,—all with a reason. To mix any of these subjects together, as is done by foreign imitators, shocks the trained eye in exactly the same manner as a solecism in grammar shocks the ear. The plain black crow does not perch facing the sun merely for the sake of contrast, though, to be sure, the contrast cannot fail to strike: he does so for the mythological reasons glanced at in our article on the Japanese. Similarly in a thousand other instances. European decorators pursued a like course in the Middle Ages, when, from the shape of the cathedral down to the smallest group of stone figures in a niche, everything possessed a symbolical signification, so that (as Rusk in has set forth at length) Amiens Cathedral is nothing less than the whole Bible in stone. The Japanese are still in that enviable stage, where decoration is organic. They have few mere "patterns." Unfortunately, any treatment of so vast a subject, to be satisfactory, would involve a history of the Japanese and even of the Chinese mind, its religious beliefs, the fairy-tales on which its youth has been fed, the places known to fame, the celebrated personages and picturesque events that have adorned the national annals.

(See also Articles on Things Japanese/Architecture, Things Japanese/Carving, Things Japanese/Cloisonné, Things Japanese/Metal-work, Things Japanese/Music, Things Japanese/Porcelain and Pottery, and Things Japanese/Wood Engraving.)

N.B. A curious fact, to which we have never seen attention drawn, is that the Japanese language has no genuinely native word for "art." To translate the European term "fine art," there has been invented the compound bi-jutsu, by putting together the two Chinese characters 美 bi, "beautiful," and 術 jutsu, "craft," "device," "legerdemain;" and there are two or three other such compounds which make an approach to the meaning, but none that satisfactorily cover it. The Japanese language is similarly devoid of any satisfactory word for "nature." The nearest equivalents are seishitsu, "characteristic qualities;" bambutsu, "all things;" tennen, "spontaneously." This curious philelogical fact makes it difficult, with the best will and skill in the world, to reproduce most of our discussions on art and nature in a manner that shall be intelligible to those Japanese who know no European language. The lack of a proper word for "art" is unquestionably a weakness in Japanese.