Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/96

84 The old Japanese sculptors rarely attempted portraiture. A good example is offered by the seated figure of Ieyasti in the temple of Toshogu at Shiba. But in sculpture, even more than in pictorial art, the strength of the Japanese talent lies rather in decoration and in small things than in representation and in great things. The netsukes—originally a kind of toggle for the medicine-box or tobacco-pouch, carved out of wood or ivory—are often marvels of minuteness, and alive with a keen sense of humour and the grotesque. The Japanese weakness in sculpture is no mere accident. It results from a whole mental attitude, from the habit of looking at nature rather than at man,a habit itself rooted in that impersonality on which Mr. Percival Lowell has laid so much stress as a Far-Eastern characteristic.

Japan's most famous sculptor was Hidari Jingorō, born in A.D. 1594. The two elephants and the sleeping cat in the mortuary shrine of Ieyasu at Nikkō are among the best-known productions of his chisel. He died in 1634, leaving a flourishing school and a reputation around which legend soon began to busy itself. A horse which he had carved as an ex-voto used, it is averred, to leave its wooden tablet at night, and go down to the meadow to graze. On one occasion the artist, having seen a frail beauty in the street, became so enamoured that on getting home he set about carving her statue; and between the folds of the statue's robe he placed a mirror, which the girl had let drop and which he had picked up. Thereupon the statue, Galatea-like, came to life, and the two lovers were made supremely happy. Now for the characteristically Japanese turn given to the tale. The times were stormy, and it fell out that the life of the daughter of the artist's lord had to be sacrificed. The artist instantly cut off this living statue's head and sent it to the enemy, who were taken in by the ruse which his loyalty had prompted. But a servant of his lord's, also deceived, and believing that Hidari Jingorō had really killed their lord's daughter, took his sword and cut off the sculptor's right hand. Hence the name of Hidari Jingorō, that is, "left-handed Jingorō." Probably Jingorō's left-handedness, which