CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
In coming to the study of Japanese art we must remember that we are entering a strange world, where life and language, and even modes of thought, run on other lines than ours.
When Japan, only fifty years ago, was thrown open to the Western nations, in our ignorance and folly we were at first inclined to treat the Japanese as a barbaric people. But never was there a greater mistake. For the truth is that their civilisation is not only older than ours but in some respects has advanced much further than we have ever attained. In an æsthetic sense the people of Japan are cultured to a degree far beyond our Western standards; their arts are full of beauties which are too subtle, too refined, for our comprehension.
Here, in the most civilised of all Western nations, one is dubbed a visionary and a dreamer if he hopes to see the day when the pleasures of art shall be the solace of the poor as well as the luxury of the rich. But this happy state has existed in Japan for ages. One of the chief characteristics of the people is their love for beauty both in nature and in art. On the public highways are notices indicating to the wayfarer the points from which the most beautiful prospects may be obtained. The artisan mother in the city carries her babe out into the public parks at the festival of the cherry blossom, that its infant mind may be permeated by the beauty and fragrance of the flowers.
And, loving beauty, they can also express it, for to learn to write in Japan is in itself a course of training in drawing. In art the European requires that everything should be stated with the utmost fulness of a tedious realism before he can grasp its meaning, but to the more cultured Japanese a mere hint or slight suggestion is sufficient. The leading characteristic of Japanese art is, perhaps, that it leaves so much unsaid. For the Philistine, who bulks so largely in the West, and has to be considered and propitiated at every turn, seems to be quite unknown in Japan. What wonder, then, that, with such a public, their art should be somewhat above our heads.
Doubtless the canons of European art differ widely from those of the Far East, but these things are not essentials. All art is based on convention, in the terms of which its meaning is expressed. If we would understand Japanese art we must accept its conventions; we must learn the language of their art and see things with their eyes.
It is the fault of too many critics of Japanese art that they fail to approach it in this sympathetic attitude, and by such it is quite misunderstood. The mystic and beautiful Buddhist figures are tried by rules of anatomy, and the dreamlike Chinese landscapes by the laws of perspective. The materialist weighs the spiritual in the balance and finds it wanting.
But we seem to be improving in these matters; perhaps we are becoming more humble. Of late years some of our leading artists are beginning to acquire the qualities which Japanese art has shown so long. Who shall say that the work of such an one as Whistler, in its sensitive feeling for balance, in its grace of line, in the unerring instinct which marks its spacing, and in the delicate harmony of its colour, is not essentially Japanese in style? Whether these qualities were knowingly borrowed from the Japanese, or whether the artist evolved them from his own inner consciousness, matters little. The important fact is that the qualities which mark the work of one of the greatest of our modern painters, and distinguish it from that of the vast body of his contemporaries, are just the qualities which for centuries have marked the art of Japan. But we know that Whistler was an enthusiastic admirer of Japanese art, and, doubtless, he would have been the first to acknowledge his debt.
With the younger school Japanese influence has been all-powerful. One might safely say that, but for the Japanese colour print, there would have been no modern poster school, working so daringly in bold outline and broad, flat tints; and recent black and white work is equally indebted to the Japanese woodcuts, with their beautiful, flowing line and dexterous use of solid masses of black.