Often the local lord would establish a kiln on his private estate, where articles of pottery and porcelain were manufactured solely for his own use. In the shelter of his castle, too, the artist in metal or in lacquer worked peacefully, freed from all sordid cares. Time was no object to him, the final result everything. He had to consult no demands of popular taste, his work was always the best he could produce, and often years of labour went to the making of one perfect piece.

As time went on, however, gradually the work lost its first freshness and originality. It became richer and more elaborate but tamer and less vigorous, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century only echoed faintly its former glories. For the burden of feudalism was pressing on the country with more and more weight. The military classes, their employment gone, gradually sank into luxury and indolence; the only sign of life was the gradual rise of a more democratic feeling among the people. The later schools of painting were more or less of the nature of a revolt from the traditions of the older styles, and the art of colour printing saw the rise of a school of democratic artists.

The soil was already prepared, some change was inevitable, and the change came when the country was thrown open to the nations of the West, feudalism finally abolished, and a democratic government established in its place.

But contact with Western ideas and Western methods seemed to give the deathblow to Japanese art. In painting, the European standards have played havoc with the charming and beautiful conventions of old Japan. Aniline dyes have spoilt the soft harmonies of the colour prints. In metal, in carving, and in lacquer the new work is vastly inferior to the old. What the European market clamoured for was not quality but cheapness, and so, adaptive as ever, the Japanese turn out by the hundred superficial and mechanical imitations of the beautiful old work. Modern commercial methods have little to do with art, and in this case seemed at once to turn the artist into a trader.

Japan is now a modern nation, Western in its civilisation, in its methods, and seemingly in its ideals—destined to become a great industrial state. Perhaps, as she has done so often before, she may absorb the new influences, and without loss of individuality follow out her own course. Perhaps, phœnix-like, from the ashes of the old, new arts as brilliant may arise. But, again, some say that art belongs only to the more youthful stages of the world, and that in these days of science never again can the artist be more than a mere survival of an earlier age—one who still keeps green within him the youth which in others has long since withered and died.

Rider on Horseback