THE ART OF THE NATION

“All that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature;

all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad.”

Dante, “De Monarchia,” bk. i. chap. xiv.

I GRACE BEFORE MEAT

The kuruma running quickly through the narrow opening in the high bamboo fence curved into a tiny garden set with dark green shrubs, and stopped abruptly.

In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden wall, a pile of gheta lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in kimono and hakama stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting kimono along the three-foot-wide platform.

Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden, sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the paper-paned wall the waiting kimono bowed us to enter.

“Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken kimono and pleated silken skirts of his hakama, as he laughingly bowed us a Japanese welcome.

The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until the paper-paned walls closed behind me again.

“If you would like a chair, there are just two—” began the professor.

But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks, hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick wadded hem of her kimono.

As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame.

“The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the samurai.” “Then the soul of the uchi,” I thought, “is the kimono of the housewife.”

The simplicity of the straight-falling lines, the perfection of the embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness of the obi at the waist, there was the same severity of design with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the tokonoma. Within the tokonoma hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the moon, a kakemono of price. On the black wood of the platform, which was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords of the samurai, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these four objects (as in the obi and the embroidery of the neck-folds) lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan—the artistic value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the kakemono held the eyes; one looked, and one saw; their beauty filled the soul; next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon curves of Miss Hayashi’s kimono, white below mauve, as she glided over the matted floor.

Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums, rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round, one to each of us.

Then came a long pause, while we asked all the questions that occurred to us about kimono and hakama, and swords and etiquette; and then our lunch, a whole lacquered trayful of bowls for each one of us, with all the courses served together, and all irretrievably and, to us, inexplicably mixed. I pass the hot soup in a lacquered bowl, and the hot rice in a china one, but the rest—a golden bream on a pale blue plate set round with oranges in jelly; slices of pink raw fish, and a design in brown seaweed and green roots; a deep bowl of pale yellow custard, its surface ruffled with silver fishes, oriental whitebait, and its depths filled with bamboo shoots and lily bulbs and other surprises; and one dish, a triumph of design and colour, where an oval slab of pounded fish, white as snow, rested against a green mound of preserved chestnuts, while in front, arranged in a curving crescent like the tail of a comet, were purple roots, brown ginger, and slices of a red radish. And all this you eat as you please, a bit here, and a bit there, now a drink of salt soup, then a mouthful of sweet chestnut; custard, vegetables, fish, sweets, with relays of rice for bread, and saké for wine, paper napkins, and withal two penholders to eat with, and your Japanese dinner is complete.

Having tried everything with the greatest perseverance, and wriggled our chopsticks until our hands were as tired as our toes, we gave in and rested from our labours. The little maid, rosier than ever, removed the trays of food, and brought in bowls of oranges and dried persimmon.

At this moment there was a rustling of screens, and a dear, little old lady with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth slid into the room, and instantly went down on her knees, and putting out her hands bowed her head right down on to them.

“This is my aunt,” said the professor, “a real old-fashioned woman—there are not many left nowadays—who blackens her teeth and shaves her eyebrows.”

The little old lady laughed, and made many polite speeches, asking after our “honourable healths” and our “august appetites.” At every word she made another bow, until I felt as if I really must get down on my knees and hit my forehead against the ground as well. Luckily the professor, after a moment’s consultation, suggested we should see the house, and we all got up. The little old lady was on her feet in a twinkling, but our half-dead limbs sent pins and needles up our legs, as we stumbled on to them and awkwardly walked away.

The sliding paper wall of our room hid another absolutely bare, no tokonoma here, only a poem painted on a long narrow board fastened against the door-post, and in the further wall, shut off by sliding screens, a large cupboard, full of the household linen, which means the silk-wadded quilts or futon, on and under which one sleeps. Sliding aside the door-panel we found ourselves on another three-foot-wide platform, looking out through more paper-paned walls into another garden. This house was just a long series of rooms with a platform and a garden on each side, and a little square bunch of rooms at one end. In one of these we cuddled down under a silk quilt thrown over a square hole in the middle of the room, and felt the heat coming up from the glowing charcoal sunk in a sort of pit beneath the floor.

Then we peeped into the bathroom, containing a high wooden wash-tub with a stove-pipe running down one end. The wash-tub is filled with cold water, and lighted charcoal put down the stove-pipe, and in a few minutes the water is hot, and you get in, and the longer you stay the hotter grows the water, until having boiled yourself in the approved Japanese way you step out and wipe yourself dry with a yard of white cotton adorned with blue storks.

Then we invaded the kitchen, bare of everything like the other rooms, and with only a two-fold brazier to cook over; one brazier has permanently fixed above it a coppered wooden tub, dedicated to rice-boiling, the other brazier cooked everything else. That was all. Wooden pots, pans and dippers were hung up inside the sliding cupboards, or were washing in the yard outside. A tiny shrine, like a mantelshelf over the sliding door, held minute gods in a dim light; a paper-framed bamboo lantern, like an afternoon-tea cake-table, with shelves between the legs for plates, stood in a corner. This is the andon, and inside the paper panes a floating wick in a saucer of oil burns all night.

Our advent into these regions was attended with much excitement punctuated with peals of laughter, it striking the dear old lady as irresistibly funny, that it was all funny to us.

In the midst of our hilarity came the summons of the kurumaya, and out we had to go, take our boots from the friendly company of the wooden gheta, and laden with mysterious boxes neatly tied with red and white strings, and bunches of plum-blossom, say stiff English “Good-byes,” while the little old lady, the rosy-cheeked maid, and the rest of the household bowed us graceful Japanese sayonara and mata irasshai (Come again).

The kuruma curved out through the tiny snow-covered garden set with dark shrubs, the paper-paned walls shut with a soft thud; the picture was gone, but the memory of it will remain with me always.

II IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY

Nagoya is a manufacturing town with a quarter of a million of inhabitants. It is full of porcelain and fan factories, cloisonné works and cotton mills. It is the centre of the celebrated potteries of Seto, and is famous for its embroideries and its silks. It is bigger than Nottingham or Hull, and is almost as large as Dublin. Nagoya is both Staffordshire and Bradford—and yet a city clean and still. A town of sunny streets and pure fresh air, whose sky is blue and clear, whose trees are green. Its 250,000 inhabitants are mostly factory hands—and there is neither dirt nor din. The golden dolphins on its castle’s roof are three hundred years old, and they glitter in the sunshine like new-fired gold.

On the edge of the growing rice-fields the porcelain factory lies. Its doors are open to the sun; and in the corner of the low, white room, where the workmen sit cross-legged like Buddhas, each beside his potter’s wheel, a yellow vase of purple iris stands.

The room is still and fresh and clean. The whirr of the turning wheel is soft as the drowsing of a bee. There is no hurry as there is no idleness. And each worker, as he moulds his clay, looks towards the purple iris in the yellow vase.

The cloisonné works are built in the heart of the city, in the middle of a busy street, where blue-clad coolies continually load and unload the wide coster-barrows which are the waggons of Japan. The hum of working life is in the air, and the wide road which stretches without division of pavement across from side to side, is thronged. Business men in grey kimono and foreign hats go out and in; the loaded barrows drawn by the blue-clad coolies pass up and down; fast-running kurumaya steer in and out among the foot-passengers and the traffic. And the occasional collision is followed by mutual bows and polite Gomen nasai (“I beg your honourable pardon”), on the part of either coolie or kurumaya.

Nagoya factories and cotton mills are hard at work.

The gateway of the cloisonné works leads down a wooden passage into a tiny court, a garden set round with the workshops of the factory. And such a garden. It is not larger than the front lawn of a suburban villa, but the skill of a Japanese gardener has planted a whole mountain side with forests of pine and bamboo, has spanned with an arching bridge the stone-grey stream at the mountain’s foot. From inside the tiny matted rooms, no bigger than bathing-boxes, which shut in three sides of the garden, the illusion is complete. And the shade and coolness of the real trees and water, of the imaginary forest and stream, brings a sense of calmness and repose, of quiet peace and beauty, to all the many workers of the factory. It is a living landscape growing unspoiled in the heart of a workshop in the centre of a manufacturing city.

Each on his mat in the clean, bare, matted rooms the workmen sit, the rice-paper shōji pushed open to the mountain stream, and the forest of pine and bamboo. In the first room sit workers outlining the design on the bare metal vase with metal wires, silver wires on silver vases, copper wires on copper vases. And each design is different, and many of the men are old. In the second room the bare metal vases are getting a coat of coloured paste, and now the design stands out rough as a cave-man’s drawing. Here the workers are younger, while boys fill in the body of the vase. In the third and fourth rooms the matted floor at the back is replaced by a large hearthstone, and a round earthen oven; in this the vases are baked, passed back to the men and boys to recoat with the coloured paste, and then rebaked, recoated and rebaked many times, until at last the vase is handed over to the workers in the last rooms. It has lost all trace of design by now; the metal wires are no longer visible; the colours have bubbled over in all directions, the vase is an unmeaning mosaic of a thousand shades. Then the workmen, sitting on their heels on the kneeling-cushions in their clean, bare, matted rooms, tiny as bathing-boxes, polish, polish, polish, sometimes for a whole year, until the worker’s hand wears down the hard smooth surface and the design shows through clean and true once more. The workmen here are grey and old.

But the oldest of all sat by himself in a little room just opposite the arching bridge which crossed the mountain stream. He wore a pair of quaint horn spectacles, and his face was the face of an Eastern sage. He sat with his tools before him fixing silver wires on to a silver vase, with a certainty and a rapidity beyond his fellows; and all that is most beautiful and most difficult in the cloisonné works of Nagoya comes from his hands. The old man pushed back his horn spectacles as I stopped before the open shōji, and his eyes rested on the still picture of the garden with a smile.

I, too, turned to look at the row of tiny paper rooms stretching out like arms on either hand, at the living landscape lying in their midst, at the blue sky above, and at the old face beneath the horn spectacles. I did not wonder at the peace which lay upon it, nor at the exquisite beauty of the finished vase standing on the matting beside him. For the garden was still as a cloister, though the cloister was a workshop for cloisonné ware in the manufacturing town of Nagoya.

III FLOWER ARRANGEMENT

We sat opposite each other on the matting, and she laughed. The polite, audible smile of the Japanese. All around us lay cut branches of fir; and on the long wooden footstool they call a table stood a shallow bronze dish and a wonderful cleft stick of bamboo.

She was a little bent old lady, with the courtly politeness of a thousand Grandisons refined to a subtle essence, and she gave lessons in flower arrangement. The close-cropped grey hair gathered into a slide behind told its own tale of widowhood, and the withered careworn face its story of work and want.

The shōji were shut, and the light through the rice-paper panes sent a warmed white light into the room that knew no colour, a light as though one sat inside a luminous mist, or in the heart of the plum-blossoms. A passionless, lifeless light which was simply light.

And the little old lady laughed again.

“There is much to learn,” I said, stopping to watch her bending the warmed fir branches over the hibachi always to the exact curve, never too near or too far, and mine snapped at the first touch.

She handed me another branch in place of the one I had broken, and watched while I wedged it into the cleft bamboo stick with little chips of wood.

“Very much,” she said. “It takes three years of learning for the pupil and seven for the teacher. And the Ijin San has had four lessons.”

The fifth and last branch being successfully wedged into line, I got on to my knees to admire the effect, while Arabella, from her camp-stool in the corner—she considered it lowering to sit on the floor—bridled.

“Oh, the Japanese,” she said; “but any European could learn in half a dozen lessons.”

The little old lady bowed, letting her forehead almost touch the ground, as she sat on her heels on the kneeling-cushion.

“The august stranger——” she began, when I interrupted.

The contemplation of my five branches of fir, two curving to the left and three to the right, had not filled me with any satisfaction. They wobbled. All their curves were wrong, and the five stems, instead of being hidden one behind the other, so that the illusion of a single branch growing out of the bronze dish was created and kept, were all distinctly and decidedly visible.

“It doesn’t look a bit right,” I said; “but what is the matter?”

The task of sticking five branches of fir, already bent to the prescribed curves for me, into a cleft stick had not seemed difficult, especially with three lessons behind me, and I had worked hard and been very confident that morning.

With a thousand apologies the little old lady pulled the bronze dish towards her, while Arabella cleared her throat.

“In Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice adapted to a kindergarten class—her Japanese voice, “we do not learn such a simple thing, we do it naturally. Every European woman can arrange flowers, and they are flowers” (with a glance at the fir branches in the little old lady’s hand—she was busy correcting) “not trees.”

The little old lady was putting back the five fir branches into the cleft stick with the deftest of deft fingers. Arabella unclasped the brooch at her neck and pulled out what she called a “nosegay.” A bamboo vase, just a piece of the stem hollowed out, in which the fir had come from the florist that morning, lay on the floor. She picked it up.

“It should be of glass,” she said forgivingly, “but I will make it do.”

And then with her own hand she proceeded to arrange the Yokohama nosegay in the slender bamboo stem. There was a bit of spiræa, one fat red rose, and some miscellaneous leaves, which Arabella referred to grandiloquently as “green.” These she crammed tightly into the bamboo stem, and then placed it, with a “who-shall-deny-me” air, upon the table.

I looked at it. No, it was not a good specimen even of Western flower arrangement, but in how many buttonholes, on how many tables, had I seen something like it.

Flower arrangement is taught in the schools in Japan, and every Japanese girl learns. If she did not, she would not “arrange” anymore than we should paint or play.

The little old lady had finished, and she pushed the bronze dish along the table beside the bamboo vase. Then, with many compliments and much bowing, she thanked the Ijin San for her “august kindness” and her “honourable condescension.” And the smooth phrases ran on and on, while I sat back on my heels and looked.

East and West, they stood there before me. At the best, what we aimed at was a scheme of colour, and at our worst no scheme at all. And what they strove after was line, whether in fir branches or lily leaves, in plum-blossom or iris flowers, line, and a coherent whole. Each branch, each twig, each flower, nay, each curve of the branch, each petal of the flower, each leaf of the twig, were parts, essential parts of the whole; for in Japan they draw with flowers and fir branches as we only draw for “design.” And line is beyond colour as sculpture is beyond painting.

The sun through the walls of rice-paned shōji spread a warmed white light through the room, a limpid, liquid light in which there was no shadow.

The little old lady had been busy tidying up. The room was one clear sheet of pale yellow matting. On the low empty tokonoma stood the bronze dish and its pure line drawing in fir. Arabella was offering the bamboo vase and its mixed contents “as a model,” and the little old lady bowed to the ground.

Once more I looked at the bronze vase and the pure outlines of the fir branches, at the bare room perfectly proportioned, at the rice-paned shōji, and the snowflake whiteness of that light which knew no colour and no shadow struck on my consciousness.

I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not colour but a blot. Outside the rice-paned shōji lay life and colour enough. Here was but light and line.

Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese sayonara.

I looked back one last time—and Arabella’s nosegay vanished.

IV GOD’S MESSENGER

The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the Iris, Hana-shōbu, and along the raised causeway, between the fields, the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the kurumaya, silhouette against the blue sky.

You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden, and they are an hour’s ’ricksha ride from the city, so that the fête is select. In the covered court of the entrance the kuruma are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while the kurumaya, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the slender shafts and smoke their pipes—three whiffs from the metal thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp tink, tink, as the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long kuruma ride proving prohibitive; but the grey kimono of the classes, Tokyo shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack of the wooden gheta on the earthen pathway, as the little musmé carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed summer-houses, is incessant.

We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit on the cushions, with our feet on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous to see the Ijin San sitting on the tables with their legs hanging uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each little white tabi sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea, inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the Ijin San’s legs are not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized boot could only have been invented by people without toes?

The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea, and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly doing something, not even the children.

In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes; one of them is writing a poem. And a bourgeois Sabbath peace is over the land.

The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack of the musmé’s gheta on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers.

Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend, Iris, Hana-shōbu. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving people alone know how to create—and how to read. For many generations have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to black or to the purest white.

The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read.

V THE ART OF THE PEOPLE

It is usual in judging the art of a nation to consider solely the art of the artists and never the art of the people. The first is naturally of greater importance; it affords moreover an easy method of comparison and enables art critics to register the high-water mark of a country’s art, and this being found, the question is considered settled and the nation judged accordingly. We say the French are artistic and think promptly of Corot, Meissonier, or Puvis de Chavannes, not of the people of France. But the art of a nation, always something less, is often something very different from the art of its artists, and though the artists’ art will give you the high-water mark, it does not and it cannot give the general art level of the people. The English nation produced the greatest dramatist who ever lived, and several fine comedians, yet the level of the nation’s dramatic instinct is acknowledged to be far below that of the French. If we wish to get a true opinion of French and English dramatic feeling we must study something more and something other than the dramatists. For it is not the presence or the absence of a certain number of celebrated men, or even the greater or the lesser value of their works, which necessarily makes a whole nation dramatic or artistic, but it is the general level of the dramatic or artistic feeling in the average individual of that nation. That a truly dramatic or artistic nation has more chance of producing a greater number of dramatists or artists is certain, the conditions under which they would work being so much more favourable, but to consider no one but the artist and nothing but his art, and then to transfer the judgment on the artist’s art to the whole nation, is surely a confusion of ideas. It is a confusion to which art seems particularly susceptible. For most people, in England any way, seem to regard art as comprising only expensive objects suitable for exhibition in museums, and not as an integral part of every article used in daily life. Museum art is the product of a nation’s artists, for the enjoyment of the rich and the cultured, but the art of a people is as wide as its life, it touches everything and is for the joy and the pleasure of all men.

Artists’ art is an end in itself, its whole reason for existence is to create beauty, but the art of a people is not an end, but a means. The problem before it is very different and really more complicated, for it is to add beauty to mere utility, and by force of art to create art in objects whose raison d’être is usefulness. And the greater the number of useful objects made beautiful, and the more beautiful the useful objects, and the further removed from beauty and the more sunk in mere utility the useful object is, so much greater will be the people’s art.

To add beauty to mere utility, art may be said to use three ways. It does it

(1) Directly, by moulding the shape (the material of useful objects being already determined);

(2) Indirectly, by decoration; and

(3) Extra-directly, by arrangement.

And if art be truly in a people, even the most ugly and stubborn of useful objects will, by one of these three methods, be made beautiful.

I suppose that any one who has ever seen a rice-field will allow that for at least some six months in the year it is one of the ugliest objects in the world. Made of liquid mud, it lies for half the year a slimy, greasy black pond shut in by low mud walls. On its oozy surface gather unwholesome growths that shine with metallic reflections, while the manure, in Japan mostly human, decomposes in the thick mud. There is nothing, I suppose, much uglier, nothing more useful, and its ugliness is the condition of its utility. The Japanese cannot change the thick black ooze, they cannot change the low mud walls which embank the slimy pools. These, with all their ugly consequences, are fixed and determined. But the art of the Japanese people has yet rendered the rice-fields beautiful. They change the shape. Those embanking walls of mud are moulded as a potter moulds his clay. A series of dead square fields I have never seen. Two, three, four, five, six, even eight-sided rice-fields can be found in Japan, and often the curves of the mud wall itself are graceful as the lines of a Greek vase.

Beneath the temple of Tesshuji, which looks towards the wonder of Fujiyama, with its two pure lines of exquisite grace, is a great fertile plain, a plain of innumerable rice-fields, one of the richest in the country. When I stood on the steps of that deserted temple and looked down, the fields were all black and naked, and yet the plain was neither ugly nor monotonous, for the peasants had curved their rice-fields into exquisite lines, and not two were alike.

A wall has certainly more possibilities than a rice-field, but our modern walls, the high brick atrocity of a prison or an embankment, is not usually beautiful. We make spasmodic attempts to beautify their monotonous ugliness with creepers or other coverings. That is, we do not beautify the wall, we take something less ugly and conceal it. Now the Japanese beautify the wall. (We are only considering here walls of mere utility, where all decoration or ornamentation is out of the question.) Except for the brick walls of the foreign buildings, walls in Japan are made of hewn stone usually shaped like pyramids and hammered base outwards into a bank of earth. In a country whose architecture, from the most glorious of its temples to the humblest of its houses, is all of wood, a clumsiness, a gaucherie in its stonework might be well excused, yet Japanese walls are a wonder to all who see them, for the hard enduring granite is plastic beneath their fingers. Their walls are never dead straight. The line always curves softly outward as it touches the ground. And this not only in the strong walls of the daimyō’s castle, or the long moat walls of the Mikado’s palace, but in the embankment walls of the tiniest shrine, in the modern walls of the modern temple of the modern coaling port of Moji.

To beautify a useful object indirectly by decoration is a great deal easier, at any rate the means and the possibility of doing so are more apparent; and yet, do we draw designs on our sacks, on our flour sacks, grain sacks, potato sacks, as they do in Japan?

For many months I passed regularly every day through a street of warehouses where sacks of all kinds, and containing all sorts of produce, were lying on the ground, were being carried into the godown or were loading or unloading. It was some time before it really struck me that the sacks were decorated, that their blank yellow sides were made beautiful with a design; but when I had once realised it, I used to look carefully to see if I could find sacks without. They were extremely rare. The designs varied considerably. A flower, conventional or natural, a maple leaf, a broken branch of plum-or cherry-blossom, the delicate outline of the bamboo in a thousand different shapes, were the most common, but there were others, birds, geometrical patterns, rice-ears, Fujiyama. These designs were with true decorative feeling in one corner, rarely in the exact centre, and admirably proportioned to the size of the sack. They were mostly drawn in, in soft blues—the commonest colour in the Far East—sometimes in a pale but very beautiful green; colours which, on the unbleached cotton or pale yellow matting of the sack, made complete harmonies.

But a sack, whatever its business in life, is at least an article of considerable duration, it is not made to be used and thrown away the next moment like the paper wrapping of a parcel. Yet it is very few parcels in very few shops which are not wrapped up in paper whose monotonous surface is broken by just one tiny design. The papers in which piece-silks are wrapped, the equivalent to those whitey-brown covers which drapers seem perpetually doing up on our counters, are often really beautiful in both colour and design. I do not think a Japanese can see a blank surface without wanting to design something on it, something little, something beautiful, just to redeem it for art.

These designs are to be found, if one looks for them, in the most unexpected places, on the axle-heads of your kuruma for instance. A casual and rather dilapidated kuruma in an out-of-the-way town in Japan had such exquisite flying storks beaten on to the bronze metal of its axle-head that I had to get out and look at them. The kurumaya was amused at my enthusiasm, and entered into a detailed comparison of these axle-heads with all the other axle-heads of all the other kuruma of his acquaintance, explaining their respective merits and defects. If there is no actual design the metal is usually beaten in such a way as to form an irregular pattern.

When a Japanese cannot mould the shape of an object, when he cannot redeem it by a design, when in fact he has no control over its creation at all, but it is placed in his hands as it is, finished, he will still contrive to add beauty to it merely by arrangement. I first noticed this on board the steamer going out, where the Japanese “boy” arranged the extra blanket on the berth in a new design each day. He folded it into lotus leaves and chrysanthemums, into half-opened fans and half-shut buds. He had one wonderful arrangement which, being patriotic, was more often repeated than the rest. The blankets of the steamship company had, instead of the usual stripes at top and bottom, just two thick wavy lines of deep red—the steamer’s flag was two wavy red lines on a white ground; by some wonderful twist of his fingers the “boy” would fold that blanket into the rising sun, with the four red lines coming out of it like blood-red rays. It sounds difficult, but he did it so perfectly that I recognised the flag of Japan the moment I saw it. Nor was he exceptional; the other “boys” on board were just as artistic, all the other cabins, for in the course of the voyage I entered most of them, were equally decorated, though in most cases the art had been quite lost on the occupants.

A Japanese servant, any servant, even one in a hotel, will set out your hair brushes, clothes brushes, nail scissors, collar box, tooth-powder tin on the ordinary average hotel dressing-table and make a design of them. The toilette table will somehow be a picture, an artistic whole. It was an application of art I tried hard to learn, and failed dismally. After awhile I could manage something with the brushes; but the nail scissors, and more especially the tooth-powder tin, remained, in my hands, the unbeautiful necessary articles which they intrinsically are.

We make in Europe various attempts at beautifying our food. We put parsley on white dishes round cold mutton, and paper frills on ham bones where the pins are dangerous. On special occasions, such as a Lord Mayor’s banquet or a cookery exhibition, we serve pastries as Tower Bridges, or jellies as broken lutes, but we do not consistently arrange our food so that each dish is a colour scheme and an art design of its own.

I lunched once with a professor in Tokyo; it was a modest meal in the house of a man badly off, according to our ideas, but when the red-lacquered trays came in, each lunch on its own tray, and all the courses served together, I could not restrain a cry of delight. The whole set out in its red-lacquered tray was a picture, each dish in itself was another. The golden bream lay on a pale blue dish; an oval slab of pounded fish, pure white in colour, rested against a mound of lime-green chestnuts; in front and lying in a crescent curve were purple roots, brown ginger, and tiny slices of red radish. It was simply a triumph. I have eaten pinky brown soup in which the curved peel of an orange floated like a golden dolphin; pale yellow custards, served in delicate blue bowls, whose surfaces were ruffled with silver fishes; white rice-moulds wrapped in the delicate tendrils of a vine-green seaweed; thin slices of pink raw fish, the colour of an uncooked salmon, laid out on green dishes and garnished with little heaps of olive seaweed shaven fine and eaten with a burnt-sienna sauce. The very hawkers in the streets serve their one-rin (10 to a ¼d.) sweetmeats or their snow-white tōfu daintily, on plates of appropriate colour, artistically set out. The rice-paste biscuits are veritable works of art in shape and colour. You can eat almost every variety of chrysanthemum, as well as see it, and the colouring, all vegetable, is almost as beautiful.

We have, I believe, in England, a profession called “window-dressing,” and in a few cases this does truly attain to art. But with us it always ends at the windows. Enter the shop and, unless it is a showroom, you stand in the midst of undigested cargoes of goods; and whose eye has not been pained by heaped rolls of stuff where a post-office red will lie, as often as not, on the top of a crimson and underneath a magenta? That is a thing which could not happen in Japan; the eye of the young man behind the counter would forbid it.

I once watched a whole consignment of silks being put away on shelves in a shop in Tokyo. It was the European side of the establishment, so that the shop was fitted with counters, chairs, and the usual drapers’ shelves, the silks, too, told the same tale in their width and pattern. It was only a boy who was putting them away, sixteen at the outside, yet he did it with a conscious choice, and when he had finished, the silks, which ran through the whole gamut of colour, harmonised delightfully. But the real Japanese shops are more beautiful still. To go over the Mitsui is to walk through a gallery of pictures in still life. Here are no heaps of undigested goods, no mere piles of articles, but a definite and deliberate setting forth of certain things which left the impression that the clerks of the Mitsui posed their silken goods as an artist his model. The Mitsui is one of the best shops in Tokyo; to be perfectly fair compare it with one of our “art salesmen.” But the best of our shops tie up their parcels in whitey-brown paper with tow-coloured string, thinner or thicker according to the weight of the parcel. In the Mitsui the string is all pure white or scarlet-red, and each parcel is tied with a strand of both laid side by side, the heavier the parcel the greater the number of scarlet and white strings, always laid side by side, until sometimes they make a wide white line above a wide red one, kept evenly together by a skilful knot. The ends, too, are not snapped off anyhow after tying an ugly knot, but are cut slantwise, to form a V or a point, and even the knot is beautiful because it is a coherent whole, and not a conglomeration of successive ties.

So far, all these things, rice-fields, sacks, and food, with the sole exception of the blankets and hair brushes, have been exclusively Japanese, the nation has evolved them in itself, and by itself, and consequently in comparing them with things European it has only been possible to take similar and not identical objects. But since their first contact with Europe, and more especially during the last thirty years, the Japanese have borrowed a certain number of articles directly from the West. They have borrowed beer-glasses, windows, and wall-papers. And from the Dutch, three-hundred years ago, they took pipes and tobacco pouches. A light kind of lager beer is rapidly becoming a universal drink in Japan. There are several native breweries, and those places where beer has not penetrated are considered hopelessly “old-fashioned.” After the beer came the beer-glasses, and though the art of the nation has not been long at work upon them, they are already very different from their European models. It must be remembered, too, that glass was unknown to the Japanese until it was introduced from the West. The first thing which the nation did when it set to work upon beer-glasses was to reduce the size, otherwise they would have been out of all proportion to the rest of the dinner service, and so the beer-glasses of Japan are small as dolls’ tumblers in which, if you are lucky, you will find three sips of beer under the egg-white froth.

If this example illustrates the love of the little, generally supposed to be the chief characteristic of the Japanese, the case of the windows will show their dislike to unredeemed blank space, and at the same time their knowledge of the artistic value of space in design. So long as windows only existed in houses built in the style called “foreign,” they remained severely Western, just another European object like the railway or the telegraph set up in the land, but when they began to be introduced into Japanese houses, then the art of the nation set to work upon them. They are still rare, but in a few private houses and in some of the best native hotels windows exist. They do not open. They were not introduced to supply ventilation, an unnecessary consideration in a Japanese house, which is all draughts, nor really for light, the paper panes of the shōji admitting light readily; but just in order that the person inside might have another picture before his eyes—the picture of what lies without. The window then is not a glass fitting to an oblong hole knocked into a wall, but a broad band of glass running round the whole length of the shōji at just that distance from the ground which will allow anyone sitting on his heels on the floor to see through comfortably. A pattern on this glass window would have interfered with the view, and the window was there expressly for the view. So the glass is empty and clear, but not blank. Then it would have been merely useful, and the Japanese never stop at utility; it had to be made beautiful, and so the pure perfect curves of Fuji were traced upon the glass. The design was quite small and only occupied one end, but the area of the glass was no longer blank space, but the demanded setting to a picture.

There is no place in a Japanese house for wall-papers, but the number of foreign-built hotels and houses has created a certain demand for them. Also the Japanese are beginning to export wall-papers abroad. As the patterns are mostly supplied to them direct from European firms, or copied from models sent them on order, they have to please their market, and yet I have seen a wall-paper in a hotel bedroom where two golden dragons drawn back to back studded a white ground. It was a perfectly conventional pattern, and at first there seemed nothing remarkable about it. The tiny dragons, looking something like a fleur de lys, occurred at six-inch intervals. Then it dawned gradually, the intervals were not regular, they differed both lengthways and width-ways. It took indeed ten feet of wall before the pattern absolutely repeated itself.

But windows, wall-papers and beer-glasses are new growths, only just engrafted on to the life of the people. They are still thought of as something foreign, whereas pipes and pouches, although coming originally from the West, have in the course of three hundred years become thoroughly absorbed and transformed by the genius of the nation. To judge from the old pictures the first pipes were three or four feet long, with a bowl to correspond, in size and capacity suggestive of those long wooden pipes with china bowls smoked by the traditional Dutchman. At the same time we in the West have also been evolving our pipes and pouches, as the art and the convenience of Europe demanded, and to-day the British navvy has arrived at his clay and the city clerk at his briarwood, and both at the gutta-percha pouch. When bent on “something tasty,” they may indulge in skeleton-head pipes with carbuncle eyes, or magenta plush pouches embroidered in apple-green silk. In Japan the navvy (or his wife, for smoking is equally common to both sexes) uses a doll’s pipe made of a slender bamboo reed, whose bowl and mouthpiece are of metal, beautifully finished, and holding just three whiffs of their fine-cut red-brown tobacco. The pouch is made of leather, fastening like a purse, and the metal snap is always fashioned into a design, however simple—two birds flying, a fish, a grasshopper. There is also a leather case to keep the pipe in, like an open spectacle-case, and the two are fastened together by means of a twisted silken cord. The pipe-case is stuck into the obi, and the pouch hangs over. It was to allow of the free hang of the pouch, and also as a finish to the silken cord, that the netsuké was invented, and some of the most beautiful of museum art objects produced. But netsuké are not for the navvy or the people, or if they do occur in the cheap pouches of the poorer classes they are nothing more than a rounded bead only valuable artistically as a spot of colour. The pouches, the pipes and the pipe-cases are genuinely beautiful in shape, make and proportion. They also have the merit, rare in gutta-percha, of endurance. A pouch bought four years ago by a careless European, and in use ever since, shows to-day no sign of wear. It is not cracking at the seams, and the snap is as firm as ever. A smoker, I believe, has no particular hankering after the Japanese pipe with its metal bowl and mouthpiece, but anybody with a sense of form must enjoy the delicate refinement of even the commonest native pipe with the gentle yellow of its bamboo stem, the finish of the metal mouthpiece, and the perfect shape of its acorn bowl.

These are, after all, only a few examples, sufficient perhaps for the purpose, but any one who has lived in Japan and looked at the common objects of daily life used, owned and produced by the people would be able to multiply them almost indefinitely.

In thinking them over perhaps the thing which occurs most frequently to the mind is the simplicity of the means used. The whole artistic effect of the rice-fields consists in the variation of their shape, in the curve of the mud wall; in the shops and in the food simply in the right choice of given articles. But through all Japanese art, even the most elaborate, this same simplicity of means is noticeable. I have seen the most elaborate imperial brocade which produced an effect of running water, and it was done by simply throwing over the original blue brocade a rough mesh network of brown silk. Every garden in Japan is an illustration of this point, for a Japanese in a dull back yard as big as a bath-towel will, by the judicious planting of two small palm-trees, the setting up of a stone lantern, and the careful making of a puddle, convey to the mind of those who look the greenness and the coolness of a dense forest, the freshness of clear water, and the delight of hills and dales. I have seen it often in wayside inns, in shops, in big towns, in factories, everywhere.

Exactly the same thing is true of their flower arrangement. Putting aside all other points of beauty and charm, a Japanese with three chrysanthemums, with one branch of fir, will produce a whole which we should only think of attempting with a shilling’s-worth of flowers and two penny bunches of “green.”

On the characteristics of Japanese art European writers have varied greatly, but in considering only the art of the people there are perhaps fewer difficulties or differences, and we come, I think, to four—value of space, desire for line, sobriety of taste, and thoroughness of workmanship. I do not include the dislike of symmetry, because a want can hardly be called a characteristic. Symmetry is more properly a characteristic of our art. The Japanese dislike it, they make nothing in pairs, and if certain things, such as candlesticks, are required in twos, each one, though resembling the other in the main idea, always differs from it in detail.

The sense of the artistic value of space shows itself everywhere, in every form of decoration and design, as well as in every object of art. In Japan there is no such thing as overcrowding. It is one small leaf which decorates the sheet of paper wrapping. It is the scarcity of articles in the Mitsui which accounts for nine-tenths of the artistic effect of that draper’s interior. If ever a nation has thoroughly and æsthetically realised the psychological fact on which much of our theory of backgrounds is based, that we only really see an object by its outlines, it is the Japanese. They have worked out this fact to its last artistic value. In a Japanese room there hangs one picture; on the raised and polished platform of the tokonoma, the artistic altar of the room, there is set one bronze or porcelain vase of flowers, one ornament. These are changed as often as the fortune or the taste of their owner permits. When a Japanese comes to Europe he complains that our drawing-rooms, with their dozens of pictures and their scores of ornaments, are “like warehouses”; and after this first disturbing feeling of crowd, when he has lived in that drawing-room for several months and finds that the ornaments are never changed, only perhaps added to, he complains then of the monotony. For he knows and has realised another psychological fact, that it is in the freshness of observation that the eye sees clearest and the brain works best.

With the sense of the supreme value of space comes an intense feeling for line. Whether this has something to do with the climate, which is clear, and the landscape, which is mountainous, I do not know; but compare the purity of outline in the Italian painters, more especially in the Tuscan and the Umbrian, Botticelli and Perugino, with the Netherlands School, Rembrandt and Rubens, where light and shadow, and colour as colour, play so great a part. But whether it is due to the landscape or not, personally I should be inclined to attach a great deal of importance to the artistic value of Fujiyama, a mountain whose exquisite outlines, visible from thirteen provinces, have simply permeated Japanese art; but landscape or no, the desire for line is a fact. The Japanese draw with everything; with the mud embankments of their rice-fields, with the granite stones of their walls, with the trees in their gardens, with the flowers in their vases. The whole essence of flower arrangement is not colour mass, but line drawing. It is the same with their trees, the dwarf trees in their pots, or the grown trees in their gardens. Both are trained and educated to produce a beautiful outline, and they succeed. It is perhaps interesting in this connection to notice the number of illustrations in Japanese books where the trees are simply silhouettes washed in in Indian ink on a blank background. We should have, I think, a great disinclination to treat our trees in this way.

The feeling for line is very strong, and it is perhaps perpetuated by the daily use of those dead pictures, the Chinese ideographs. Several hundred years ago the Japanese invented the phonetic syllabaries called kana. It is interesting from an artistic point of view to compare them with our alphabet. A very short contemplation of the alphabet as used in our books and handwriting will show that it is mainly composed of straight lines, often parallel, with a certain admixture of circles. Now, although a straight line is the nearest way between two points, it is rarely or never the most beautiful; did not some one once say, “The line of beauty is a curve”? I do not think any one’s artistic soul has received much nourishment from a contemplation of the letter “m,” three parallel lines, or “t.” Compare them with the corresponding kana, and the difference will be felt at once. Indeed, we are all unconsciously well aware of the artistic failing of our ordinary alphabet, for directly we carve or write an inscription, or introduce it in any way into something which claims to be an object of art, then we discard it altogether, and either fall back on the Gothic letters, or adopt some kind of fancy alphabet. As the average Japanese child is taught writing four hours a week for the first three years, and three hours for the next two, and as their writing is really painting, their feeling for line has at least a chance of development.

Of the thoroughness of Japanese workmanship I do not think anybody would disagree; when the wing of the stork on your rice-bowl is finished inside, when the chrysanthemum petals on your wooden tray curl over the edge, when the bottom of your flower vase has a design as well as the outside, you are convinced that the Japanese knew Ruskin’s dictum long before he said it. I have seen the feet of a bronze statuette, the feet which were entirely hidden under the folds of the kimono from in front, carefully finished off underneath. The statuette in question cost 50 sen (1s.), and was sold by a street hawker. Nobody really sees the designs on the kuruma axle-heads, not unless they look for them, except perhaps the kurumaya himself, when he squats on the ground waiting for a fare; but they give a thoroughness of finish to the ’ricksha which it would miss without.

Most people are agreed, I think, upon the thoroughness of workmanship, but sobriety of taste is a more disputed point. We are very fond of talking of the “gorgeous colouring of the East,” and using terms like “barbaric splendour” and “oriental luxury.” These terms may have had some truth as applied to the art of India, but because Japan is also situated in the East, they do not necessarily apply to her. We do not sufficiently realise over here that there is considerably more difference between China and Japan, let alone India and Japan, than there is between any two European countries whatsoever, be they Greeks or Dutch, or what you will; that they are not of the same race, nor do they belong to the same linguistic family. Therefore, to transfer an adjective applicable to India to Japan, just because both are Oriental, is like applying an adjective suitable to the Turks or the Laps to the English, on the ground that both are European. This is, I think, one source of error; the others are more subtle. There is first of all the climate. Now a colour, any colour, under a bright blue sky in a dazzling yellow sunshine, will always look more subdued than that same colour under a grey sky and in a cloudy atmosphere. This is simply an effect of contrast. Therefore, Japanese colouring must be judged as it is seen in Japan, not as it may look when transferred to England. And, again, a study of the actual colour itself will show that the Japanese have learnt how to make the very brightest colours soft in tone. This fact has been well rubbed into me lately, for I have tried both in Paris and in London to match certain Japanese stuffs, or at least to find something in the same note of colour which would go with them. It was quite impossible. All our soft colours, the so-called artistic shades, are too dull in tone, while none of our bright ones are soft enough; by the side of the Japanese colours they look simply crude. These are all quite material reasons, objective facts, but there is another which only those who have stood and looked at the glorious splendour of a Japanese temple such as Nikkō or Shiba, where the whole rainbow is resplendent in carved wood and gilded lacquer, and that is their matchless power of combination and of background. The temples of Nikkō or Shiba are both built in the midst of a wood; the dark, deep, sober forms of the giant pine-trees stand all around. This is the setting; then between each gorgeous gateway comes a still clear space of court, paved with quiet grey pebbles; and when the glory culminates in the temple’s interior the building is of unstained, unpainted wood, soft as the dust-brown carpet of the beech-leaves when the sun’s rays are level. But the temples, supreme in their way among all the products of Japanese art, are exceptional. The average Japanese room is colourless, luminous, but practically colourless. The floor is of the palest yellow matting, the one or two solid walls of the room are washed in the softest of bark browns, the wood of the tokonoma is dark and polished, and the other walls are shōji, that is, composed entirely of small panes of rice-paper. Through this paper the sunlight comes luminous but colourless. To sit in that room is like living in the heart of the plum-blossom, or within the petals of a warm white rose.

In their dress the Japanese are equally subdued: the men wear mostly grey or dust-coloured silks, the women soft mauves, blues and greys. It is only the children who are dressed in bright colours and gay patterns. All the working classes, both men and women, wear a dark indigo blue. The Japanese wear no jewellery. Precious stones they have, exquisite mauve and purple amethysts, crystals of blood-red splendour or soft and milky as flushing pearl. And the rich man buys these, not to wear, but to look at, as works of art, as exquisite natural objects. He never hangs them round his own neck, or enmeshes his womankind in them. The Japanese are, I believe, the only nation on the earth who know and value precious stones, and yet wear no jewellery. Might not this be considered convincing evidence of their essential sobriety of taste? Even the landscape, though supremely beautiful and sunny, is never flaunting. There are too many sober green pine-trees, and pale, bewitching bamboos for that. I have never seen anywhere in Japan, in the poorest house, in the cheapest shop, anything that was tawdry or even “loud,” except in that part of porcelain and other factories which supply goods, mostly from “foreign” patterns, for the European market.

In this enumeration of the characteristics of Japanese art, you will perhaps wonder why I have omitted the very popular one of their love of the little, the small, the minute. I have left it out simply because I do not believe it exists as such. Many writers have exclaimed in paragraphs sprinkled with interjections on this passion for the little which they say the Japanese possess; and they have apparently seen in it nothing but a blind unreasoning prejudice for the something small as opposed to the something great. I think this opinion is mostly due to the “little knowledge” of the tourist or the restricted knowledge of the specialist. It leaves also entirely unexplained and inexplicable the Dai Butsu of Kamakura, a bronze statue of Buddha, fifty feet high and of the most exquisite workmanship; the Buddhas of Kyoto and of Nara; the big bronze bell of Kyoto, the largest hanging bell in the world, besides that at Chion-in, the second largest, and at Nara, the third; the Hongwanji at Kyoto, the walls of the castle at Osaka—and the battle of Mukden. A wider acquaintance with the Japanese people and the realities of their daily life will show, I think, that this so-called love of the little is really a highly cultivated and acute sense of proportion, where it is not purely ethical.

The Japanese beer-glass, you will remember, was the size of a doll’s tumbler. “Why?” “Oh, because they have a passion for little things” is certainly the easiest and most obvious answer. But follow that glass to its home on its Japanese dinner tray, in its Japanese room, and you will see that its littleness is in exact proportion to the tray and the room. Nor are the rooms so small, but because we insist on bringing our encumbering “foreign” ideas into them. There is no furniture in a Japanese room, no furniture of any kind whatsoever. Two kneeling-cushions and a round box, a brazier, are the only possible objects which could come under that heading, therefore the whole space within the four walls of a room is space for movement. If a measurement were taken of the actual feet of free space in many a modern European drawing-room, I believe that it would be found to be something less than that in the “tiny” Japanese apartment.

Another thing to be borne in mind is that life in Japan is lived, not above the floor on chairs, but on the floor itself. Try living on the floor and you will find the whole horizon of a room opening out in the most astonishing way. What we call a stool, for instance, represents the same level as a table. The actual difference in the height of the eyes sitting on one’s heels on a Japanese floor and on a chair is really between two and three feet, while it must also be remembered that Japanese eyes, belonging as they do to a body shorter on the average than our own, come still nearer to the ground.

Thus a careful examination of the things which are small in Japan, which they have deliberately chosen to make small, copied smaller than the foreign originals, will show, I think, that it is due to their acute sense of fitness and proportion. There is also another reason, which is not artistic but ethical.

The Japanese are a sober and abstemious race, a race of high culture and of ancient civilisation. When we were running about clad in the inadequate skin, gorging off half-raw oxen, and drunken with seven-day feasts of mead, they lived already under an ordered and an organised government with most, if not all, of the essentials of civilisation. And after all, is not one of the hall-marks of real civilisation the learning to take “a little” instead of “a lot,” in extracting from each atom the whole of its use, enjoyment and pleasure? Children and savages are always wasteful. We do not now try to eat whole oxen or drink mead for seven days, we have learnt to get as much if not more pleasure out of one glass of wine and one slice of beef, and the reason is that we are slowly learning not to gulp. If you watch the working man drink his beer, or the working woman her tea, you will see that they usually gulp it down in big draughts, imagining, I suppose, that it is sheer quantity which produces flavour. They have not yet learnt that profound ethical truth, expressed by the old epicure when he said approvingly of some young man that he “had already learned to sip his wine and not to gulp it.” The Japanese have learnt to sip. Their wine-glasses, which are china bowls, hold perhaps two tablespoonfuls, their tea-cups three, their pipes just three fleeting whiffs. Drunkenness is exceedingly rare; it does exist, but with a glass holding two tablespoonfuls there is time for reflection. It is also more economical than the foreign variety, the actual quantity required to produce intoxication when taken in small doses being, I believe, considerably less.

There is always another side to a people’s art, a side which is frequently overlooked, and that is the art, not in the object, but in the workman. A people’s art will show itself, not only in the actual object produced, but in the life of the producer and in the conditions of production.

In the cloisonné works of Nagoya, an industrial centre of a quarter of a million of inhabitants, the workers sat in peace and solitude, not a sound of the busy streets penetrated to the long series of matted rooms where they worked. Each room and each workman looked towards a quiet garden, cool with running water, and still with the deep mystery of the pines. In the modern porcelain factory, dedicated to the production of goods for the “foreign” market, the long white room looked out through open doors upon the waving rice-fields, and each potter’s wheel was turned to see the branch of purple iris standing in its yellow vase. There is a cotton factory in Japan which is a positive addition to the beauty of the landscape.

Nor is it only the big and wealthy workmen who produce good art. Some of the most beautiful silver enamel-ware in Tokyo was made by a little man who owned the smallest and poorest of general shops, where halfpenny tooth brushes and farthing sheets of paper formed the richest portions of his stock. All this beautiful silver enamel-work was done in the back parlour, and at no time could he have had more than ten yen (£1) worth of such goods in hand. Yet he was an artist to the tips of his fingers, and the sheen and colour of his enamelled silver lotus flowers were a joy to the beholder.

In Nikkō there was a carpenter who made wooden trays for the inhabitants. His stall, the merest shanty, was the littlest imaginable, yet he carved me a wooden box with a design in chrysanthemums which was skilled artistic work, and even his cheap wooden trays had the stamp of art. He did them with a penknife, and the whole surface of the tray was grooved in shallow curving lines.

And the worker himself? If there is art in the product and in the conditions of production, what of the producer? Is there art in his life and his tastes? Is there art in the life of the labourer, of the coolie and the ’ricksha man? Is there art in the daily life of the common people as well as in the things they use?

A man’s tastes are known by his pleasures. When the common people of Tokyo make “Bank Holiday” they go to see a handful of pink cherry-blossoms against the blue of an April sky. They walk politely, looking up at the trees, and though the crowd is thick, endless, nobody pushes or fights or swears. No special posse of policemen is turned out to keep order. Down the long two-mile avenue of cherry-trees at Mukojima the crowd wanders amiably, and the municipality of Tokyo has never thought to invent a single penalty for the destruction of young trees and shrubs. The world stares contentedly, drinks tea, and goes home again. And this is considered to be the rowdiest crowd at the most popular resort on the favourite “Bank Holiday” of the year.

The blossoming of all the other flowers, plum, peach, azalea, peony, wistaria, iris, lotus, convolvulus, maple, chrysanthemum, are equally visited, and advertised daily in the newspapers. The people of Japan take few holidays, but those they do take are almost always at the time of the flower festivals.

When they can afford something more expensive they go to the “Royal Academy,” which opens its doors twice in the year for the aristocratic sum of 3 sen (¾d.) gheta (wooden clogs) and umbrellas left outside, 5 rin (10 rin make ¼d.). The other picture exhibitions, not having the status of the Tokyo “Royal Academy,” are more moderate, averaging 1 to 2 sen for admission, and gheta, free. The entrance to the exhibitions of bronze, lacquer, porcelain and other arts is the same. Even on the basis of Japanese incomes, where a General earns £300 a year, the Headmaster of a Public School £160 and a coolie 6d. a day, the charges are exceedingly moderate. And the people, the real working people, go. I should be curious to find out how many working men have paid at the turnstiles of Burlington House.

Besides art exhibitions, Japanese workmen go to the theatre, but this is a taste they share with many other nations; what is all their own is their love of pilgrimages, not only to temples of religious repute, but to places of celebrated beauty. Fujiyama is yearly ascended by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Here religion and beauty are mingled. For the great mountain is sacred. So is almost every spot in Japan that is particularly beautiful. As one journeys through the country, the traveller will always find that the most beautiful point of view, the grandest scene, the loveliest nook, has a temple, or at least a wayside shrine, set up by the common people and tended by them. There never was a nation since the days of Ancient Greece who so entirely believed that beauty is sacred, or who so entirely disbelieved that art can be divorced from ethics. They have the love of beauty innate and inalienable. A man I knew was once crossing Tokyo in a ’ricksha; he was a prosperous, commercial being with a vast contempt for the “heathen.” It was late afternoon. His kurumaya, after looking round at him several times, suddenly stopped short, and waving his hand to the west said respectfully but firmly:

“Honourably please to observe the unusual glory of the sunset.”

“And I told him to jolly well get on,” was the end of the story as I heard it.

A favourite pastime of the ’ricksha men on the cab-stands as they wait for a fare is to draw in the dust of the roadway one against the other. If sand has been spilled from a cart anywhere within reach the whole ’ricksha stand migrates and has the happiest time. I have seen really good outlines of Fujiyama and of flying birds, or blossoming flowers, all on the roadways by the ’ricksha stands. And whatever their faults, they at least had life, for the ’ricksha man has knowledge, knowledge based on intelligent observation and on the inherited training of his race.

In the Japanese language there is a word, edaburi, which means “the formation or the arrangement of the branches of a tree.” Merely to possess such a word shows the long training in art and observation which the nation must have undergone. But this word is not a technical term used only by artists and the cultured classes; it is a living, breathing expression, part of the vocabulary of every Japanese, even the Board School educated. Kurumaya discuss edaburi in the streets of Tokyo. Railway porters at wayside stations argue the matter with the stationmaster. Every peasant knows, understands, and talks of the matter as though he had brought himself up on long courses of Ruskin. It has often been a subject of great regret to me that Ruskin did not know the Japanese, for in them he would have found the living proof of so much of his teaching.

But the people of Japan not only discuss edaburi, they write poetry. There is an exceedingly simple form of poetry called hokku. It consists of only three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and is written in the language of daily life. The hokku was invented by a man called Bashō, for the definite ethical purpose of cultivating the taste and improving the morals of the people. He believed in the composition of poetry as an ethical force, and he wished to bring it from the home of the educated into the lives of the poor. He succeeded. Not because the hokku is a so much easier form of poetry than the English couplet, but because the people have taste, and art, and civilisation in the very cells of their brains. Every one writes poetry, even the typical jinricksha man, who is to the Japanese what the charbonnier is to the French or the coster to us. When the kurumaya and his wife go to visit their relations the whole party amuses itself by composing these tiny poems. On all occasions of joy and grief, on birth, death and marriage, at the time of each flower festival, or of any other happening, the people compose poetry. Literary composition has always been inculcated as the best medicine for sorrow, and as such is practised daily.

This is a little poem taken from the diary of a woman who died in Tokyo a year or two ago. She lived with her husband, a doorkeeper, on an income of £1 a month, and she was very delicate. She bore him three children, who all died shortly after birth; then the poor mother died herself. Her diary came into the possession of Lafcadio Hearn, who translated it under the title of “A Woman’s Tragedy.” This poem was composed on the death of the third baby and runs:

“Tanoshimi mo Samété haka nashi. Haru no yumé.”

“All my delight has perished, and hopeless I remain. It was a dream, a dream of spring.”

Here is another poem which is more typically Japanese. It was composed by the same woman after the death of her second baby, and runs:

“Sami daré ya Shimerigachi naru Sodé no tamoto wo.”

“Oh, the month of rain; all things have become damp; the ends of my sleeve are wet.”

It is this very allusiveness, this saying of something simple and commonplace, and hiding behind it a whole meaning of intense emotion, which makes this poem so typically Japanese, for Japanese art is always suggestive, it always needs the observer to bring his share of thought and mind to its interpretation.

It is interesting to speculate how much the two most universally recognised characteristics of the Japanese, politeness and cleanliness, owe to their sense of art. If one looks into the psychology of the race, one sees, of course, that this national trait of exquisite politeness was built up, or at least assisted, in many ways. There was that stern training of the samurai which taught eternal, never-ending self-control. There is the whole Buddhistic teaching, which is one long gospel of unselfishness and kindness. But other nations have had training in self-control, we ourselves among the number—think for a moment of the Puritans and our public schools. And other religions preach kindness and unselfishness, our own again, and yet there is no other nation so widely recognised, even by the snappiest of tourists who ever wrote his “memoirs,” as universally polite from the Emperor to the coolie in the streets. It is a hypothesis which I put forward with some hesitation, because the origins of national psychology are not for the amateur, but I do think that a certain stress is to be laid upon this innate and instinctive, but much cultivated sense of art. Has not the politeness something to do with that love of a beautiful outline, that desire for a perfect curve in the relations between man and man as well as between man’s eye and his drawing? Is not, in fact, a rude action a something inartistic in the social whole, a blot of crude colour that jars?

The whole of the cha-no-yu, or tea ceremony, one of the few Japanese things of which Europeans have heard more or less vaguely, is an illustration in point. The tea ceremony, divested of its subsidiary and attendant growths, is in essence nothing more than the proper making and the proper drinking of a simple cup of tea. This, in the course of centuries, has been elaborated into an imposing and very complicated ceremonial. Nowadays the cha-no-yu is regarded mainly as a useful reservoir of etiquette and politeness, and is taught as such. But the whole idea on which it rests is that for every given action there is always one, and only one, right and proper attitude, that is to say, the most graceful. So that the curve of every finger in the mere passing of a tea-cup is the result of careful thought and long experience. Everything has to be considered, the room, the person, the relation of the body to the arm, of the arm to the hand, of the hand to the tea-cup, the position of the person serving, and of the person served, the place of the tea-cups, of the teapot, and the tea-kettle; all have been taken into consideration by the tea ceremonialists, and the proper, the most graceful attitude carefully evolved.

That you may not think politeness a matter of social caste in Japan, I may say that the kurumaya when they run into one another at the corners, the coolies hauling carts when they collide, bow profoundly and beg one another’s pardon.

And the exquisite cleanliness? Some one once defined dirt as “matter out of place.” Is not much of art just the putting of things in their right places, in their best and most appropriate and consequently their most beautiful place; in the putting of a thing in such a place that you feel it never could have been otherwise. As the child said when lost in admiration of his birthday cake, “It’s so beautiful I think God must have made it.” It is this cleanliness, this neatness, which the Japanese possess, a neatness which has passed beyond mere precision, passed on into its essence—grace.

All this may perhaps sound far-fetched to English ears. If we are clean and polite it is on sanitary or on ethical grounds, not for æsthetic reasons, because “it is healthy or right,” not “because it is more beautiful,” and we make a broad distinction between ethics and æsthetics. In Japan, on the contrary, there is the most intimate of relations between them. The whole modern controversy of “art for art’s sake,” all the dearly cherished views of French critics that art has nothing to do with morals, is simply unmeaning to them. You might as well say that the sun had no relation to light.

I have already mentioned how the hokku form of verse arose as a moral influence, how literary composition is always recommended as the best medicine for sorrow; but what of a nation whose gardens are arranged to express an ethical abstraction such as courage, resignation, obedience, or to suggest a saying of Buddha, the Blessed One; whose dwarf trees are not merely grown to make a design, but also to express an idea and suggest a reflection; where every single tree, and flower, and bird, and beast is a moral symbol and is commonly used as such; where a simple candlestick of a stork standing on a tortoise and holding the stem of a convolvulus in its mouth is a whole philosophy: the stork, representing Life, standing upon the tortoise, Eternity, and holding in its mouth the Morning Glory, a flower whose brief life, only blooming for the few hours after dawn, is typical of mortality, and the impermanence of all things. From Life based upon Eternity springs Mortality, whose joys are fleeting. Here is the kernel of the whole Buddhistic faith. The impermanence of phenomena and the eternity of law, that is, cause and effect.

Even such an ordinary art as that of arranging flowers is deeply ethical. The whole of Chinese philosophy is bound up with it. Each stem is known by the name of some tenet in this philosophy, and at the end of the lesson on flower arrangement the teacher sits down and talks to the class of the underlying ethical ideas.

I do not think there is any art in the world into which so much thought and meaning has been poured as into that of the Japanese. Every design, even the simplest, even the most stereotyped, has behind it a whole world of symbol, of suggestion which speaks to the mind of the beholder as the outlines to his eye. And this is the reason why no design is ever unmeaning, haphazard, as it so often is with us. It is there not only because it is beautiful, but because it is appropriate to the place and the occasion, because it has some connection with the object it decorates, with the person who gives or the person who receives it, with the time and the circumstances of the giving. Their art, in fact, regarded from the ethical point of view, is often a sort of moral shorthand, a very beautiful, finely wrought shorthand, which men can take away and think upon.

And this brings me to my last point. John Addington Symonds, in one of his wonderful essays on the Italian Renaissance, says that painting inevitably fell from its high estate among men because modern life is too complex to be expressed by it. That just in the same way as the Renaissance required something less simple than the sculpture of the Greeks to translate its thoughts and feelings into outward form, so we in this century cannot express our own more subtle and complex thought in terms of painting, and therefore never again can we hope to rival the perfection of that old Renaissance art. And he concludes by remarking that it is in music, more plastic and suggestive, that we must seek our best expression. Now Japanese art is not dead but intensely living, and it has always seemed to me that it lives, it holds its place in their life, thought and culture just because it has learnt to express those complex and subtle emotions which make up our world to-day. And it does it, not by imaging them forth defined and definite as our painting seeks to do, but just as our music would by suggestion.

To every Japanese painting a man must bring his own soul and his own thoughts, and where he has none or little, then he will turn away complacently, saying, “Here, there is nothing.” For his are not the eyes to see all the dim eternal problems, all the vistas of unwritten poetry which the artist has but shadowed forth; the artist whose part is not to portray, but infinitely to suggest.