Note 19 — Chapter II

The South Kensington Museum has a very interesting collection of art-works from China and Japan; but the latter are chiefly lent. It is a strange thing that the perfect works of the East are so poorly illustrated in this national collection, while costly, yea, very costly works of inferior character, illustrative of Renaissance art, swarm as thickly as flies in August. This can only be accounted for by the fact that the heads of the institution have a feeling for pictorial rather than decorative art, and the Renaissance ornament is that which has most of the pictorial element. To me, the style appears to owe its very weakness to this fact, for decorative art should be wholly ideal. Pictorial art is of necessity more or less imitative.