The traveller who enters suddenly into a period of social
change--especially change from a feudal past to a democratic present--is
likely to regret the decay of things beautiful and the ugliness of
things new. What of both I may yet discover in Japan I know not; but
to-day, in these exotic streets, the old and the new mingle so well that
one seems to set off the other. The line of tiny white telegraph poles
carrying the world's news to papers printed in a mixture of Chinese and
Japanese characters; an electric bell in some tea-house with an Oriental
riddle of text pasted beside the ivory button, a shop of American
sewing-machines next to the shop of a maker of Buddhist images;
the establishment of a photographer beside the establishment of
a manufacturer of straw sandals: all these present no striking
incongruities, for each sample of Occidental innovation is set into an
Oriental frame that seems adaptable to any picture. But on the first
day, at least, the Old alone is new for the stranger, and suffices to
absorb his attention. It then appears to him that everything Japanese is
delicate, exquisite, admirable--even a pair of common wooden chopsticks
in a paper bag with a little drawing upon it; even a package of
toothpicks of cherry-wood, bound with a paper wrapper wonderfully
lettered in three different colours; even the little sky-blue towel,
with designs of flying sparrows upon it, which the jinricksha man uses
to wipe his face. The bank bills, the commonest copper coins, are
things of beauty. Even the piece of plaited coloured string used by
the shopkeeper in tying up your last purchase is a pretty curiosity.
Curiosities and dainty objects bewilder you by their very multitude: on
either side of you, wherever you turn your eyes, are countless wonderful
things as yet incomprehensible.
But it is perilous to look at them. Every time you dare to look,
something obliges you to buy it--unless, as may often happen, the
smiling vendor invites your inspection of so many varieties of one
article, each specially and all unspeakably desirable, that you flee
away out of mere terror at your own impulses. The shopkeeper never asks
you to buy; but his wares are enchanted, and if you once begin buying
you are lost. Cheapness means only a temptation to commit bankruptcy;
for the resources of irresistible artistic cheapness are inexhaustible.
The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you
wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact
to yourself, what you really want to buy is not the contents of a shop;
you want the shop and the shopkeeper, and streets of shops with their
draperies and their inhabitants, the whole city and the bay and the
mountains begirdling it, and Fujiyama's white witchery overhanging it in
the speckless sky, all Japan, in very truth, with its magical trees
and luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and
forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe.
Now there comes to my mind something I once heard said by a practical
American on hearing of a great fire in Japan: 'Oh! those people can
afford fires; their houses are so cheaply built.' It is true that the
frail wooden houses of the common people can be cheaply and quickly
replaced; but that which was within them to make them beautiful
cannot--and every fire is an art tragedy. For this is the land of
infinite hand-made variety; machinery has not yet been able to introduce
sameness and utilitarian ugliness in cheap production (except in
response to foreign demand for bad taste to suit vulgar markets), and
each object made by the artist or artisan differs still from all others,
even of his own making. And each time something beautiful perishes by
fire, it is a something representing an individual idea.
Happily the art impulse itself, in this country of conflagrations, has a
vitality which survives each generation of artists, and defies the flame
that changes their labour to ashes or melts it to shapelessness.
The idea whose symbol has perished will reappear again in other
creations--perhaps after the passing of a century--modified, indeed, yet
recognisably of kin to the thought of the past. And every artist is a
ghostly worker. Not by years of groping and sacrifice does he find his
highest expression; the sacrificial past is within him; his art is an
inheritance; his fingers are guided by the dead in the delineation of a
flying bird, of the vapours of mountains, of the colours of the morning
and the evening, of the shape of branches and the spring burst of
flowers: generations of skilled workmen have given him their cunning,
and revive in the wonder of his drawing. What was conscious effort in
the beginning became unconscious in later centuries--becomes almost
automatic in the living man,--becomes the art instinctive. Wherefore,
one coloured print by a Hokusai or Hiroshige, originally sold for less
than a cent, may have more real art in it than many a Western painting
valued at more than the worth of a whole Japanese street.