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
¼_d._) 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.