Part 9

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_ (1_s._), 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_ (¾_d._) _gheta_ (wooden clogs) and umbrellas left outside, 5 _rin_ (10 _rin_ make ¼_d._). 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 6_d._ 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.