JAPAN
and propagandists of the faith were naturally disposed to claim the cachet of Korean and Chinese artists for the decoration and equipment of sacred edifices. The artist effaced himself; his employers ignored him, and posterity was probably betrayed into the error of attributing to foreign masters much that Japan had a just title to call her own. The tendency of modern research is to throw doubt upon the foreign provenance of several important works hitherto attributed to Chinese or Korean artists. Men that could conceive and construct the colossal bronze figure of Lochana Buddha at Nara, and the numerous images preserved in the temple there, cannot have experienced much necessity to employ Chinese or Korean hands. Nevertheless, though the glyptic art, the lacquerer's art, and the inlayer's art unquestionably attained a high stage of development in this epoch, the pictorial art remained in a secondary place and a careful examination of the Shoso-in collection shows that even in the field of decorative art the features which constitute the chief charm, as well as the specialty, of Japanese genius in later ages had not yet been evolved. Without exception the decoration seen in the Shoso-in specimens is geometrically distributed. There is no evidence that the Japanese had yet begun to fathom the secret of natural proportion, or to study the lesson they afterwards acquired so perfectly, namely, that to conceal, while preserving, the geometrical relations of part to part, to obtain equilibrium while apparently despising equipoise, is the fundamental axiom of graceful symmetry. But as sculptors they unquestionably stand at the head of Far-Eastern artists, and although the degree of their supremacy varied from age to age, the fact could never be questioned. What
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