Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/64

artist's work be carried no further even than the outlines, you will still have something worthy of being hung on your wall or inserted in your album. Japanese art disregards the laws of perspective and of light and shadow. Though sometimes faultlessly accurate in natural details, it scorns to be tied down to such accuracy as to an ever-binding rule. Even in the same picture say, one of a bird perched on a tree you may have the bird exact in every detail, the tree a sort of conventional shorthand symbol. Or you may have a bamboo which is perfection, but part of it blurred by an artificial atmosphere which no meteorological eccentricity could place where the painter has placed it; or else two sea-coasts one above another, each beautiful and poetical, only how in the world could they have got into such a relative position? The Japanese artist does not trouble his head about such matters. He is, in his limited way, a poet, not a photographer. Our painters of the impressionist school undertake less to paint actual scenes than to render their own feelings in presence of such scenes. The Japanese artist goes a step further: he paints the feelings evoked by the memory of the scenes, the feelings when one is between waking and dreaming. He is altogether an idealist, and this at both ends of the scale, the beautiful and the grotesque. Were he able to work on a large canvas, a very great ideal art might have been the result. But in art, as in literature, his nation seems lacking in the genius, the breadth of view, necessary for making grand combinations. It stops at the small, the pretty, the isolated, the vignette. Hence the admirable adaptability of Japanese art to decorative purposes. In decoration, too, some of its more obvious defects retire into the background. Who would look on the side of a teapot for a rigid observance of perspective? Still less in miniature ivory carvings such as the netsukes, in the ornaments of sword-guards, the bas-reliefs on bronze vases, and the patterns in pieces (and many of them are masterpieces) of embroidery. As decoration for small surfaces, Japanese art has already begun to conquer the world. In the days before Japanese ideas became known to Europe, people there used to consider it essential to