CHAPTER SIX

The Minor Arts

AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY we stood as on a height of land whence we could look backward along the path of human development: a larger view, one more comprehensive and complete, was possible than ever before, and we were permitted to see many things, establish many relationships not recognized in the past. Amongst them was the position of art in its relation to what we are pleased to call civilization. The wider view we were then enabled to take gave, I think, something of a shock to our self-satisfaction, for we saw very clearly that the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries had witnessed a steady and unbroken decline in all the arts but one, the art of music, and also that this decline, varying slightly in the periods of its duration, had extended over the entire world. Retrogression there had been many times in the past, one or two or all the arts had suffered now and then and here and there, but the resulting inferiority had been relative always before; with us it was absolute. By this I mean that by the middle of the nineteenth century we had sunk to a point lower than ever in history, excepting only in music and in a measure in literature, but even here the loss was actual and measurable, for the great results achieved had been at the hands of isolated individuals and in spite of the general enmity of the great mass of the people. For the first time in the annals of the world art as an instinctive thing, as a heritage of humanity, had reached its term. We had sold our birthright, perhaps, though this is heresy, for a mess of pottage.

The consciousness of this startling condition came first to the few, and even before the nineteenth century had covered half its allotted course. These few began a feverish search through all the world for the vivifying flame that had flickered and died in the West. They found it at the antipodes, in the then unravaged East, and in one spot, in a little group of hermit islands, in the most ancient and glorious Kingdom of Japan, they found it burning with yet unhindered brightness and they announced their treasure trove with exultation.

That was less than fifty years ago, but now the flame has been extinguished also in this its latest sanctuary, and the lamps hang empty of oil and void of light.

In the history of the gradual extinction of the artistic impulse Japan stands as the last of nations to forsake its heritage, as it also stands as the first of the nations that now exist to assume these rights and privileges of civilization. While Europe was wallowing in the banalities of the pagan Renaissance, insulting intelligence with the architectural crudities of Palladio and Maderna and the pictorial imbecilities of Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa, Japan was building the shrines of Nikko and painting the palace temples of Kyoto with immortal decorations. Later by two centuries, while the West was producing black walnut and haircloth, plated silver ice-pitchers, and chromo-lithographs, Japan was quietly creating lacquers, cloisonné and embroideries, ivory carvings, screens and kakimono, any single example of which would honor a contemporary museum of art. So also at the beginning the architecture and sculpture of the seventh and eighth centuries in Japan was inconceivably in advance of the rough brutalities of the Europe of that time, then just emerging from barbarism, and so it was to remain for almost five hundred years. The great art of the West is comprised in two brief periods, one of some three hundred years ending with the Christian era, one of a similar space of time dating from the crusades to the Reformation: the art of Japan lasts unbroken from the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the nineteenth, a duration of twelve hundred years. It is the most prolonged art-record in the world, and though it passed through many vicissitudes, it never lapsed, remaining always vigorous and true. At different times it expressed itself through different modes, sculpture, architecture, painting, decoration, and “arts and crafts,” each in turn serving its purpose as a vehicle of expression for a passion for beauty that never failed.

Japanese civilization begins with the year 552 when Korean missionaries brought from the mainland the vivifying spirit of a most exalted religious system, though actually the conversion of Shotoku Taishi, the Constantine of Japan, some forty years later, marks the permanent establishment of Buddhism, that noble union of religion and philosophy that was to be the inspiration of a civilization and an art destined to endure for almost thirteen hundred years. Art marked the birth of this great civilization as it marked its close, and the temples of Horiuji still stand in enduring record. The architect was a Korean, and the style is the purest Chinese; Chinese also are the painted frescoes of the walls, with a slight Hindoo cast, and the superb sculptures, preserving, through all their orientalism, hints of Hellenic influence.

China has always been to Japan what Athens was to Rome; the first influence towards culture, learning, and art came from her, and down even to the sixteenth century there was a constant reference to her on every subject. She remained the perfect standard in letters, philosophy, religion, sculpture, architecture, painting, and music, but she was always a guide, not a model for narrow copying. The germ of every phase of civilization emanated from her, but these germs developed independently, and as a result, while Japan never quite achieved the astounding height of perfect development that was achieved in Hangchow in the twelfth century, she yet produced a more persistent and lasting civilization than was granted to her great mother.

All the art of Japan is therefore primarily Chinese, but it is marked by a certain searching vitality, a mobility and an almost nervous eagerness that are all her own. As I have said, the first architecture, painting, sculpture, and poetry were Chinese or Chino-Korean, but almost immediately, so fertile was the soil, so powerful the impulse of Buddhism, native Japanese arose to carry on the work and on their own lines. The unknown architect of the Yakushiji pagoda was undoubtedly a Japanese. Tori Busshi, though of Chinese blood in part, was born in Japan early in the seventh century and was the first of the great sculptors, while Akahito and Hitomaru, who flourished about the year 700, were the first of the famous poets. Kose-no-Kanaoka was the first of the painters; he was much later in time, living during the second half of the ninth century. Komachi, a third great poet, was his contemporary. A hundred years later came Eshin and Jocho, sculptors, and Murasaki Shikibu, the first and greatest of the novelists of Japan.

All these were products of the great Fujiwara period, the first essentially Japanese manifestation of governmental possibilities. The old and primitive patriarchal system had been reorganized on the Chinese bureaucratic plan in the year 600, but seventy years later the Fujiwara family usurped almost all of the sovereign power and remained dominant for four hundred years. This was artistically a period of architecture, sculpture, and poetry, and the results were amazing in their perfection. The sculpture of Japan is almost unknown, but Horiuji, Nara, and Kyoto bear witness to the fact that it ranks with the most perfect in the world; in point of finely studied line it has no superior. Nearly all the Fujiwara architecture has perished, but the exquisite Ho-o-do of Byodoin still remains a marvel of refinement of proportion and exquisite decoration.

Following the fall of the house of Fujiwara came a long period of political anarchy when the rival houses of the Taira and Minomoto struggled for the mastery. During this epoch architecture contrived to develop, but the other major arts languished, nor did they regain any degree of brilliancy under the Hojo Shogun. Towards the middle of the fourteenth century the Shogunate passed into the hands of the house of Ashikaga, and with the beginning of the fifteenth century came the great burst of artistic genius that, after the early sculpture of the first years, is the great aesthetic glory of Japan. Josetsu was the first of the great school of painters, Chodensu its most famous representative, and these immortals were quickly followed by Sesshu, one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, Shubun and Kano Motonobu, the first of a famous line and a decorative artist almost without a rival. Unkei was meanwhile restoring the glories of the Chinese and Fujiwara sculpture. In the second generation came Iwasa Matahei, Kano Eitoku, and Kano Sanraku. Then the Napoleonic Hideyoshi strode on the stage, overturning the foundations of all established systems, and when he passed like a dying meteor the Tokugawa family assumed the Shogunate.

Now came a change, though painting still remained the chosen mode of artistic expression. For a time Korin and the later painters of the Kano family preserved the classical traditions of the Ashikaga school, but in 1750 Okyo and his great pupil Sosen founded the Shijo school of avowed realists and fixed the popular style that was to continue to the end.

In the meantime how had fared the “arts and crafts,” the art, that is, of all the people, the art that was the sign of joy in life and industrial vitality, and the proof of the depth to which the current civilization had permeated?

Well, we know that from the very first whatever had been made by any workman had been beautiful. Of course much, nearly all, indeed, that dates from the earliest period, has perished. We know that the arts of the potter, the weaver, and the metal worker had come from China with the sixth-century missionaries, and for the following eight centuries had followed the progress of the major arts closely and intimately. But when feudalism became an established system at the beginning of the thirteenth century, then came the opportunity of the minor arts, and under the Ashikaga these developed to such a degree that they themselves actually became major arts; lacquer, porcelain, cloisonné, wood carving, screen painting, embroidery, goldsmithery, metal working, ivory carving, each and all became exalted to a marvelous height, and remained there until the fall of the old régime.

The art of Japan falls easily into four great periods: first, the Chinese and Fujiwara epoch lasting from 600 to 1100, when the chosen arts in their order of precedence were sculpture, poetry, and architecture; second, the Kamakura period, when architecture alone maintained and even increased its glory: this kind of interregnum lasted three hundred years, from 1100 until 1400; third, the Ashikaga epoch, the golden age of art when painting became unrivaled in its perfection while sculpture and the industrial arts followed close behind; fourth, the Tokugawa régime, when architectural decoration, together with the industrial arts, leaped to the front in a blaze of unexampled glory, architecture showing signs of decadence, and painting suffering from the realism that the followers of the Shijo school exaggerated into a prominence that would have shocked its founders. Then Commodore Perry opened the ports, and like a house of cards the marvelous dream fabric crumbled into ruin. The Shogunate was abolished in 1868, feudalism was destroyed in 1871, the wearing of swords was prohibited in 1876, in 1889 the Mikado promulgated the Constitution, and a civilization that had endured for thirteen centuries, a civilization that had produced a national character of singular nobility and an art of almost unexampled beauty, passed away forever. Japanese art is now history; as a vital and contemporary power it has no existence. I am supposed to talk to you about the Arts and Crafts of Japan, but if by this is meant a certain few of the minor arts of a people, the task is an impossible one, for in this sense the arts and crafts do not exist in Japan; there was never really any distinction between the major and the minor arts, a poem, a devotional picture, a statue, a temple is just as much a piece of craftsmanship as a netuske, or a lacquer box, and a carved ramma or a bronze incense koro is just as much a vehicle of the highest aesthetic and spiritual expression as a kakimono by Cho-densu or the Dai Butsu of Kamakura. It was all art; that is, the achievement of the highest visual beauty, the expression of joy in life and exultation in well-doing, and the communication of spiritual and emotional enthusiasm. Art is simply the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpressible ideas, and the Japanese, living in a beautiful land, inspired by an exalted form of religion, and ultimately ennobled by a splendid feudalism that enhanced every inborn trait of honor and chivalry, simply did this better than almost any other people in the world. Art should be at least the voicing of health, joy, the delight of work, and the conviction of a beautiful religious faith. When conditions are such that all the people are blessed with the possession of these things, then the arts and crafts will flourish, and no hard line will divide them from what are called the major arts.

In Japan every man, whether he were daimyo, samurai, or peasant, lived practically out of doors all the time and all the year round, he bathed at least three times a day, and, except at the luxurious close of the Kamakura period when tea-drinking and incense-burning ceremonies tended to produce sloth and effeminacy, every man was active and vigorously busy. Under feudalism this vitality of action became characteristic of the entire race, and as a result there were universal health and perfect joy in life. Japan has always been either an absolute monarchy, a powerful aristocracy, or a splendid feudalism; therefore the principles of law and order—except during the Kamakura anarchy—have always been universally accepted, and honor, faithfulness, and personal devotion have been supreme. As a result there was an unusually high standard of government and industry of all kinds flourished, so there was general content and a greater continuity of good civil conditions than can easily be found during any similar period in Europe. Finally Buddhism was supreme and its noble ethical system, its profound philosophy, and its intense religious quality worked together to build up strong character and to incite the imagination and the emotions of the people to the highest pitch.

No other result than that which actually followed could be predicated from these conditions: namely, a kind of life, a mode of thought, a quality of action that made artistic expression inevitable. For art of any kind is not a commodity, it cannot be bought and sold, it is a result that follows inevitably from certain conditions, and these conditions held in Japan for thirteen centuries as they held in medieval Europe for three centuries. The Japanese were clean, brave, honorable, religious, loyal, and art followed like the blossom and fruitage of a tree.

The minor arts, like the major arts, were simply the proper expression, as I have said, of a healthy delight in doing everything just as well as it could possibly be done. Buddhism, chivalry, and unflinching loyalty to the Emperor and to the dead, all taught the lesson of faithfulness in small things as well as great. Whatever any workman did, he did as well as it could possibly be done. Ugliness was then, as it is now, a sin; carelessness and cheapness of workmanship were then, as they are now, a crime. The fact that a thing was humble in its function was no reason why it should not be perfect in form and fashioning. The Japanese knew that art was not an amenity of life, a mere prettiness, pleasing, perhaps, but decidedly a luxury; they knew that it was the mark of the man, the proof of his character, the pledge of his civilization, and therefore they were ashamed to do anything that was not beautiful. This is really all there is to be said about Japanese arts and crafts. The forms are new to us, the methods singular, the patterns strange and foreign, but these qualities are superficial. Essentially there is no difference but one of degree between the arts of Japan and those of medieval Europe. Unbroken civilization, a continuity of tradition, and an absence of religious heresies resulted in training the eye and the hand of the Japanese artisan to a point never attained by his brothers of the West; but the impulse, the motive was the same, and it is this impulse that must be incited again if we are ever to attain once more proficiency in the arts.

I said at the beginning of this chapter that with the close of the last century we stood on an eminence from which we could obtain a general view of the recent past impossible to us before. In this view lies a certain space so arid, so desolate, that in a way it cuts us off from the ancient tradition that is ours by right. The second and third quarters of the nineteenth century will stand forever as a kind of Babylonish Captivity, an epoch of horror that isolates us from the past. During that time we sank lower in industrial art, in the art of the race, than ever before in recorded history, and as a result the mental attitude of the world was seriously changed. We have simply to start all over again, and by the grace of God we will start properly with the industrial arts; but we cannot start from them immediately, we must achieve first of all the industrial, economic, political, and spiritual conditions that will result inevitably in some form of artistic expression. How we are to do this is not for me to say, but it must be done, for if we do not express ourselves artistically in all we do, then we are barbarians.

In a curious old book written some forty-five years ago by Sir Rutherford Alcock, I find this delicious estimate of Japanese art:

“There is much, especially in the province of art properly so called, to which the Japanese cannot make the slightest pretension. They cannot produce by an effort works to be compared with the noble specimens of repoussé carving from the chisel of a Vechte, a Morel Ladeuil,or a Monti, which the great International Exposition showed: yet the Japanese bronze castings are, some of them, scarce inferior in skilled workmanship and mixture of metals to anything we can produce of the same kind. No Japanese can produce anything to be named in the same day with a work from the pencil of a Landseer, a Roberts, or a Stanfield, a Lewis, or a Rosa Bonheur.”

To compare the “repoussé artists” Vechte and Morel Ladeuil, whoever they may have been, with Okyo and Hidari Jingoro, and Roberts and Lewis with Sesshu and Kano Motonobu, would be idiotic were it not so laughable; but poor Sir Rutherford will serve very well to show how truly we had sunk in the middle of the century into the pit of perfect barbarism. Later the worthy Englishman tells us why the Japanese are so inferior to Vechte and Morel Ladeuil. He says, “I should say that there was a material civilization of a high order in which all the industrial arts had been brought to as great perfection as could well be obtainable without the aid of steam power and machinery.”

I have quoted thus at length from the admirable Briton just to show how great are our grounds for encouragement today. Forty years ago nine men out of ten would have agreed with him, today he would stand alone. We know now that steam power and machinery destroy and not create art, and this is the first battle; but there is yet another and a greater fight that must be won before the way is clear before us, and that is the fight against the heresy that we can have art at any time if we are willing to pay for it, in other words, that art is a commodity, not a result. Ten years ago the Arts and Crafts movement began in England: five years ago its results were the only truly good industrial art in the Western world. Today the movement has spread all over the continent with deplorable results, and in England itself exaggeration, affectation, and artificiality are taking the place of the first true arts and crafts. The Art Nouveau of France and Belgium is worse than haircloth and black walnut, and Birmingham is making arts and crafts furniture by “steam power and machinery.”

We are building on shifting sands, we are beginning at the top, not the bottom, and we are playing with a pack of cards. Japan teaches us one lesson besides that of the inefficiency of steam power as an incentive to art, and that lesson is that healthy living and joyful labor, just economic conditions, good government, a chivalric mind, a fine sense of honor, and a deep religious faith must come first as the rocky base whereon we may build our fabric of noble art.