An Artist's Letters from Japan

by John La Farge

Then I went to see the painter whose drawings had been engraved. I can't explain just why the arrangement of his courtyard seemed what I might have expected, and yet I still keep that impression without having noticed anything but the heat—the heat and the sun—the heat accumulated in this big dreary city of innumerable little houses.

We explained at the door our request, and after a few moments we were told that the painter, though he was ill, would see us. We entered, and sat awhile, during which interval a boy pupil, occupied in copying sketches of the master, looked at us surreptitiously through a circular opening in the partition that made him a room.

Our artist came in and sat down, evidently an ill man, and offered us the inevitable tea, and showed us his methods of preparation for the colored wood-blocks, and got down examples from the great pile of rolls and bundles of papers and drawings that filled one side of the room, among which I noticed many fragments of illustrated English or American newspapers. And we dared not intrude any further, and departed—just as the conversation had turned toward European art—with gifts of drawings from him and promise of exchange.

No; what we have really done is again to call at shops and begin over again the pursuit of bric-à-brac. It is so impossible to believe that we can find nothing in all the accumulation of all these shops. But even if it be so, the manner of hunting is an amusement, as is the mere seeing of all this stuff in its own home; and the little attentions of the dealer, the being in a house with the privileges of tea and smoking, and a lazy war of attack and defense; and the slow drawing out of pieces from bags and boxes, so that time, the great enemy, is put in the wrong. And then, what one is not expected to buy or look at is quite as good. I know of one place to which I have returned to look out of the shoji screens into the garden, where there is a big pottery statue of Kwannon. I don't intend to get it or to bargain about it, but I intend to buy other things under its influence; perhaps the daimio seats that we use in our visit, or the lanterns that light us when we stay late, whose oil will have to be emptied if they are sold. And there are places where things are for sale to people versed in Chinese ways of thinking, but where amateurs on the wing like ourselves are not encouraged, and that is certainly seductive. Still, I am afraid that we shall miss a great deal that we wish to see, because of this dawdling in shops.

And yet there is no sadness following these visits, such as has come upon us when we have gone to see some of the modern workers. From them we depart with no more hope. It is like some puzzles, like the having listened to an argument which you know is based on some inaccuracy that you cannot at the moment detect. This about the better, the new perfect work, if I can call it perfect, means only high finish and equal care. But the individual pieces are less and less individual; there is no more surprise. The means or methods are being carried further and beyond, so that one asks one's self, "Then why these methods at all?" The style of this finer modern work is poorer, no longer connected with the greater design, as if ambition was going into method and value of material. Just how far this is owing to us I cannot tell, but the market is largely European, and what is done has a vague appearance of looking less and less out of place among our works, and has, as I said before, less and less suggestion of individuality. None of it would ever give one the slight shock of an exception, none of it would have the appearance which we know of our own best work, the feeling that we are not going to see more of it. This statement applies to the best work; the more common work is merely a degradation, the using of some part of the methods; just enough to sell it, and to meet some easily defined immediate commercial needs. I saw the beginnings years ago, and I can remember one of our great New York dealers marking on his samples the colors that pleased most of his buyers, who themselves again were to place the goods in Oshkosh or Third Avenue. All other colors or patterns were tabooed in his instructions to the makers in Japan. This was the rude mechanism of the change, the coming down to the worst public taste, which must be that of the greatest number at any given time; for commerce in such matters is of the moment: the sale of the wooden nutmeg, good enough until used. Have I not seen through the enormous West any amount of the worst stained glass, all derived from what I made myself, some years ago, as a step toward a development of greater richness and delicacy in the "art of glass"? And my rivalry of precious stones had come to this ignoble end and caricature. The commercial man, or the semi-professional man whom we call the architect, must continually ask for something poorer, something to meet the advancing flood of clients and purchasers, something more easily placed anywhere, at random, without trouble or responsibility, and reflecting the public—as it is more easy to fit in a common tile than the most beautiful Persian one—in the average of buildings made themselves to meet the same common demand. And so with all applied beauty; the degradation is always liable to occur.

Japan is an exceptional place for studying these changes; we can see them gradually evolved—all as if by vivisection of some morbid anatomy. The study of these diseases and infections of art at home is attended with moral distress and intellectual disgust, because we are all in part responsible; but here we can see it disinterestedly, and speculate dispassionately upon the degradation of good things resulting from the demands of business.

Were it quite in the line of what you expect to-day from me, I might make out for you the lines of the old scheme of civilization under which former work was done. The feudal organization of Japan divided the country into provinces of distinct habits and modes of work—more or less isolated, partly by want of easy or general communication, partly by the political interests of their rulers and of the main government, partly by the permanence of the provincial feeling which prevented the inhabitant of one place moving to another to find occupation and employment. The rule of the idea of the family, which is still great in Japan, kept things in the same order, preserved all traditions, and at the same time offered opportunities, by adoption, to individuals who might increase or keep up the family reputation or influence. Here, too, I suppose, is the basis of a certain dignity and personal independence in the manners of the people which runs in with their courtesy. Every one must have known what was expected of him, and have felt quite free after that duty paid. Within this courtesy that I see all about me, I feel something of what we might call democratic, for want of a better name. I recognize it in the manner of the subordinate, who takes an apparently personal interest in things, after his duty of politeness and obedience is paid. And though there was no absolute caste, as we understand it, except in such a case as that of the Eta, the lines of life were strictly laid out, until the new laws, which have made things open more or less to all.[9] With these changes, with disturbances of fortune, with the loss of power and of income on the part of the small rulers, with a country all laid out now in "prefectures," with the necessarily increasing power of "bureaucracy," the whole tone of individual life must change, must become less independent in any one thing, more independent apparently in general—must flatten out, if I may so express it. And the artisan will have to follow the course of trade and its fluctuations until some general level has been established—some general level of manufactures, I mean, for there is no general level possible in art. Something will happen which will resemble the ways of France, where art still exists, but where things have been so managed that any artist out of the general level has had a very bad time of it—the whole live forces of the nation, in trade and "bureaucracy," being against his living easily any life of his own. When the forces of traditional taste and skill and habits of industry now existing in Japan shall have been organized anew, Japan, like France, will have undoubtedly a great part to play in industrial trade.

Art may live or may not in the future here; nothing of what has been done elsewhere to grow it or foster it has made it stronger. It has always come by the grace of God, to be helped when it is here, or choked out; but no gardener has ever seen its seed. Some of my friends in Japan are plunged in a movement to save what there is of the past in art, to keep its traditions, to keep teaching in the old ways, without direct opposition to what may be good in the new. They see around them the breaking up of what has been fine, and the new influences producing nothing, not even bad imitations of Europe. I know too little upon what their hopes are based, but O——, who is in the "tendency," sails with us for America and Europe, and I may find out more through him. Meanwhile he is to inquire with Professor F—— into the education of the artist and artisan with us, and to see "how we do it." I am deeply interested in their undertaking, perhaps the most remarkable of all similar inquiries—if honestly conducted. But I see vague visions of distorted values, of commercial authorities looked upon as artistic, of the same difficulties, for instance, that I might meet if I wished now to make an official report, not to the public or to government,—that is always easy,—but to myself, who have no special interest in being misled, of the methods of art and industry that have been and exist in the East.

... Three days are wasted. I do scarcely any work, and there comes to me, as a punishment, a feeling of the littleness of a great deal here, coming, I think, from the actual smallness of many details—of the sizes of the little houses, of the little gardens, of the frail materials, of the set manners.

... To-morrow we shall go to something great, to the great statue, the "Daibutsŭ," at Kamakura, and perhaps we may even push as far as Énoshima, but I doubt it. It will be our last day, as we shall sail the following morning for Kobe. As I run along the streets of Tokio in the afternoon, with the feeling that I have tried to set down, of things having narrowed as they become familiar, comes the excited melancholy of departure, and this same ugliness and prettiness have a new value as I look upon them for the last time. I sit in the little tea-house near the station, waiting for A——, and drink the "powdered tea," which tastes better than ever, as a stirrup-cup. And I do not resent the familiarity of a big Chinaman, proud of his English, and of national superiority here in size and commercial value, who addresses me and seeks to find out whether I, too, have a commercial value. My answers puzzle him, and he leaves me uncertain as to quantities, and walks off with the impudent majesty of his fellows among this smaller and less commercial race.