JAPANESE TOUCH
With the Japanese art is an inspiration. They are incapable of bad taste in art. If their work is not always great, it is always fine. It sometimes lacks depth, it never lacks grace.
Lightness of touch, exactness of touch, characterise all Japanese work; but it would be grossly untrue to say that all Japanese work lacks strength, depth, and force. Much that the Japanese do, they do “from the shoulder.” Their cloisonné is rich, their carvings are masterly, and on the stages of their theatres I have seen handling of group-masses that was powerful in the extreme.
But finish and delicacy are the most general characteristics of all Japanese work. Even when the Japanese are positively bold in design and execution, it is so well bred a boldness that we are apt to lose sight of it, and be absorbed in admiration of the details.
Japanese finish is so extreme that it is almost veneer. The Japanese are as polished as their own lacquers; and all their work is a reflection of themselves.
Art and Nature are at their loveliest in Japan. Nowhere else is Nature so artistic. Perhaps because nowhere else does there dwell a people so intensely sympathetic with Nature. In Japan the scenery is so perfect that we almost suspect it of being studied. And the Japanese architecture—of hut or of temple—is so appropriate to its background, so fits the landscape, that we feel that both have been arranged by the same master-hand.
No other people can boast an art that breaks into so many lines of beauty, and that smiles with such sweet wealth of colour-harmony. But there are parts of the globe where both Art and Nature seize upon us more quickly and hold us more powerfully.
In the Alps, in the Sierra Nevadas, in Tasmania, in Gippsland, in the Himalayas, Nature takes you by the shoulders and shakes you—shakes a soul into you if you never had one before.
In Japan, Nature has vines and blossoms in her hair, and wine on her lips. She smiles into your face. She stretches out to you her warm, dimpled arms. She has bewitched you. You may tear yourself away from her, but you will never forget her. She will haunt you in your London club; and when you are deer-stalking in Scotland or yachting in the Norway fiords you will close your eyes sometimes and feel once more upon your cheeks the perfume of her breath. Her beauty has mastered you. You love her, with a light love, perhaps, but then, alas, the light loves are the loves that last. You have escaped to honest English civilisation and to Regent Street, but to the day of your death you will long to go back to the gentle, scented embrace of the blithe Nature that laughs and rollicks and lavishes her myriad beauties on Japan.
I have seen strong men weep in Dresden and in Rome, moved to a new emotion by some gigantic achievement of Occidental art,—an achievement that was great, but far from faultless. The great proportion of Japanese art is faultless, but far from great.