1892.] on Japanesque. 557 



when it is so applied it should conform to the principles of pictorial 

 art, and must be judged by its standards. A base form of pictorial 

 work, work without artistic vitality, is not to be tolerated merely 

 because technical difficulties stand in the way of getting good execu- 

 tion on clay. If I paint a landscape on a potter's vessel I shall not 

 be forgiven its crudity, its lack of depth and light ; nor if it be a 

 human face, its vacuity, simply because of the difficulties which my 

 materials set in my way. Admittedly the work is much more diffi- 

 cult than if I painted my subject on paper or canvas ; but art is 

 power, and if it succeed, I. may look for greater praise for my picture, 

 because of the great technical difficulties which I have overcome ; 

 but the attempt to overcome them was of my own seeking, and if I 

 fail, I cannot insist that, by reason of these technical difficulties, my 

 art finds legitimate expression in a lower range of feeling. Nor, 

 again, for art is long, can the length of time which work^would 

 occupy were it well done, be an excuse for doing it badly. Is it 

 essential to my happiness to cover my walls with red roses and 

 ribbons, and my ceilings with chubby cupids and all the winged 

 hierarchy of artistic space ? I may do so, and infringe no real or 

 imaginary law. But the cost, if it be the work of men's hands, or 

 the difficulty of getting good results, if it be processed, will not be 

 an answer to kind friends who tell me that my variegated patches of 

 colour are hideous and mere nothingness, or that my cherubs are up 

 aloft in positions of anatomic impossibility. Decorative art in its 

 lowest form supplies the means of obviating those terrible productions 

 in which our fathers of an age not so long past seem to have 

 delighted. 



Let me turn your attention now for a moment to the pictorial art 

 of Japan. Much of it depends for its charm on the simplicity of the 

 means by which it produces its effects. It revels in suggestion. 

 The works of one of the greatest of its schools is in great part in 

 monochrome. The treatment of leaves and flowers often approaches 

 very closely to the conventional treatment necessary to ornament. 

 In these simple black and white pictures much of the" detail, even of 

 the foreground, is left to the imagination; the middle distance is 

 veiled in a misty cloud ; the distance is suggested by a few delicate, 

 almost disappearing, touches. Now the technical difficulties in the 

 way of executing pictures such as these in materials less easy to 

 manipulate than ordinary pigments, are obviously much diminished. 



The canons of the art can be observed as faithfully by an artist 

 working with lacquer and gold dust as by one who uses water and 

 Chinese ink. The wood-carver and the metal worker, the embroiderer 

 and the dyer, know that the masses of colour which their materials 

 produce may be made to correspond entirely with the masses of full 

 tone in a picture. Again, that wonderful dexterity of workmanship, 

 which surpasses all we have ever dreamed of in the West, looks upon 

 the hammer, the chisel, the needle, the knife, as no less facile instru- 

 ments for producing sweeping swelling lines than the brush. And, 



