1892.] on Japanesque. 563 



of the national spirit. A graceful symbolism and an ultimate 

 reference to nature pervade it in all its forms, whether in the more 

 fanciful side which makes it the most delightful of home arts, or 

 in the severely classical side which puts it in the front rank of 

 arts suited to devotion. 



For the panels and doorways for the shrine to a departed hero the 

 Buddhist emblems furnish a hundred different diapers, so that the 

 walls and doors glitter and scatter the light in a thousand fanciful 

 ways. For the friezes and the ceilings, not a flower that blows, nor 

 leaf that withers, but is pressed into the service ; the paBony and the 

 chrysanthemum bend their stalks into a classic scroll, or the plum 

 blossoms floating down the stream suggest new lines of exquisite 

 tracery. Here a few lines of conventional work, notwithstanding 

 their recurrence at regular intervals, and their almost geometrical 

 treatment, compose a design as restless in its beauty as the sea-waves 

 which have suggested it ; and there the oft-repeated scroll-work tells 

 of the summer cloud from which it has borrowed its shape. Dull 

 monotony is packed away along with moulds and stencil-plates, and 

 in its place, imaginativeness, suggestion, devotional reminders, worship 

 of nature, infinite variety everywhere. 



That the art-instinct in the East, and among Eastern nations in 

 Japan the highest, is higher than in the West, none will deny. It is 

 not indeed to be wondered at. In that beautiful country life passes 

 under easier and more graceful conditions than with us ; there the 

 days are not marred by the ever-presence and worship of the machine 

 which civilisation the king has set up : there the sway of fashion 

 is unknown, only that changeless law, the joy perpetual in the 

 things of beauty ; there one learns how great a part in life art may 

 play, rendering every incident of the day more interesting by 

 beautifying its surroundings, making them, when they minister to the 

 wants of the body, minister also to the lust of the eye. It is in great 

 part the lack of this, when one comes back to be ground by the great 

 machine, that causes that Japanostalgia, which all suffer who have 

 once set foot in that land of flowers. 



****** 



[F. T. P.] 



