JAPANESE ART INDUSTRY IN GENERAL, 319 



the weaving and colouring, that the feehng for art and the artistic 

 skill of the people show themselves. 



China is the original home of these branches of industry. Japan 

 has received them thence as well as the most of its peculiar habits 

 and decorations. Chinese state polity and jurisprudence, Chinese 

 letters and literature, Chinese ethics and medicine, Chinese art and 

 industry with all their peculiarities of operation and tendencies of 

 taste, all reached Japan, and mostly by way of Corea, with Bud- 

 dhism, the great base and supporter of the particular Eastern 

 Asiatic civilization which includes China, Corea, Japan, and a part 

 of Farther India. 



Japan has regarded China as her model in all these departments 

 for many centuries, and has developed great aptness of imitation 

 and skill in the use of its acquirements, but on the other hand 

 very little independent creative power. The indisputable fact that 

 it now far surpasses its old masters in the most extended branches 

 of art handicraft, is to be attributed to this very gift of imitation, 

 and inclination to appropriate what has been seen and to make it 

 useful, and above all to its own developed sense of beauty in nature 

 and art. 



The relics of Japanese industry before the time of the ascendancy 

 of Chinese influence, which have become known chiefly from 

 excavations, show that the country at that time occupied a very 

 low plane of artistic ability and taste. There is a great resem- 

 blance in the forms and decorations of these ceramic discoveries to 

 the first phases of cultivation in many other and widely separated 

 nations. The forms are awkward, inclining to spherical shapes, and 

 the decorations simple. As in all young civilizations, the older 

 people of Japan before their contact with Chinese and Coreans in 

 the first centuries of our era, beside simple lines and dots, imitated 

 animals instead of plants in their decorations. 



In Europe, from the Middle Ages onward, so-called free aca- 

 demic art, i.e.^ painting and sculpture, forsook art industry 

 altogether, went its own way, and soon was far in advance. In 

 Eastern Asia it was entirely different. Here free art has remained 

 far behind art industry, and has been only partially developed. 

 The Eastern Asiatic has been for centuries especially hampered 

 by conventional forms in the pictorial representation of the human 

 body. He paints after an old traditional type, no matter how 

 little it may be like nature. 



A dreary naturalism on the one side, and the free play of an 

 exuberant fancy on the other, rule the art industry of Eastern Asia. 

 But nowhere else have these traits been so thoroughly cultivated. 

 We find together with a highly developed sense and comprehen- 

 sion of the beautiful in nature and in art, an inclination toward 

 the grotesque and unsymmetrical all the more striking with a 

 surprising and fascinating truth in design and execution, a strongly 

 marked fancy and tendency to irregularity and caricature ; with a 



