JAPANESE ART INDUSTRY IN GENERAL. 325 



and a loving appreciation of all the beauty which mountain and 

 valley, wood and field in all their manifold forms and phenomena 

 can spread before him. 



" Natura artis magistra " — this motto of the Zoological Garden of 

 Amsterdam suits no people better than the Japanese. It does not 

 stand written on the products of their art industry, but the eye of 

 the connoisseur recognises it and its full significance in them, and 

 admires the freedom of treatment, the surprising force of expres- 

 sion which the Japanese artist knows how to unite with great 

 truth to nature, especially in the representation of birds and 

 insects and many of the popular flowers. 



Who will dare to deny that this is the true, the fully justified 

 Naturalism 1 The artist takes his subject from nature. He seeks 

 to represent with devotion and truth the utmost beauty that she 

 offers, uncor-rupted and unfalsified by any addition of his own fancy 

 or of a low and obscene taste. Not that the latter is wanting 

 in the Japanese art world. It was formerly very prevalent, but 

 has been repressed by the better judgment and co-operation of 

 foreigners and natives of higher aim and cultivation. 



That tendency of our realistic art toward the representation of 

 dreadful scenes where blood and the odour of death prevail {e.g. 

 those of the celebrated Brussels painter Wiertz, or Benvenuto 

 Cellini's well-known bronze statue in the Loggia at Florence) has 

 never found approval with the Japanese. And it betokens a better 

 development of our own taste, when this bronze masterpiece, " Per- 

 seus, standing on the body of Medusa," with the severed, blood- 

 dripping head in one hand, and in the other the sword triumphing 

 over its bloody work, is being regarded everywhere as an unworthy 

 and cruel theme for art. The choice by many artists also of sub- 

 jects from daily common life, in so far as they are immorally and 

 unsesthetically handled, cannot stand before a strict artistic judg- 

 ment, and is at any rate not Fine Art. In every art, realism has 

 its justification and its limits. The latter cannot be embraced in 

 one short rule, but are defined by a moral power which governs 

 and translates the sense of what is beautiful. 



The question whether art must be moral, indeed, whether it 

 always can be, is a very old one, and long ago occupied Grecian 

 philosophers. Each individual answers it according to his own 

 taste and inclination. Obscene representations, however artistically 

 perfect they may be, are without question a misuse of art, which 

 should educate and form a proper taste. For this reason, the 

 Venus di Medici, which is quite in place in a museum, is surely 

 not suited for a school. 



In the many decorative subjects which have been borrowed from 

 Japanese history, and especially from the great Buddhist mytho- 

 logy, the old warriors appear in clumsy armour checking all free 

 movement, and the court people in stiff ceremonial dress, but 

 generally in remarkably expressive positions. The men are always 



