PACIFIC ERA 
57 
THE COLLECTION OF MR. CHARLES L. FREER. 
BY ERNEST F. FENOLLOSA. 
Art—new creative art—being the most difficult flower to grow in the 
garden-bed of crowded human communities, it is always interesting to note what 
fresh vitality is from time to time added to its soil. Such a set of new condi¬ 
tions for the Western world came in with a deeper knowledge of oriental art, 
especially Japanese, in the middle of the last century. It is not too much to 
say that the thousand and one innovations, the freer technique, and the 
generally increasing breadth of view of our recent generations, are either the 
direct or indirect results of this contact. 
It is not that the Eastern art could contribute a definitive new canon to 
supplant our gray, academic traditions; but rather that we have been led, 
through rich comparisons, to divine sources of art deeper than any canons what¬ 
soever. Nor is it only that we have been forced to break through conventions 
to the artesian levels of the individual soul, and to seek for the fount of art 
in the subjective mood. If oriental example has revealed a germ stronger 
than raw nature, and richer than classic refinement, it has also suggested some¬ 
thing more positive than the mere whim of impression. From it we have learned 
that as complicated and unsuspected art universes, ranges of natural affinities, 
systems of magnetic structure, lie under all pure beauties of line, mass, value 
and color;—as are the systems which recent science is revealing in the physical 
formation of what we used to call elemental atoms. As the disintegration 
shows, by unlocking, the enormous stores of force absorbed in the very being 
of matter,—so does genuine analysis discover, in what at first sight appear to be 
simple art-effects,—agreeable sensations,—a great range of dynamic pulls, 
balances, and interlocking, among all the visual parts of which they are made 
up. Just as between noise and musical ideas a great gulf is fixed, the difference 
between unrelated and mutually solvent vibrations,—so does an ordinary use of 
lines and colors differ from that which blends them into crystalline impressions. 
The whole effort of art-trainings is to cross this abyss. And yet, before 
oriental examples opened our eyes, few of our artists even suspected its exist¬ 
ence. 
This consciousness, too, is no longer the possession of a favored few, but 
of recent years has become democratic. Perhaps, even more than the painters, 
it is the mass of workers in many materials and for decorative uses who have 
come to feel that color and line are worlds of infinite richness to explore. This 
is because, in their realms, the stupid plea for narrow representations sounds less 
plausible. The craftsman must build up his structures in harmony with larger 
wholes. Thus creative art is once again brought nearer, as it was at the outset 
of communal working, to the great laboring heart of mankind. Many a poor 
boy puts more art into his wood-carving, than an academician into his elaborate 
and conscientious picture. The little hard points of the latter can be summed 
