XI. JAPANESE ART AND CIVILIZATION

A retrospect—Contrasts—An estimate—The doom of the old Japan

The Japanese print was almost the last phase of that subtle and delicate civilization which crumbled under the impact of Occidental industry, just as the cynical pessimism of the Western mind today may be the final aspect of a civilization doomed to die under the heel of Oriental industry. Because that medieval Japan which survived till 1853 was harmless to us, we can appreciate its beauty patronizingly; and it will be hard to find in a Japan of competing factories and threatening guns the charm that lures us in the selected loveliness of the past. We know, in our prosaic moments, that there was much cruelty in that old Japan, that peasants were poor and workers were oppressed, that women were slaves there, and might in hard times be sold into promiscuity, that life was cheap, and that in the end there was no law for the common man but the sword of theSamurai. But in Europe too men were cruel and women were a subject class, peasants were poor and workers were oppressed, life was hard and thought was dangerous, and in the end there was no law but the will of the lord or the king.

And as we can feel some affection for that old Europe because, in the midst of poverty, exploitation and bigotry, men built cathedrals in which every stone was carved in beauty, or martyred themselves to earn for their successors the right to think, or fought for justice until they created those civil liberties which are the most precious and precarious portion of our inheritance, so behind the bluster of the Samurai we honor the bravery that still gives to Japan a power above its numbers and its wealth; behind the lazy monks we sense the poetry of Buddhism, and acknowledge its endless incentives to poetry and art; behind the sharp blow of cruelty, and the seeming rudeness of the strong to the weak, we recognize the courtliest manners, the most pleasant ceremonies, and an unrivaled devotion to nature’s beauty in all her forms. Behind the enslavement of women we see their beauty, their tenderness, and their incomparable grace; and amid the despotism of the family we hear the happiness of children playing in the garden of the East.

We are not much moved today by the restrained brevity and untranslatable suggestiveness of Japanese poetry; and yet it was this poetry, as well as the Chinese, that suggested the “free verse” and “imagism” of our time. There is scant originality in Japan’s philosophers, and in her historians a dearth of the high impartiality that we expect of those whose books are not an annex to their country’s armed or diplomatic force. But these were minor things in the life of Japan; she gave herself wisely to the creation of beauty rather than to the pursuit of truth. The soil she lived on was too treacherous to encourage sublime architecture, and yet the houses she built “are, from the esthetic point of view, the most perfect ever designed.”⁹⁰ No country in modern times has rivaled her in the grace and loveliness of little things—the clothing of the women, the artistry of fans and parasols, of cups and toys, of inro and netsuke, the splendor of lacquer and the exquisite carving of wood. No other modern people has quite equaled the Japanese in restraint and delicacy of decoration, or in widespread refinement and sureness of taste. It is true that Japanese porcelain is less highly valued, even by the Japanese, than that of Sung and Ming; but if only the Chinese product surpasses it, the work of the Japanese potter still ranks above that of the modern European. And though Japanese painting lacks the strength and depth of Chinese, and Japanese prints are mere poster art at their worst, and at their best the transient redemption of hurried trivialities with a national perfection of grace and line, nevertheless it was Japanese rather than Chinese painting, and Japanese prints rather than Japanese water-colors, that revolutionized pictorial art in the nineteenth century, and gave the stimulus to a hundred experiments in fresh creative forms. These prints, sweeping into Europe in the wake of reopened trade after 1860, profoundly affected Monet, Manet, Degas and Whistler; they put an end to the “brown sauce” that had been served with almost every European painting from Leonardo to Millet; they filled the canvases of Europe with sunshine, and encouraged the painter to be a poet rather than a photographer. “The story of the beautiful,” said Whistler, with the swagger that made all but his contemporaries love him, “is already complete—hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon, and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai—at the foot of Fuji-yama.”⁹¹

We hope that this is not quite true; but it was unconsciously true for the old Japan. She died four years after Hokusai. In the comfort and peace of her isolation she had forgotten that a nation must keep abreast of the world if it does not wish to be enslaved. While Japan carved her inro and flourished her fans, Europe was establishing a science that was almost entirely unknown to the East; and that science, built up year by year in laboratories apparently far removed from the stream of the world’s affairs, at last gave Europe the mechanized industries that enabled her to make the goods of life more cheaply—however less beautifully—than Asia’s skilful artisans could turn them out by hand. Sooner or later those cheaper goods would win the markets of Asia, ruining the economic and changing the political life of countries pleasantly becalmed in the handicraft stage. Worse than that, science made explosives, battleships and guns that could kill a little more completely than the sword of the most heroic Samurai; of what use was the bravery of a knight against the dastardly anonymity of a shell?

There is no more amazing or portentous phenomenon in modern history than the way in which sleeping Japan, roughly awakened by the cannon of the West, leaped to the lesson, bettered the instruction, accepted science, industry and war, defeated all her competitors either in battle or in trade, and became, within two generations, the most aggressive nation in the contemporary world.