ention. I do not mean to say that every
Jap is a born artist. There are Philistines in Japan, as elsewhere. What
I do maintain is that the artistic instinct is more widely diffused, is
more common to all classes of the community in Japan, than in any of our
European countries. This is no small thing to say of a country. It is
full of deep significance to all students of art. Although we are doing
our best, with our love for gimcrackeries, to cheapen and degrade the
artistic capacity of Japan, our evil influence has been but partially
felt, and so but partially successful. Having done all the harm we can
do unwittingly, let us pause, if possible, and reflect before we
wittingly do further mischief.

The problem to the lovers of art is simply this: shall we learn all we
can learn--and that is a great deal--from the living art instincts of
Japan, or shall we continue to blunt and deaden the productive power of
Japan by encouraging the barbarous demand for worthless baubles to make
ludicrous the home of the so-called aesthete? If those who are most
proud of the Japanese toys and trinkets they have amassed, which, with
semi-savage stupidity, they have nailed upon their walls and stuck upon
their shelves and tables, could but see what an artistic house in Japan
is like, they would learn some startling truths as to the real facts and
principles of Japanese decoration and the Japanese ideal of art. If they
could only know the contempt with which the truly artistic Jap looks
upon the demand for "curios," and upon the kind of "curios" which are
turned out wholesale to meet that demand, they would not feel so proud
of themselves, and of the rooms which they display to delighted friends
as "quite Japanese, you know." The artistic Jap shows nothing in a
room--absolutely nothing, except a lovely flower and a screen, and
perhaps a beautiful verse or some clever sentence indited in freehand
writing, placed beautifully in the room in just relation to its
surroundings.

There is a curious fact to be noticed in connection with such
inscriptions. In conversation a friend might happen to give forth some
brilliant and very epigrammatic utterance. The hearers are so delighted
that they get him to write down this _mot_ in large characters, and it
is mounted and placed in the room. Such a caligraphic maxim, written by
the hand of the speaker, they consider a fitting portion of the
permanent decoration of a room.

You would never know from th