e young and
bustling empire be heard. Shiba Kokan, the pupil of Harunobu, says in
his "Confessions":

"In Occidental art objects are copied directly from nature; hence
before a landscape one feels as if one were placed in the midst of
nature. There is a wonderful apparatus called the photograph, which
gives a facsimile copy of the object, whatever it is, to which it
is directed. Nothing which has not actually been seen is sketched,
nor is a nameless landscape reproduced, as we often see done in
Chinese productions.... A painting which is not a faithful copy of
nature has neither beauty nor is worthy of the name."

And this is the considered judgment of that popular modern painter Okio:

"The use of art is to produce copies of things, and if an artist
has a thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints,
he can assuredly make a name.... Without the true depiction of
objects there can be no pictorial art. Nobility of sentiment and
suchlike only come after a successful delineation of the external
form of an object."

Such men would be very much at home at an Academy banquet or in the
parlour of a suburban stockbroker and less so in the world of art than a
saint would be in Wall Street. For whereas the saint would perceive the
spark of the universal in the particular stockjobber, the stockjobber
and his friends, Mr. Okio, the delineator, and the philophotographic Mr.
Kokan, are blind to anything that is not on the surface. Japan, we are
told, is to shape the future of the Eastern hemisphere. Japan is
"forging ahead." Already she has set her hand to the task of civilizing,
that is to say Europeanizing, China--just at the moment when Europe is
coming to loathe her own grossness. Time is the master of paradox. Who
shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the
classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of
trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the
unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than
the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a
tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world,
while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of
lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police
regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and
obt