ny signs or portents of his advent?
None. Modern conditions of life have killed the artist, and replaced
him by artistic mediocrities or mechanicians who labour not for love
but for lucre, and are more concerned about the amount of their output
than the quality thereof. And as of England and Europe so I fear is
it, and will it be to a greater extent, in the near future in Japan.
The artist in lacquer, porcelain, metal, painting, embroidery, cannot
exist under the conditions of modern progress. He may still produce
good and beautiful work, but it will be no longer artistic in the
higher sense of that word, just because those ideas and ideals which
make the artist and connote art cannot exist in their fulness and
purity amidst the hurry and bustle and turmoil and desire for wealth
which are the essential characteristics of the civilisation of Europe
and America to-day--a civilisation which Japan has imported, and to a
large degree assimilated, and which she must accept with its defects
as well as its advantages. We may, and must, regret the effect of this
civilisation upon the art of old Japan, but there is no good shutting
one's eyes to obvious facts or affecting to believe that in due course
we shall witness a renaissance in Japan, a new birth of all that is
great and grand and magnificent in her past history.

There has for some years been a movement to prevent, as far as
possible, the passing out of Japan of its art treasures. The
Government has diligently catalogued all that remain in the temples
and public buildings to obviate their being sold, and museums have
been built for the purpose of collecting and exhibiting all that is
best and representative of Japanese art There has also been a movement
among the noblemen and the upper classes in the direction of forming
private collections. It was time that steps such as these should be
taken. It is a thousand pities they were not taken earlier. The drain
of Japan's art treasures went on unchecked year after year, and it is
probable that the private and public collections of Europe and America
contain more Japanese art treasures than are now to be found in Japan
itself. I am aware that in these collections are also to be found no
little of the spurious, and many articles with no claim to be
considered artistic in any sense of the word, but at the same time
there is no doubt that, as I have said, for years, there was a
constant export of artistic wealth from Japan. The Re