sed to move. Yet again another actor,
determined to outdo this former performance in originality, trained a
live monkey to take the place of the decorative pasteboard monkey which
had always been used on the stage. This animal, unlike the horse, was
trained to know the stage as well as his master's room, and grew quite
accustomed to the lights and the people surrounding him. So thoroughly
at home was this monkey that on its first appearance it swept the stage
of all the actors, caused confusion and distress among the audience--in
short, it behaved abominably, and did everything but that which it had
been so carefully trained to do. After this the pasteboard monkey
reigned supreme.

Mr. Fukuchi, although he is a brilliant English scholar and has an
intense admiration for Shakspeare's works, thoroughly realises how
impossible it would be to attempt to put Hamlet on the Japanese stage:
it would suit neither the actors nor the public.

THE LIVING ART

CHAPTER II

THE LIVING ART

A Japanese authority has boasted that the only living art of to-day is
the art of Japan; and the remark is not so much exaggerated as it may
appear at first sight to the European. Art in Japan is living as art in
Greece was living. It forms part and parcel of the very life of the
people; every Jap is an artist at heart in the sense that he loves and
can understand the beautiful. If one of us could be as fortunate as the
man in the story, who came in his voyages upon an island where an
Hellenic race preserved all the traditions and all the genius of their
Attic ancestors, he would understand what living art really signifies.
What would be true of that imaginary Greek island is absolutely true of
Japan to-day. Art is in Europe cultivated in the houses of the few, and
those few scarcely know either the beauties or the value of the plant
they are cultivating. That is the privilege of a class rather than the
rightful inheritance of the many. The world is too much divided into the
artist on the one hand and the Philistine on the other. But it is not so
in Japan, as it was not so in ancient Greece. In Japan the feeling for
art is an essential condition of life. This is why I expect so much from
the interest in Japan which is now awakening in England.

The report of the Japanese Commission sent to Europe to investigate the
conditions of Western art, some years ago, startled Western minds
considerably. The Commissioners gave it as their