It would certainly have been an exceedingly false move if a direct imitation of the Japanese had been thought of. Japanese art is the product of a sensuous people, and European art that of intellectual nations. The latter is greater and more serious; it is nobler, and it reaches heights of expression not attained by the grotesque and terrible distortions and the morbidly droll or melancholy outbursts of sentiment known to the Japanese. Our imagination is alien to that of these children of the sensuous world, who quake and tremble for joy, horrify themselves with their masks, and pass from convulsive laughter to sheer terror, and from the shudder of hallucination to ecstatic bliss. Had Japanese art been coarsely transposed by imitators it would have led to caricature. But if its poetics were little suitable for Europe in the specialised case, they nevertheless contained general laws better fitted for modern art than those which had been hitherto borrowed from Greece. All arts, music as well as poetry, were then striving for the dissolution of simple, tyrannical rhythms. The recurrence of unyielding measures beaten out with unwavering repetition no longer corresponded with the complicated, neurotic emotions of the new age. In painting, likewise, exertions were being made to burst the old shell, and a style was sought after for the treatment of modern life which had been violently handled in the effort to force it to fit the Procrustean bed of traditional rules. Then came the Japanese with their astonishing, rapid, and pictorial sketches, and revealed a new method for the interpretation of nature. At a time when the symmetrical balance of lines, borrowed from the works of the Renaissance masters, became wearisome in its monotony, they taught a much freer architecture of form, and one which was broken by charming caprices. Where there had been rhythm, tension, clarity, largeness, and quietude in the old European painting, there was in them a nervous freedom, an artful carelessness, and life and charm. Art was concealed beneath the fancy shown in their facile construction, which seemed to have been improvised by nature herself. An artistic method of deviating from geometrical arrangement, freedom of distribution, unforced and unsymmetrical structure, in the place of balance and construction according to rules, were learnt from the Japanese in the matter of composition. [Illustration: TOYOKUMI. NOCTURNAL REVERIE.]