It always cost him an effort to leave this section to enter that devoted to art after Western fashion, which was constantly, year after year, encroaching on, elbowing out of the way that fashioned after the ideals of old Japan. A few years ago there had been only a couple of these modern rooms; now those of the old and the new were almost even; soon the latter would predominate entirely. It seemed such a pity; it irritated him, the relentlessness of this march of progress? Still, it was in its way more instructive than the other, gave concrete, graphic illustration of the ideas and ideals of the young generation, what it was seeking, striving for, more or less uncertainly, but always coming nearer to the goal ever shimmering before it, mastery of the modern, the new culture.
They were improving. Every year the exhibitions showed more certain mastery of technique, better grasp of the spirit of the French art which seemed to be the almost universally accepted school. Kent admitted it to himself grudgingly; every step in advance in this direction meant defeat of the old. What would it all amount to, after all? Even if, with their amazing facility for copying, for imitation, they might produce work which was creditable, which might pass muster even in Europe, as, in fact, some of the things he saw before him might, they would probably never climb out beyond the mediocre, would never attain original achievement. There were some very good portraits, excellent flower pieces, though, of course, this was but natural, considering that this subject was a preëminent favorite with the Japanese schools. Even some of the landscapes were undeniably fine, though, he noted, this was the case especially where some Oriental subject had been chosen, great, carved junks with blood-red sails glaring in the sunlight against a faint blue sky; mountain scenes following largely the composition of _kakemono_ subjects, the delicacy of the latter being replaced by the more massive boldness made possible by the medium of canvas and oils.
He felt that he was ungenerous; still it irritated him that they should be making such headway in their apostacy. Only the nudes gave him an incongruous sense of satisfaction. They were atrocious and the exhibit was cluttered with them. In the old art of Japan, _kakemono_, color-print and screen, they were virtually unknown, but during the last few years the craze for them had swept over the moderns like an obsession; the very fact that they were utterly new to Japan, the sense that they were unconventional, modern, outré, was undoubtedly the reason. So there they were, scores of them, clumsy masses of female flesh, blatantly brazen, in all sorts of absurd and contorted attitudes--and all these women were not nude, they were naked. The conception of the spirit, the idea of their French masters, the verve, the _élan_, they had missed it all. The paintings were bad, and the sculpture, with which the rooms were filled, was worse. Evidently these young enthusiasts had rushed forth fanatically intent to place on canvas something naked; almost anything would do. The clumsy, paunchy forms, shapeless limbs, invariably thick ankles, all seemed to indicate that they had found their models where best they might, among country wenches and servant maids, bringing forth on canvas or from clay mere lumps of flesh, utterly soulless reproductions of female kind.