•, , • ,. " ,,,, .... , ,,, ..

One of the greatest perils to fine arts is in the rise of the standard of living. A great proportion of the population in a modern nation are financially able to acquire products of the fine arts. Nowhere is this more evident than in Japan. Widened prosperity among the people in Europe and America has not been accompanied by a corre· sponding degree of widened development of taste. The impulse to enjoy the beautiful expresses itself in a time of prosperity in the acquisition of various objects of beauty for the adornment of the home and public places. Prosperity has not taken due account of art education. No adequate emphasis has been given to the wider cultivation of the taste which now finds a means of satisfying itself. The result is that the false prophet flourishes and truth and beauty decline. Genuine art undergoes debasement. This consequence is so apparent in the position of the fine arts in modern Japan as to be-

30 5

come the subject of common remark. The production of things of beauty has been changed in order to meet the bourgeois tastes of a prosperous age. Such is the gravest peril art in its true sense must meet and overcome. I t is not the menace of the machine age itself that endangers art, but the flourishing state of mediocrity in the fine arts. In the old Japan there was no such concession made to bourgeois tastes. The degeneration can be traced directly to modern prosperity brought about by industrial progress and the increase of wealth among the people.