activities by the dominance of the Shogunate Government, the Kuge devoted themselves to the arts and the refinements of life.  For the exclusiveness of the past some of their descendants substitute artistic integrity.  The Shirakaba has had for several years a remarkable magazine.  Its editor and its publisher, its size, its price and its date of publication are continually changed; it never makes any bid for popularity; it expresses its sentiments in a downright way and it has always been anti-official:  yet it survives and pays its way.  Beyond the magazine, the Society has had every year at least one exhibition of what its members conceive to be significant modern European work.  The members have also supported a few Japanese artists of outstanding sincerity.  Through the Shirakaba the influence of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Blake, Delacroix, Matisse, Augustus John, Beardsley, Courbet, Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked.  The Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of Rembrandt, Duerer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Tintoretto, Giotto and Mantegna[110].

While an ardent Young Japan has formed and dissolved many societies, movements and fashions, this Shirakaba group has held fast and has gained friends by its sincerity, its vision and its audacity[111].  Rodin encouraged the Shirakaba efforts to reproduce the best Western art by presenting it with three pieces of sculpture.

“The intellectual man does no fighting,” Froude has written.  Why do not Yanagi and his friends make a stand on public questions?  “Because,” he said, “at the present stage of our development it is almost impossible to take up a strong attitude, and because, important though political and social questions are, they are not, in our opinion, of the first importance.  To artists, philosophers, students of religion, such problems are secondary.  More important problems are:  What is the meaning of this world?  What is God?  What is the essence of religion?  How can we best nourish ourselves so as to realise our own personalities?  Political and social problems are secondary for us at present; they are not related emotionally to our present conditions[112].

        For the East the Root,
        For the West the Fruit.

“If we faced such problems directly we should probably make them primary problems, as you do in Great Britain.  Our present attitude does not prove, however, that we are cold to political and social problems.  In fact, when we think of these terrible political and social questions they make us boil.  But you will understand that in order to have something to give to others, we must have that something.  We are seeking after that something.”