Hokusai.
Because thou wast marvellous of eye, magic of fancy, lithe of hand,
Because thou didst play o'er many a gulf where common mortals dizzy stand,
Because no thing in earth or sky escaped the pryings of thine art,
I call thee, who wast master of all, the master with the monkey's heart.
Where in the street the drunkards roll—where in the ring the wrestlers sway,
Where rustics pound the harvest rice, or fishers sail, or abbots pray,
In rocky gorge, or lowland field, or winter heights of mountain air,
Wherever man or beast or bird or flower finds place—yea, everywhere
Thou standest, as I fancy, rapt in the live play of mass and line,
Curiously noting every poise; and in that ugly head of thine
Storing it with unsated fierce passion for life's minutest part,
Some day to use infallibly—O master with the monkey's heart!
Where Kanazawa's thundering shores behold the mounded waters rave,
And Fuji looms above the plain, and the plain slopes to meet the wave,
There didst thou from the trembling sands unleash thy soul in sudden flight
To soar above the whirling waste with awe and wonder and delight.
Thou sawest the giant tumult poured; each slope and chasm of cloven brine
Called thee; and from the scattered rout one vision did thy sight divine,
One heaven-affronting whelming wave in which all common waves have part—
A billow from the wrath of God—O monkey with a master's heart!
What mind shall span thee? Who shall praise or blame thy world-embracing sight
Whose harvest was each rock and wraith, each form of loathing or of light?
Though we should puzzle all our days, we could not know thee as thou art,
Nor where the seer of vision ends, nor where begins the monkey's heart.
Until rather recently Hokusai was, for European spectators, as isolated and commanding a figure in the domain of Japanese art as Fuji is in the Japanese landscape. He was regarded as the one culminating and all-inclusive genius among Japanese painters and print-designers. At precisely the same time, he was esteemed by Japanese connoisseurs to be a prolific but vulgar artisan, whose mere craftsman-dexterity could not compensate for his lack of lofty feeling and poetic vision.
It is not necessary to quarrel with either of these views. Almost every student of Hokusai passes through three stages. At first, he is overwhelmed by Hokusai's technical skill and imaginative brilliance, and regards him as unrivalled. Deeper experience brings him the conviction that much of this magical dexterity is somewhat in the nature of a juggler's antics in a vaudeville, and that his first burst of enthusiasm was not wholly warranted. Then, finally, he comes to perceive that there are qualities in Hokusai's work which, in spite of so much that is vulgar, justly entitle this artist to his high fame.
HOKUSAI.
One classes Hokusai as a landscape-artist; yet his work was by no means confined to landscape. He pictured, as M. Théodore Duret wrote, "everything to be seen by the eye or invented by the brain of a Japanese." His "Mangwa," that vast twelve-volume collection of drawings, includes sketches of a whole world of varied scenes and objects and people. The bulk of his production was colossal—dozens of designs a day throughout most of his eighty-nine years!
His figures are drawn with a swift and sure realism that is generally tinged with humour and often with vulgarity. His vigorous power of observing and recording faces and attitudes is almost unparalleled. Fantasy, whimsical conceits, irony, grotesqueness animate them; always they have superabundant life. The play of his brush is miraculous.
His landscapes are his greatest works. In the best of these he shakes off his trifling mood, and, as in [Plate 51], creates designs whose stark brilliance and originality of composition is unsurpassed. And at least once, in the noblest of his prints—the rare and monumental series of "The Imagery of the Poets"—he achieves a high seriousness that will always be impressive.
HOKUSAI: FUJI, SEEN ACROSS THE TAMA RIVER, PROVINCE OF MUSASHI.
One of the Series "Thirty-six Views of Fuji." Size 10½ × 15. Signed Hokusai I-itsu, hitsu.
Plate 49.
Hokusai was born in 1760, the son of a mirror-maker. He lived to the age of eighty-nine years—a long life, crowded with privation that wins our sympathy, and with incessant devotion to his art. When in his seventies, he said: "Ever since the age of six years I have felt the impulse to draw the forms of objects. Up to the age of fifty years I made a great number of drawings; but I am dissatisfied with everything that I created prior to my seventieth year. At the age of seventy-three I, for the first time, began to grasp the true forms and nature of birds, fishes, and plants. It follows that at the age of eighty I shall have made still greater progress; at ninety I shall be able to create all objects; at a hundred I shall certainly have attained to still higher, unimaginable power; and when I finally reach my one hundred and tenth year, every line, every dot will live with an intense life. I invite those who are going to live as long as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called the Old Man Mad with Painting." His dying words were: "If the gods had given me only ten years more—only five years more—I could have become a really great painter!"
Hokusai's education began as an apprentice to a wood-engraver, a valuable experience for his later career. At the age of eighteen he entered the studio of Shunsho and adopted the name of Shunro. Under this name he produced actors in the orthodox Shunsho manner and melodramatic illustrations for the popular romances of the day. About 1786 a quarrel with Shunsho, due to the pupil's insubordination, led to Hokusai's expulsion, and he thereupon launched out for himself, to begin his long life of poverty and madly enthusiastic labour.
His work may be divided roughly into three periods. In the first he followed the traditions of Shunsho, Shunyei, Utamaro, and others of his contemporaries, with great skill but no special originality. His countless book-illustrations of this time were all conceived with lively fancy and vigour; but perhaps the finest works of this, his conventional period, are the very wide prints and surimono in which, against a delicately suggested landscape, move extraordinarily graceful women's figures not unlike those of Utamaro. Already he was a master of drawing; but he kept incessantly at his studies under many teachers, learning, among other things, European perspective from Shiba Kokan. His work was done in this and the following periods under a dozen different names, of which Sori, Kako, Shunro, and Taito are the most important.
In 1812 began his second or realistic period, with the publication of the first book of his fifteen-volume series of drawings, the "Mangwa." In this epoch he turned from the styles of his predecessors and launched into a hitherto unknown journalistic realism. With a lively sense of the comic and the burlesque, and an insatiable interest in the homeliest details of life, he threw overboard all formal stylistic quality and set sail on a riotous voyage of naturalistic discovery.
The "Mangwa," which may serve as a type of his whole production in this realistic period, is praised sometimes as his greatest work. In it we shall find not only his most striking tours-de-force as a draughtsman but also the key to his weakness. All existence thrilled him as it did Walt Whitman; and each object on which he turned his eyes stirred him with the desire to record it in his pages. Day after day he worked like a madman, throwing off his sketches of man, beast, and phantom, of rock, river, and sea, in endless profusion and with inexhaustible ingenuity. And though we grant our admiration to the enthusiasm, sharp vision, and clever draughtsmanship of these sheets, we may still find in this undiscriminating passion a quality incompatible with the highest reaches of artistic greatness. There is something vulgar, childish, under-developed in the mental attitude revealed; it seems a coarse greed for all experience, unlighted by the power to judge and reject, or by any consciousness of the ranks and hierarchies of beauty. It is a vast and dull enthusiasm; a celebration of the victory of the will to live over the will to perfect; a triumph of meaningless sensation over the just judgments of the discriminating mind. All shapes seem equally interesting and beautiful to it—all smells equally sweet. As Pater writes of Balzac—a man who was in many ways not unlike Hokusai—this artist "had an excess of curiosity—curiosity not duly tempered with the desire of beauty."
I can never look through the "Mangwa" without a sense of distressing chaos and a longing for the purer beauties which more finely organized artists have evoked from the heterogeneous welter of the seen world. But just this welter is at this time Hokusai's theme. "A debauch of sketches," Fenollosa calls it. In this work Hokusai stands beside Harunobu exactly as Whitman stands beside Keats—a more interesting mind but a far less perfect artist.
"Hokusai is incomparable," writes the commentator who furnished the introduction to one of his books. "While all his predecessors were more or less slaves to classical tradition and inherited rules, he alone emancipated his brush from all such fetters, and drew according to the dictates of his heart." True: and this was his curse. No man has ever lived with heart profound and subtle enough for such emancipation. Nor have the supreme artists ever attempted it. In Hokusai's case this upstart-abandoning of all tradition was an error from which he was able later to retrieve himself; but so great was the impression produced by his vulgarities on the mob that even to this day popular Japanese art has remained under the cloud of it.
Hokusai himself did recover. In his third period, the stylistic one, the greatness that was in him transcended his petty interest in the trivial idiosyncrasies of seen things, and he created those visions which constitute his lasting glory. Between 1823 and 1830 he issued those series, "The Thirty-six Views of Fuji," "The Bridges," "The Waterfalls," "The Loocho Islands," and "The Imagery of the Poets," in which we hail him as master. No longer the dupe of realism, he brings us his dreams.
"The Thirty-six Views of Fuji" stands as one of his two greatest works. Here, in the forty-six plates that constitute the main series and the supplement, the same motive is treated recurrently, but with infinite variety. He depicts Fuji, the sacred mountain, in storm and calm, in mist and sunlight—sometimes dominating the colossally empty frame of the design, sometimes receding to a mere speck in the distance; and around the noble peak beat the waves of the sea and the foam of the clouds and the restless stream of human life, in a great epic of infinite diversity and profound unity.
HOKUSAI: FUJI, SEEN FROM THE PASS OF MISHIMA, PROVINCE OF KAHI.
One of the Series "Thirty-six Views of Fuji." Size 10½ × 15. Signed Saki no Hokusai I-itsu, hitsu.
Plate 50.
In this series his trivial realism is forgotten, or employed only in just subordination. Throwing aside his earlier vulgar absorption in the minutiæ of existence, he concentrated his vision on one conception, one chosen impression, so sharply and personally seen that he evoked a new style in landscape. Much it borrowed from tradition; but the flavour was Hokusai's. These designs are, primarily, magnificent studies in linear composition. The great sweep of Fuji's slope is related to the rhythm of every other line in the picture. And the line-dominance is preserved by the use of the simplest and most original of colour-schemes—green, blue, and brown—broadly laid on in large masses. A highly decorative quality and great boldness are the result.
The justly famous "Wave" belongs to this series. Here for the first time in our survey of the prints do we find elemental fury depicted with grandiose eloquence. In the majestic composition of the "Great Tree" ([Plate 50]) the calm sublimity of nature and the infinitely minute, vermin-like aspect of man is superbly expressed. In the "Tama River" ([Plate 49]) Hokusai gives us a sweep of wave and shore, mist and mountain, that his great predecessors, the landscape-painters of Sung days in China, might have envied. In all these prints he relates man and nature to each other with a vividness and dramatic power foreign to his great rival Hiroshige.
The world which Hokusai pictures in this series is not the real world, but Hokusai's highly personal translation of it into terms of superb imagination. A thousand memory-stored impressions combine to make the sharp composite of each design; and it is to use the term in its technical Platonic sense, the Idea of the scene that he flashes before us. Herein lies the abnormal vitality that emanates from these pictures. "We feel," says Mr. Binyon, "that the world holds more wonders than we dreamed of, sources of power and exhilaration which Hokusai has revealed, and which we may go and discover for ourselves."
Hokusai's other great work was a series of ten upright prints of very large size, "The Imagery of the Poets." It returns in feeling, though not in technique, to the style of the classic masters; and remains, because of its high seriousness of mood and its sweeping magnificence of composition, at the very top of all Hokusai's work. Of all his thousands of designs, the one that is supreme is probably the print of this set which depicts the famous Chinese poet Li Peh beside the chasm and cascade of Luh.
Even his latest years were crowded with continued efforts. In 1849, at the age of eighty-nine years, he died.
Fine and well-preserved Hokusai prints are not common. His "Poets" and really brilliant impressions of his "Thirty-six Fuji" are very rare, particularly the former. Poor impressions of the latter are numerous. Practically all of Hokusai's most famous prints have been reproduced, and the collector must be on his guard against these worthless sheets. One of the best-known judges in Europe was recently deceived by a fraudulent set of the "Poets." Hokusai's fine bird-and-flower designs and his large early surimono are rare; as also are good copies of his famous books, the "Mangwa" and the "One Hundred Views of Fuji." Numerous late blurred impressions of these are extant, and should be avoided. His other books are not uncommon.
HOKUSAI: THE MONKEY BRIDGE—TWILIGHT AND RISING MOON.
Size 14½ × 6½. Signed Hokusai ga.
Plate 51.