Masayoshi.

Kitao Masayoshi, who frequently signed himself Keisai or Shosin, was a curious and original designer, who lived from 1761 to 1824. Though a pupil of Shigemasa, he appears to have drawn a large part of his inspiration from a source outside the Ukioye movement—the Kano School of painting, in which the classical traditions still flourished. In his main period, contemporaneous with Kiyonaga, his work was little influenced by the great master. His designs are marked chiefly by the vividness of his observation of flowers, animals, and landscape, and by his technical skill in recording them. His books of sketches are his best-known works—drawings in a manner new to wood-engraving; he seldom employs any key-block, but leaves the main body of his colour in broad impressionistic sweeps of the brush without definite boundary. He approached Nature somewhat as did Hokusai in later days, with a sharp perception and infinite interest. His work lies aside from the main current of Ukioye history—an interesting backwater that comes more properly within the region of classical painting than within that of prints.

KITAO MASANOBU: THE CUCKOO.
Size 15½ × 22. Signed Masanobu ga. Spaulding Collection.

Plate 34.

Single-sheet prints by Masayoshi are very rare. His book-sheets are somewhat more frequently met with.

VI
THE FOURTH
PERIOD:
THE DECADENCE
FROM THE
RETIREMENT OF KIYONAGA
TO THE
DEATH OF UTAMARO
(1790-1806)

CHAPTER VI
THE FOURTH PERIOD: THE DECADENCE

From the Retirement of Kiyonaga to the Death of Utamaro (1790-1806)

The change that confronts us as we turn from the period of Kiyonaga to that of Utamaro, Yeishi, and Toyokuni is one whose significance is not at first sight wholly clear. We find the sound and classic figures of Kiyonaga gradually replaced by new and fascinating types—slender drooping bodies, wonderfully piled coiffures, elaborately brocaded robes; and the virile drawing of the earlier master gives way to the sinuous curves and arresting plasticity of the new designers. The favourite types of this time are almost as unreal as those of the Primitives, but they convey a totally different feeling; on the one hand, in their curious perverted way, they are far more realistic than the Primitives ever dreamed of being; and on the other hand, they seem the products of minds weary of reality, who turn to the phantasies of the not wholly normal spirit for their ideals and their consolations.

It must not be supposed, however, that the transition to this style of the Decadence was a sudden one. The painters who had most perfectly assimilated the style of Kiyonaga were the very ones who, in this period, turned to the depiction of figures in which every line betrays the weariness of the hour and its craving for novelty. The apex of creative energy in this art had been reached and the inevitable decline was under way.

Of the forces that produced this decline we have comparatively little knowledge. Fenollosa's account of the social conditions of the period throws some light upon the problem. "It was," he says, "a period of crisis in Tokugawa affairs. The cleavage between the aristocratic and the plebeian strata of Japanese life, which had become placidly conscious of itself in the days of Genroku, now threatened a moral, a social, if not a political disruption. The new factors of popular education—art, prints, illustrated books, the theatre, novels, contact with the Dutch at Nagasaki—all had stimulated the spirit of inquiry and of unrest which had penetrated back in investigation to the facts of the Shogun's usurpation; which wrote new, popular histories of the national life; which gave plays and novels a semi-political aim. This deeper wave of self-consciousness on the part of the people was met by the authorities with sterner repressions. The better elements that might have drifted into improving the popular standards in pleasure and art were driven out by a strict censorship. There was thus a sort of natural, or unnatural, selection which tended to isolate and give prominence to the coarser side of the popular feeling. If the issue were squarely made between Confucius and rank demoralization, there was little resource for the commoner but to choose the latter. Thus there arose a sort of alliance between the theatre and the houses of pleasure on the one hand, and the disaffected among the literary and political agitators upon the other. Men, great men who sowed the seeds of the revolution which ripened in 1868, had to flee for asylum, not to Buddhist temples, but to the labyrinths of the Yoshiwara, where, in the care of a romantic love lavished upon them by its then highly cultivated hetairæ, they could print and disperse, from their hidden presses, seditious tracts which set the heart of the nation on fire. It was not the ideals of a ripe self-consciousness, such as Kiyonaga had attempted; it was a struggle of living desires against outworn conventions and hopeless tyrannies. Hence, the two phases of a new Ukioye art—its pressure outward toward fuller scientific realisms, and its frank recreations in the vulgarities of its surroundings."

In addition to the restlessness growing out of such political conditions, we should remember that it is not the nature of the human race to be satisfied even with perfection for very long. Kiyonaga, with all his placid beauty, could not forever suffice men who felt themselves to be living as passionately "modern" lives as we do to-day. Change was required to keep them interested; and since the idealization of sound vitality could hardly be pushed farther than Kiyonaga had taken it, the obvious path for the artist lay in the direction of fantastic variations on the old theme and in the idealization of the erotic phantoms evoked by uneasy weariness. New refinements had to be introduced; new emotions had to be stirred; and the unending search for novelty led in due time to strained efforts, perverted mannerisms, and distorted outlooks upon life.

So much for that part of the decadence which was due merely to the desire for change. But there was another element of even more definite operation. It is fairly clear that part of the fatal development resulted from that slow drift toward realism which we have seen growing, period by period, since the days of the Primitives. The age of Harunobu, with its new technical resources, had abandoned pure decoration and aspired to put into its designs something of the flavour of life. The age of Kiyonaga, with its complete mastery of technique, had projected into its designs its observation of real beings—drawn with a fine idealization, but nevertheless based on a deep fidelity to concrete forms. The age of Utamaro had a choice of only two steps left to take if it were to advance to any new position—a step in the direction of still closer fidelity to nature, or a step in the direction of complete revolt from naturalism into regions of wild phantasy. Characteristically, it took both!

Particular instances will show this. Utamaro and Sharaku recorded the peculiarities of real things with a sharpness of observation and an accuracy of rendering that the earlier artists had never approached. And at the same time they used these sharply mastered details of nature as mere brick and mortar out of which to construct fantastic edifices of the most unbridled imagination. Because they were geniuses, they did this and created masterpieces; but they left to later times and lesser artists only the sterile heritage of a deadening realism which they had found it convenient to employ, but to which they themselves had never been truly subject.

At the beginning of this period Yeishi, Choki, Sharaku, and the young Utamaro produced work that ranks quite as high in beauty as that of preceding days. Yeishi's visionary figures of women, drawn with a disembodied and fragile grace, are in their way matchless things, whose only fault is their lack of virile strength. Choki's finest works are wholly beyond praise. Sharaku, the supreme master of actor-portraits and one of the great artists of the world, created designs of stupendous power; if there is any trace of decadence in him it is not weakness but brutality. Utamaro, in his earlier years at least, was as wholesome as Kiyonaga; and even when, in later times, he turned to figures that have about them an indescribable atmosphere of languor and decline, he made of them designs that are to many people the most beautiful productions of the whole school. In all of these men, technical power and sense of composition were of unimpaired vigour. Why, then it may be asked, should we speak of the decadence?

The answer lies partly in the fact that these productions, as a rule, express in their languid or overstrained figures tendencies of emotional super-refinement and nervous tension that impress every beholder with a sense of disintegration, and partly in the history of later days. For the moment, the rivalry between the great men of the period was so keen as to sustain what was, after all, the dying effort of their art. The successes of each one spurred the others on to new types and new feverish devices, feeding thus the flames of the desire for novelty among the people. But the end was at hand. By 1800, in the later work of Utamaro, in most of the work of Toyokuni, and in practically all the work of their followers, genuine artistic weakness appeared, sensationalism took the place of vigour, garishness supplanted harmony, and crude emotions, crude drawing, crude colour became the common feature. The ancient sense of style gave way to a desire to push pictorial effects beyond their legitimate boundary, and the edge of the abyss was in sight.

But before that moment came there remained sixteen years in the productions of which we shall find beauties less sane and sound than those of Kiyonaga, but nevertheless perpetually delighting.