CHAPTER II
THE LIVING ART
A Japanese authority has boasted that the only living art of to-day is the art of Japan; and the remark is not so much exaggerated as it may appear at first sight to the European. Art in Japan is living as art in Greece was living. It forms part and parcel of the very life of the people; every Jap is an artist at heart in the sense that he loves and can understand the beautiful. If one of us could be as fortunate as the man in the story, who came in his voyages upon an island where an Hellenic race preserved all the traditions and all the genius of their Attic ancestors, he would understand what living art really signifies. What would be true of that imaginary Greek island is absolutely true of Japan to-day. Art is in Europe cultivated in the houses of the few, and those few scarcely know either the beauties or the value of the plant they are cultivating. That is the privilege of a class rather than the rightful inheritance of the many. The world is too much divided into the artist on the one hand and the Philistine on the other. But it is not so in Japan, as it was not so in ancient Greece. In Japan the feeling for art is an essential condition of life. This is why I expect so much from the interest in Japan which is now awakening in England.
The report of the Japanese Commission sent to Europe to investigate the conditions of Western art, some years ago, startled Western minds considerably. The Commissioners gave it as their opinion that Japanese art was the only real living art. This surprised, perplexed, and irritated many people, as home truths generally do. Without adopting in integrity every word of the Commission’s report, I must confess that I found in it a great deal of truth.
The great characteristic of Japanese art is its intense and extraordinary vitality, in the sense that it is no mere exotic cultivation of the skilful, no mere graceful luxury of the rich, but a part of the daily lives of the people themselves. It is all very well to draw gloomy deductions about the decay of Japanese art from the manufacture and the importation of curios destined for the European market. That there is such an importation there can be no doubt, any more than that this condition of things will continue while people fancy that they are giving proof of their artistic taste by sticking up all over their walls anything and everything, good, bad, and indifferent, which professes to come from Japan or to be made on Japanese models.
SUN AND LANTERNS
What an educated Jap would think of some of our so-called “Japanese rooms” I shudder to imagine. But let me ask—and this is much more to the purpose—what would an uneducated Jap think? And let me give my own answer. He would be as much surprised by any bad taste or bad art as his educated superior would be. This is the burden of my argument—that art in Japan is universal and instructive, and therefore living; not an artificial production of a special class, and therefore not living. Art was certainly a living thing in the best days of Athens; art has been, in some measure, a living thing elsewhere and in later days. For we must remember that art does not merely consist in the production of a certain number of works of art, or even of masterpieces. A country may produce a great many works of art, and yet as a country be entirely lacking in living artistic feeling. France is a land of works of art; but the works do not appeal to the voyou—still less do they appeal to the ouvrier, to the bourgeois, to the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. Now, what I claim for Japan is that in its most real and most important sense it is a living artistic country. The artistic sense is shared by the peasant and the prince, as well as by the carpenter, the fan-maker, the lacquer-worker, and the stateliest daimio whose line dates back to the creation of things.
But do not run away with my contention. I do not mean to say that every Jap is a born artist. There are Philistines in Japan, as elsewhere. What I do maintain is that the artistic instinct is more widely diffused, is more common to all classes of the community in Japan, than in any of our European countries. This is no small thing to say of a country. It is full of deep significance to all students of art. Although we are doing our best, with our love for gimcrackeries, to cheapen and degrade the artistic capacity of Japan, our evil influence has been but partially felt, and so but partially successful. Having done all the harm we can do unwittingly, let us pause, if possible, and reflect before we wittingly do further mischief.
The problem to the lovers of art is simply this: shall we learn all we can learn—and that is a great deal—from the living art instincts of Japan, or shall we continue to blunt and deaden the productive power of Japan by encouraging the barbarous demand for worthless baubles to make ludicrous the home of the so-called aesthete? If those who are most proud of the Japanese toys and trinkets they have amassed, which, with semi-savage stupidity, they have nailed upon their walls and stuck upon their shelves and tables, could but see what an artistic house in Japan is like, they would learn some startling truths as to the real facts and principles of Japanese decoration and the Japanese ideal of art. If they could only know the contempt with which the truly artistic Jap looks upon the demand for “curios,” and upon the kind of “curios” which are turned out wholesale to meet that demand, they would not feel so proud of themselves, and of the rooms which they display to delighted friends as “quite Japanese, you know.” The artistic Jap shows nothing in a room—absolutely nothing, except a lovely flower and a screen, and perhaps a beautiful verse or some clever sentence indited in freehand writing, placed beautifully in the room in just relation to its surroundings.
There is a curious fact to be noticed in connection with such inscriptions. In conversation a friend might happen to give forth some brilliant and very epigrammatic utterance. The hearers are so delighted that they get him to write down this mot in large characters, and it is mounted and placed in the room. Such a caligraphic maxim, written by the hand of the speaker, they consider a fitting portion of the permanent decoration of a room.
You would never know from the rooms of a Jap that he was a great picture-collector. The wealthy collector keeps all his treasures stowed away in what is called a “go-down”—his storehouse—and his pictures are brought up one at a time if any visitor is present or expected. Generally a single picture will be brought in and hung up. You enjoy that beautiful picture by itself. It is very much like bringing a bottle of wine from the cellar—no one would want the whole bin at a time.
The Japs have an artistic temperament altogether and the simplest craftsman is an artist in his own way. I was especially struck with this once when I was in want of some frames, and I employed a Jap to make them for me. He could talk English perfectly well, and it was remarkable to watch the development of the frames and the enthusiastic temperament discovered by the carpenter as he proceeded. I myself designed a certain frame, and I would by slight drawings encourage him and his fellows to go on with the work. They all took the greatest possible interest in the refinement of the object—they would place it down and then go off and look at it, and talk to those friends who were looking on about the beauties they saw in it and in its proportions; and the intelligence and pleasure they showed were not only extraordinary but also delightful. This frame-making was quite novel to them, as they do not frame any of their objects; but they were interested in the design of the frame and the placing of the picture within it. Although the matter was not in itself of any remarkable importance, I hold that it fairly proves the artistic temperament of a chance selection of people. Think of a common carpenter making a simple thing and taking a just pride in doing it! The result was that I got one of the most beautiful frames you can conceive, and that I was encouraged in my own work by the sympathy of these workmen.
THE SCARLET UMBRELLA
Of course, in Japan there are painters who paint for the market—people who have been destroyed by the British merchant and the American trader. They spend their time in painting pictures of flowers and birds in vivid colourings that appeal to our tastes, solely for exportation to England and America. Apropos of this I must mention a conversation I had with a painter about screens, which struck me as being very curious. I wanted to buy a gold screen, and he took me to a shop where I saw a vast number of screens, nearly all with black grounds and golden birds and fish on them. I told him I did not like them; and he answered, “Neither do we. Here in Japan we would not have them in our houses; but they are what the English and American markets demand. We ourselves never buy them; we nearly always choose screens with light grounds, beautifully painted”—in fact, splendid pieces of decoration. A screen painted by a first-class artist is valued very highly, while the fact of one from the hand of an old Japanese master being for disposal is known all over the country at once, and everybody is prepared to bid for it as one would bid for a Sir Joshua here. A really good screen fetches an enormous price, for it takes the place there of pictures and frescoes with us, and every man of taste requires one or two fine specimens in his house beautiful. One I saw at the house of the Minister for Foreign Affairs was painted with a blue wave—an arrangement, in fact, in blue and gold. I never saw such a gorgeous screen, nor, I verily believe, anything more beautiful as an arrangement of colour—the huge wave, one sweep of blue, and the piece of gold at the top. It was, I was told, by an old master of Japan, and worth an enormous sum. The Japanese perfectly appreciate the value of things like that, and they very rarely let them leave the country, so that it has become very difficult to get hold of anything really fine.
An experience which gave me a close insight into Japanese feeling was a meeting of some of the painters of Japan. It was arranged by a Japanese gentleman who, though not an artist himself, is deeply interested in art, and keenly alive to everything touching it. Knowing me personally, he was anxious that I should come in contact with these men whose practice he so much revered, and so he invited several of these artists of different kinds—designers of metal work and designers for manufactures—to his house to meet me. I talked to them with his interpreting help, just a little about art and its principles and so forth, in the hope that the others would be brought to speak freely, and I expressed my readiness to give them what information I could of European art and its practice. They asked me remarkable questions. Most of them, it appeared, were discouraged because “the European required such ugly things.” If they made what the Europeans really enjoyed, their productions were looked upon as unsaleable. It appeared to me that it must be extremely difficult for the Japs to hold fast to their artistic instincts, and in the end I expressed my conviction that it would pay them better to adhere to their principles rather than to pander to the foolish demands of the dull American or British merchant who had neither idea nor concern as to the beauty of the work he buys.
LEADING TO THE TEMPLE
Unfortunately, to a great extent these traders are lowering the standard of painting in Japan. Not a few of these sixty men who came to meet me would do work they did not care about, not being men of such individuality and independence of character as Kiyosai. With them, as with us, the prize of money-reward is a bait too tempting to be resisted. Two days afterwards some of these friends were good enough to write a long discourse in one of the Japanese papers on my address, saying how much pleased they were to find an artist from England with my ideas of Japanese art—one who condemned the notion so common among them that it was necessary to pander to the tastes of a foreign market. They were especially glad that I had condemned that, and many of the painters, more or less on the strength of my conversation, decided to do thenceforth what they felt to be true to their principles—to go to nature and themselves, to choose their lovely harmony of colour, instead of designing stereotyped screens with gold birds on black backgrounds. Many were determined to give up that kind of art altogether, and one in particular (whose studio I called at the day after) pointed out that he had already quite altered his style. He was an artist by nature, and he told me he felt that having to do this horrible work was going against him, and he had made up his mind that in future he would insist upon doing what he felt to be beautiful, and would be ruled by the merchant no more. I visited the studios of a great many of the artists to whom I had delivered my lecture, and saw their sketch-books and their method of work. In nearly every case their method coincided with the principles laid down by Kiyosai—each having, of course, his own method, but each working in the same broad way of “impression picture.”
Japan might be said to be as artistic as England is inartistic. In Japan art is not a cause, but a result—the result of the naturalness of the people—and is closely allied with all aspects of their daily life. In the houses, the streets, the gardens, the places of public resort—everywhere is to be found the all-pervading element of art and beauty. A rainy day in Japan is not, as it is in London, a day of gloom and horror, but a day of absolute fascination. What a joy is the spectacle of all those lovely yellow paper umbrellas unfurling themselves beneath a shower like flowers before the sun, so different from the dark shiny respectability of our ghastly gamps at home! John Bunyan has written and talked of the house beautiful; but the Japanese have given to the nation not only the house beautiful, but also (what is even more important to the community at large) the street beautiful, and that is where Japan differs so widely from Europe. As I walk through the London streets at night, how prosaic is the flicker of each gas-jet, within its sombre panes of glass, in some “long unlovely street,” and how different from the softened rays that shine from out the dainty ricksha lanterns illuminating the streets in Japan! There a poem meets your eye with each step you take; and how pretty is every street corner, with its little shop, its mellow light and dainty arrangements, with the smiling face of some little child peeping out from the dim shadow beyond! It is a terrible thing to live in a country where art is the luxury of the few, and where the people know as little of what constitutes the beauty of life as a Hindoo knows of skating. What would a Japanese gentleman say, I wonder, if he passed into a room in the depths of winter and saw a quantity of those pretty fans, which in his country help to modify the heat of the golden summer days, viciously nailed, without rhyme or reason, upon a bright red wall, or those fairy-like umbrellas, upon which he has seen the rain-drops glisten so brightly, stuck within the gloomy recess of some lead-black hideous grate, or (with still less sense of the fitness of things or regard for the uses for which it was made) glued to a white-washed ceiling?
BY THE LIGHT OF THE LANTERN
We sometimes talk of the deteriorating influence of European ideas upon Japanese art; but we have failed to perceive the ghastly inappropriateness of applying the Japs’ delicate flights of fancy to our homes of discomfort. That usefulness is the basis of all righteousness is the moral code by which a man’s position is gauged in Japan, and by which things are made. It does not matter how beautiful an article may be, or how trivial—whether it is a penholder, a snuff-box, or a pipe—if it is not useful it is considered inartistic, and will not be accepted by the Japanese public. The form of a vase or a cup, or the shape of a handle, must all be designed with a view to its usefulness; and every little work of art that is made, every cabinet and curio (apart from being decorative), is designed to convey some maxim-like idea, a lesson that will be useful and helpful in one way or another to the beholder.
On entering a Japanese tea-house you will see a kakemono hanging on the wall that strikes you at the first glance as being a perfect picture, with the bold but simple Chinese characters on the white silk and the tiny slip of vermilion which is the signature of the artist. It is placed well in the room, and is altogether a thing of beauty; but when, on closer inspection, you read the decorative letters, you will find that they give you some dainty piece of advice to help you through the day, or some pretty idea on which your eye and mind can rest.
Then, again, the games that the children play in the streets with sand or pebbles—they are teaching them arithmetic, construction, patience, and innumerable valuable lessons.
Usefulness is the basis of the ancient caste system of Japan, which system exists at the present day, and upon which the relative usefulness of a man depends. Take the Samurai. They occupy the premier position as Japanese aristocracy, because, although they wear silk, they give up their lives for their country—and no man can be more useful than that. The agriculturalist ranks next in dignity; for none can do without food, and therefore his usefulness is indisputable. Then come the workmen, and last of all the merchants, who are considered as “no class” in Japan and are greatly looked down upon—producing nothing, they merely turn over articles made by other hands for a profit.
“NEWS”
The most beautiful article we possess (one that is entirely our own) is the hansom cab. It is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs that the West has produced in the shape of a conveyance, and simply because it has been designed with a view to its usefulness. Would that we were always ruled by this splendid quality! Unfortunately, we are not. We are ruled by our own tastes, which, I feel bound to admit, are not artistic. Think of the sombre, happy-go-lucky arrangements of our London theatres. How is it that in the best-managed of them an actress will so far forget herself as to lie dying in the middle of a snowy street in the dead of night, pale-faced and wretched-looking, with ten thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery on her fingers? Such a scene would drive the artistic and consistent Japanese manager into the nearest lunatic asylum. At the same time he would be unutterably shocked at seeing a red moon (red, let us trust, with the blush of shame at its creator’s folly) rising hurriedly behind some stage bank of roses, swiftly and unnaturally hurrying across a purple sky, and shamefacedly setting in the East, in the West, in the North, in the South, within the brief hour of an English stage, as if glad to escape the rapturous applause of an inartistic public.
But perhaps nowhere is the difference between European and Japanese art so sharply accentuated as it is in the teaching of it in the great schools of the West and of the East. Let us take the art schools of Paris, which is considered by a vast portion of the artistic world to be the very paradise of art. You enter the crowded studio of some well-known master, and you see before you a large white statue, the first and predominant impression of which is its exceeding whiteness; and to your mingled amusement and amazement you discover that the unfortunate pupils are engaged in a futile endeavour to render an impression of exceeding whiteness by the aid of thick black chalk or charcoal. As to how this is to be done with any degree of verisimilitude you are no less at fault than they are, poor dears, themselves; and therefore you will not be surprised that, dazed and wearied as they must be from the steady contemplation of this never-ending pose, their work at the close of a day resembles the figure from which they have been drawing as closely as the work of Michael Angelo, or any of the great Japanese masters.
A SUNNY TEMPLE
From the antique you pass to the life room. Here another shock awaits you. In the middle of the room stands a young girl, strapped up in the attitude of Atalanta of classic fable running her immortal race. These pupils are taught first of all to sketch the figure in the pose of running as a skeleton. When the hideous skeleton has been carefully and laboriously committed to paper, it is with equal care imbued with nerves and muscles and flesh. When all this is done, a light Grecian drapery is flung on her, regardless of the folds and movement that would eventually have resulted from the fluttering of the breeze, and, mind you, she is strapped up all the time. Then, when all is completed, the poor dear lady is expected to run her immortal race. Of course, by this time there is no action in the figure at all. Atalanta appears glued to the spot, and my only wonder is that she does not indignantly chase her unfortunate creators from the studio. On looking at these pictures the spectator would say that he never saw anything so absolutely unsuggestive of the breathless vigour and energy of a healthy young girl engaged in a rapid race as is indicated by the pitiful weariness of that poor strapped-up creature in front of them. Would it not be far better that these students should go out into the street, after the method of the Japs, and watch some girl as she runs and jumps in the bright sunshine, with a soft wind blowing her hair about her head and her gown about her limbs, and then come back, and, with a memory of the beautiful inspiriting scene still fresh in their minds, commit their impressions “hot and hot” upon the canvas before them?
ON THE GREAT CANAL, OSAKA
Still, England has not always been so hopelessly inartistic. None would think of denying the perfect taste of the architects who designed such buildings as the Winchester and Durham Cathedrals, and Arundel Castle; but those are buildings wrought in dead days by men a long time dead, and England’s days of artistic appreciation are, I fear, as dead as they are. Commerce and so-called civilisation have ruined us, I fear, for ever. Japan is as artistic to-day as we were five hundred years ago, and I rejoice to think that at present there appears to be little fear of so ghastly a fate as has overtaken us. As a nation the Japanese remain faithful to art in all its details, and as individuals they are still a nation of artists. Where else but in Japan would an aged gentleman dream of rising ere the day has well begun, merely that he might bring into harmony with all its surroundings, and present in the best light possible, a little flower placed in a pot—bending it this way and that way, that its attitude might conform with the cabinet in one corner of the room, or a screen in the other? Who but a Japanese chamber-boy would be so impressed with the artistic value of contrast merely that he would feel constrained thereby to place the can of hot water in a different attitude every time he brought it into the room, and thoughtfully step aside to regard its consonance with its immediate surroundings? Art begins, as charity begins, at home; and where the home of the individual is absolutely artistic, it cannot fail that the whole nation should be a nation of artists. I give way to none in my loyalty to my country and my love for that country—I must say that I do not think that there is a country better in the whole world;—but perfection on this earth is not only impossible, but to my idea also absolutely undesirable—a perfect nation would be to the full as dreadful as a perfect man. We are saved from perfection by an almost entire lack of the artistic faculty, and, however great we are in other respects, I am sad to say we are thoroughly inartistic. To whom but the Englishman would the golden dragons that play so recklessly about on black screens with their scarlet drooping tongues, that are sold in the Japanese curio shops, possibly appeal? Who but English-speaking people would crave for those cherry-blossoms embroidered on white silk grounds, which they so gleefully carry away with them? Who but my inartistic countrymen would insist on their cabinets being smothered with endless and miscellaneous carvings? The Japanese are too artistic to admit these things into their own homes; but why are their dealers so inartistic as (blinded by the desire of filthy pelf) to put forth these embroideries for the English and American market? Such things now and then make me tremble for the future of art in Japan. It may be (though I trust not) the thin end of the wedge; it may be “the little rift within the lute that by and by will make the music mute, and, ever widening, slowly silence all.” What a tragedy it would be that the music of this most perfect art should ever be silenced in that lovely land, the resting-place and home of the highest and only living art!
PAINTERS AND THEIR METHODS