VIII
BUSHO HARA[A]
[A] See the [Appendix]
Often I tried to write about Busho Hara the artist (I use the term in the most eclectic Japanese conception, because his art served more frequently to make his personality distinguished through its failure rather than through its success); that my attempt turned to nothing was perhaps because my mind, solitary and sad like that of Hara, did not like to betray the secret of the recluse whose silence was his salutation. Besides, my heart and soul and all were too much filled with this Busho Hara from the fact of his recent unexpected death—(by the way, he was in his forty-seventh year, that interesting age for an artist, as it would be the beginning of a new page, good or bad); and I am, in one word, perfectly confused on the subject. When I wish to think of his art alone, and even to measure it, if possible, through the most dangerous, always foolish way of comparison with others, I find always, in spite of myself, that my mind, even before it has fairly started on his art, is already carried away by the dear, sweet, precious memory of his rare personality. “Above all, he was rarest as friend,” my mind always whispers to me every two minutes from the confusion of my thought, this and that, and again that and this, on him. To say that I think of him too much and for too many things would be well-nigh the same as to say that I am unfitted to tell about him intelligibly. I confess that I had a little difference with him on the subject of his own art here and there, while I was absorbed in his conversation or criticism (I always believed and said—did he dislike me when I said that?—he was a better and greater critic than artist), now by the cozy fire of a winter evening, then with the trees and grasses languid with summer’s heat; he was the first and last man to whom I went when I felt particularly ambitious and particularly tired, and I dare say that he was pleased to see me. My own delight to have him as my friend was in truth doubled, when I thought that his personality and art, remarkable as they are honest, true, and sympathetic, were almost unknown at home except in a little narrow community; as I said before, he was a recluse. In England, many readers of Mr. Markino’s book, A Japanese Artist in London, will remember Hara’s name, as it is frequently repeated in the book; and a certain well-known English critic had an occasion once or twice to mention his name and kindly comment on his work in the Graphic. That was in 1906, when he was about to leave London after a few years’ stay there. “Shall I go to England again for a change or to take a few pictures of mine?” he often exclaimed. England was his dream, as she is mine. How unfalteringly our talk ran; every time the subject was England and her art.
HIS DREAM OF ENGLAND
“Now is it settled, let us suppose,” Hara would say in the course of talk, slightly twisting his sensitive mouth, holding up straight back his well-poised head (what a philosopher’s eyes he had, gentle and clear), “that we shall go to England some time soon in the future. Yes, we shall go there even if we are not begged by Japan to leave the country. The most serious question is, however, where we shall sleep and dine. I have had enough experience of a common English boarding-house; I am haunted even to-day by the ghosts of Yorkshire pudding and cold ham. And suppose that a daughter or a son of that boarding-house might sing aloud a popular song every Saturday evening; I should like to know if there is anything more sad than that. Still, suppose that one next to you at table will ask you every evening how your work might sell; certainly that will be the moment when you think you will leave England at once for good. But it is England’s greatness that she has art appreciators as well as buyers. Oh, where is the true art appreciator in Japan, even while we admit that we have the buyers? I will take a few pictures with me when I go to England next, and show them to the right sort of people; really, truly, only London of all the cities of the world has the right sort of people in any line of profession. Besides, I should like to examine the English art again and let the people there listen to my opinion; I was not enough prepared for such a work when I went there last.”
But I believe that his own self-education in art, which he most determinedly started at the National Gallery, where he was forcibly attracted by Rembrandt and Velasquez, must have been happily developed, when the same Graphic critic spoke of his “sensitive and searching eyes,” and (printing Hara’s intelligent rendering of Rembrandt’s “Jewish Merchant” on the page) said that it proved the painter was at the root of the matter, and declared that the critic had rarely seen better or more intelligent copy, and again to prove that Hara was not merely a copyist or imitator, he also reproduced on the same page his original work called “The Old Seamstress.” And I am doubly pleased to find that the same English critic mentioned him somewhere as a “keen and acute critic, but generous withal”; I was so glad to have Hara as my friend for the rare striking power of his critical enlightenment (Oh, where is another sane artist like himself?), THE ENEMY IN HIS OWN SELF even when he failed to make a strong impression on me with his art. It was his immediate question on his return home how to apply the technique of oil painting he learned in London to Japanese subjects; if he failed in his art, as he always believed and I often thought he did, it was from the reason, I dare think, that he had indeed too clear a view of self-appraisal or self-criticism under whose menace he always took the attitude of an outsider towards his own work. How often I wished he were wholly without that critical power, always hard to please, altogether too fastidious! His artistic ambition and aim were so absolute and most highly puritanic; as a result, he was ever so restless and sad with his art, and often even despised himself. He had a great enemy, that was no other but his own self; he was more often conquered by it than conquering it. I have never seen in my life a more sad artist with the brush, facing a canvas, than this Busho Hara. Besides, his poor health, which had been failing in the last few years, only worked to make his critical displeasure sharper and more peculiar; and he utterly lost the passion and foolishness of his younger days. How often we promised, when we parted after a long chat, which usually began with Yoshio Markino, dear friend of his and mine in London, and as a rule ended with reminiscences of our English life, that we would hereafter return to our younger age, if possible to our boys’ days, and even commit the innocent youthful sins and be happy; but when we met together again, we were the same unhappy mortals, Hara with a brush, I with a pen. He always looked comforted by my words when I told him my own tragedy and difficulties to write poetry; both of us exclaimed at once with the same breath and longed for life’s perfect freedom. How he wished to cut away from himself and bid a final farewell to many portrait commissions, and become a lone pilgrim on Nature’s great highway with only his brush and oil; that was his dream.
Let me repeat again that he was sad with his brush only to make his art still sadder; when he was most happy, it was the time when he left his own studio to forget his unwilling brush and send his love imaginations under the new foliage of spring trees and make them ride on the freedom of the summer air. How he planned for future work while contemplating great Nature; he was a dreamer in the true sense. And dream was to him more real as he thought it almost practicable. I do not mix any sarcasm in my words when I say that he was a greater artist when he did not paint; he rose to his full dignity only when out of his studio; and it was most unfortunate that I found him always ill when he was out of it. But I will say that I never saw one like himself so well composed, even satisfied, on a sick bed; that might have been from the reason that his being AT THE HOSPITAL absorbed in Nature, his thought and contemplation on her, did not give an opportunity for bodily illness to use its despotism. He gave me in truth even such an impression that he was glad to be ill so he could lay himself right before the thought of great Nature. Once in the spring of 1911 I called on him at the hospital, when he successfully underwent a surgeon’s knife (he was suffering from typhlitia); although he was quite weak then, he was most ambitious and happy to talk on the beauty of Nature; and he said: “I almost wonder why I did not become ill and lay me down on this particular bed of this hospital before, and (pointing to the blue sky through the window with his pale-skinned slender hand that was unmistakably an artist’s) see how the eastern sky changes from dusk to milky grey, again from that grey to rosy light. How often I wished you, particularly you, might be here with me all awakening in this room, perhaps at halfpast three o’clock; that is the time exactly when the colours of the sky will begin to evolve. Thank God all the other people are sleeping then. At such a moment I feel as if all Nature belonged to me alone in the whole world, and I alone held her secrets and her beauty; I am thankful for my illness, as it has made me thus restful in mind and allowed me to carefully observe Nature, and build my many future plans. I can promise you that I will whistle my adieu to the commissioned work, all of it, when I grow stronger again, and become a real artist, the real artist even to satisfy you. Oh, how I could paint the mysterious changes of the sky which I have been studying for the last week!”
Again I saw him in his sick-bed at his little home one afternoon; we grew, as a matter of course, quite enthusiastic and passionate as our talk was on art and artists; it was the foundation of his theory, when he expanded on it, not to put any difference between the arts of the East and the West; he seemed to agree with me on that day when I compared even recklessly Turner with our Sesshu. Although he entered into his art through the technique, I observed that he was speedily turning to a Spiritualist; I often thought that he was a true Japanese artist even of the Japanese school, while he adopted the Western method. (It was the Graphic critic who said that he was “perhaps the ablest Japanese painter in our method who has visited our shores.”) He and I saw that time the famous large screen by Goshun belonging to the Imperial Household called “Shosho no Yau,” or “The Night Rain at Shosho”; as our minds were still absorbed in its soft mellow atmosphere and grey flashes of sweeping rain, we often repeated our great admiration for that Goshun. “It’s not merely an art, but Nature herself,” he exclaimed. The afternoon of the summer day was slowly falling; the yellow sunbeams, like an elf or fairy, were playing almost fantastically with the garden leaves; Hara was looking on them absent-mindedly, and when he awoke from his dream, he said: “Suppose you cut off a few of those leaves, even one leaf, with that particular sunlight on them; they are indeed a great art. Who can paint them as exactly they are? To prove it is a real art, when the artist is great and true, a large canvas and big subject are not necessary at all; one single leaf would be enough for his subject. I recall my first impression of Turner’s work; I thought then that even one inch square of any picture of his in the National Gallery would be sufficient to prove his great art. I always vindicated his mastery of technique to the others who had the reverse opinion; what made Turner was never his technique. To talk about technique. I believe that even I have a better technique than is shown in most of the pictures drawn by Rossetti; but there is only one Rossetti in the world.” On my way home after leaving him, I could not help wondering if he were not turning to a pessimist: I was afraid that he was in his heart of hearts denying his own ability and art.
TURNER’S GREAT ART
One day last September, when my soul felt the usual sadness with the first touch of autumn, I received a note from Hara saying that his stomach had been lately troubled, and he wished I would call on him as he wanted to be brightened by my presence. I could not go then to see him on account of one thing and another; and when I was told by one of his friends and mine that Hara’s illness was said to be cancer, even in its acute form, and that he was eagerly expecting my call, I hurried at once to his house. He was very pale and thin. As I was begged by Mrs. Hara at the door not to let him talk too much, as it was the doctor’s command, I even acted as if I hated conversation on that day; it was Hara (bless his sympathetic gentle soul) who, on the contrary, wished to make me happy and interested by his talk. He talked as usual on various arts and artists; when he slowly entered into his own domestic affairs, he said: “I have decided to sell all my works of the last ten years, good or bad, among my rich friends, and raise a sufficient fund to provide for my old mother and wife; to have no child is at least a comfort at this moment. I think I call myself fortunate since such a scheme appears to be quite practicable; but if I could have even one picture which I could proudly leave for posterity—that might be too great an ambition for an artist of my class. Will you laugh at me when I say how I wish to live five years more, if not five years, two years at least, if not two years, even one year? It might be better, after all, for me to die with hope than to live and fail.” With a sudden thought he changed the subject; he thought, doubtless, he had no right to make me unnecessarily sad, and resumed the talk on Hokusai and Utamaro where he had left off a little while before. “I wish that you will see Utamaro’s picture in my friend’s possession; it is, needless to say, the picture of a courtesan. How that lovely woman sits! (Here Hara changed his attitude and imitated the woman in the picture.) Oh, these charming bare feet! That is where Utamaro put his best art; I cannot forget the feeling that I felt with the most attractive naked heels of the picture.”
HARA GONE TO HIS REST
I gave him many instances of doctors’ mistakes to encourage him, before I left his house. I called on him two weeks or ten days later; but I was not admitted to his presence, as the doctor had already forbade any outside communication. At my third call I was told that he was growing still worse; it was on October 29 that I made my fourth call, and I found at once that the house had been somewhat upset. Alas, my friend Busho Hara had gone already to his eternal rest! I rushed up to the upstairs room where the cold body of the artist was lying; he could not see or hear his friend. I cried. I was told by one of Hara’s friends, who saw his last moment, how sorry he was that he did not see me when his final end approached, and that he had begged him to tell me that he was wrong in what he told me before about art. Now, what did he mean by that? I already suspected, as I said before, that he was growing to deny his own art; now I should like to understand by that final special message to me that he wished to wholly deny all the human art of the world against great Nature before his death. When he grew weaker and weaker, I think that he found it more easy to dream of Nature; whether conscious or unconscious, he must have been in the most happy state, at least for his last days, as he was going to join himself with her. I never saw such a dead face so calm, so sorrowless, like Hara’s; it reminded me of a certain Greek mask which I saw somewhere; indeed, he had a Greek soul in the true meaning.
We six or seven friends of his kept a tsuya, or wake, before his coffin, as is the custom, on the night of the 29th; the night rapidly advanced when the reminiscences of this passed great artist were told to keep us from falling asleep. One man was speaking of the story of Hara’s friendship with Danjuro Ichikawa, the great tragedian of the old kabuki school of the modern Japanese stage. Once he played the rôle of Benkei in “Adaka ga Seki,” which he wished Hara to draw; it was a most unusual treat on the actor’s part to give the artist one whole box at the Kabuki Theatre during fifteen days only for that purpose, where he appeared every day not to draw, but to look at the acting. But Hara very quickly sketched him one day at the moment when he thought that the actor was prolonging his acting at a certain place to make him easy to sketch; in fact, Danjuro made his acting in some parts stand still for fifteen minutes. Strangely enough, the other actors who were playing with him did not know that, while Hara rightly read the actor’s intention and thought. Danjuro said afterwards that Mr. Hara understood him through the power of his being a great artist. Did he draw the picture and finish it? That is the next question. He did not, as was often the case with Hara; he wrote the actor bluntly he was sorry that this spirit was gone, making it impossible to advance. The one who told the story exclaimed: “I never saw an artist like Hara so slow to paint, or who found it so difficult to paint.”
SITTING AT THE SHOP FRONT
Among us there was a well-known frame manufacturer, Yataya by name, who, it is said, was Hara’s very first friend in Tokyo, where he came thirty years before from his native Okayama; he spoke next on his dear friend: “He made his call on me at my store in Ginza almost every night; he never came up into the room, but sat always at the shop front. And there he gazed most thoughtfully on the passing crowd of the street with his fixed eyes; he made himself quite an unattractive figure especially for the shop front. ‘Who is that sinister-looking fellow?’ I was often asked. I am sure that he must have been there studying the people; his interest in anything was extremely intent. He was a great student.”
While I am now writing upon Hara, I feel I see that he is sitting at a certain shop front, perhaps of Hades. Is he not studying the action of the dead souls clamorous as in their living days?
[IX]
THE UKIYOYE ART IN ORIGINAL
I often think the general impression that the best Ukiyoye art reveals itself in colour-print has to be corrected in some special cases, because the Ukiyoye art in original kakemono, though not so well appreciated in the West, is also a thing beautiful; and I feel proud to say that I have often seen those special cases in Japan. On such occasions I always say that I am impressed as if the art were laughing and cursing fantastically over the present age, whose prosaic regularity completely misses the old fascination of romanticism which Japan of two or three hundred years ago perfected by her own temperament. Whenever I see it (mind you, it should be the best Ukiyoye art in original) at my friend’s house by accident, or in the exhibition hall, my heart and soul seem to be turning to a winged thing fanned by its magic; and when my consciousness returns, I find myself narcotised in incense, before the temple of art where sensuality is consecrated through beauty.
It is not too much to say that Shunsho Katsukawa, who died in 1792 at the age of ninety-seven, gained more than any other artist from the originals, through his masterly series of twelve pieces, “A Woman’s Year,” owned by Count Matsura, a most subtle arrangement of figures whose postures reach the final essence of grace perhaps from the delicate command of artistic reserve, the decorative richness of the pictures heightened by life’s gesticulation of beauty; whilst the harmony of the pictorial quantity and quality is perfect. Behind the pictures we read the mind of the artist with the critic’s gift of appraising his own work. When we realise the somewhat exaggerated hastiness of later artists, for example, artists like Toyokuni the First, or Yeizan (the other artists being out of the question, of course), Shunsho’s greatness will be at once clear. It may have been his own thought to modify the women’s faces from the artless roundness of the earlier artists to the rather emphatic oblong, from simplicity to refinement, although I acknowledge it was Harunobu’s genius to make the apparent want of effort in women’s round faces flow into the sad rhythm of longing and passion, a symbol of the white, weary love; in Harunobu we have a singular case of the distinction between simplesse and simplicité. It was the old Japanese art to portray delicacy only in the women’s hands and arms; but certainly it was the distinguished art of Shunsho, with many other contemporary Ukiyoye artists, to make the necks, especially the napes, the points of almost tantalising grace; what a charm of abandon in those shoulders! And what a beautiful elusiveness of the slightly inclined faces of the women! I am always glad to see Shunsho’s famous picture, “Seven Beauties in a Bamboo Forest,” owned by the Tokyo School of Art, in which the romantic group of chignons leisurely promenade, one reading a love-letter, another carrying a shamisen instrument, through the shade of a bamboo forest. Not only in this picture, but in many other arrangements of women and sentiment, Shunsho reminds me of the secret of Cho Densu of the fifteenth century in his elaborate Rakan pictures, particularly in the point that the figures, while keeping their own individual aloofness, perfectly well fuse themselves in the alembic of the picture into a composition most impressive. And you will soon find that when the sense of monotony once subsides, your imagination grows to see their spiritual variety.
“BEAUTIES IN A BAMBOO FOREST"
It is rather difficult to see a best specimen of the originals of Harunobu or even of Utamaro. I think there is some reason, however, to say in the case of Utamaro that he did not leave many worthy pictures in original, because he made the blocks, fortunately or unfortunately, a castle to rise and fall with; while I see the fact on the one side that, while he was not accepted in the polite society of his time, he gained as a consequence much strength through his restriction of artistic purpose. There was nothing more ridiculous for the Ukiyoye artists of those days than to intrude their work of the so-called “Floating World” into the aristocratic tokonoma, the sacred alcove of honour for the art of a Tosa or a Kano, and to attempt to call themselves Yamato Yeshi, whatever that means. What wisdom is there to become neutral, like Yeishi or in some degree Koryusai, who never created any distinct success either as Ukiyoye artist or as so-called polite painter. I can easily read the undermeaning how they were even insulted, by the cultured class, when they tried to satisfy their own resentment by such an assumption of Yamato Yeshi (“the Yamato artist,” Yamato being the classic name of Japan); I see more humiliation in it than pride. The contempt displayed toward them, however, was not so serious till the appearance of Moronobu, who created his own art out of their sudden descent; his realism accentuated itself in the portrayal of courtesans and street vagrants of old Yedo, for the popular amusement, at the huge cost of being criticised as immoral. The artists before his day, even those to-day roughly termed the Ukiyoye artists, were the self-same followers. To begin with Matabei, after the Kano, Tosa, and Sumiyoshi schools successively, their work was strengthened or weakened according to the situation by the irresistibility of plebeianism; it is clear that the final goal for their work THE WITHDRAWAL FROM SOCIETY was, of course, the tokonoma of the rich man and the nobles. And it seems that they must have found quite an easy access into that scented daïs, if I judge from the pictures of the “Floating World” (what an arbitrary name that!) that remain to-day. They had, in truth, no necessity to advertise themselves as Yamato Yeshi, like some artists of the later age who were uneducated and therefore audacious; and in their great vanity wished to separate themselves from their fellow-workers; while their work has a certain softness—though it be not nobility—at least not discordant with the grey undertone of the Japanese room, doubtless they lack that strength distilled and crystallised into passionate lucidity which we see in the best colour-prints. When I say that Moronobu was the founder of Ukiyoye art, I mean more to call attention to the fact that the Japanese block print was well started in its development from his day, into which process the artists put all sorts of spontaneity, at once cursing creed and tradition. As for the Ukiyoye artists, I dare say their weakness in culture and imagination often turned to force; they gained artistic confidence in their own power from their complete withdrawal from polite society. Such was the case with Utamaro and Hiroshige. I wonder what use there was to leave poor work in the original like that of Toyokuni and Yeizan, whose works often serve only to betray their petty ambition.
I have seen enough of the originals of this interesting Ukiyoye art, beginning with Matabei and Katsushige; Naganobu Kano, the former’s contemporary, is much admired in the series of twelve pictures, “Merry-making under the Flowers,” with the illogical simplicity natural to the first half of the seventeenth century. The fact that the name “Floating World” did not mean much in those days can be seen in the work of Rippo Nonoguchi or Gukei Sumiyoshi, whose classical respect weakened the pictorial impression. Mr. Takamine, who is recognised as the keenest collector of Ukiyoye art in Japan, has quite an extensive collection of the works of Ando Kwaigetsudo (1688-1715), Anchi Choyodo, Dohan Kwaigetsudo (early eighteenth century), Doshu Kwaigetsudo, Doshin Kwaigetsudo, Nobuyuki Kameido, Rifu Tosendo, Katsunobu Baiyuken, and Yeishun Baioken, all of them contemporaries of Doshu. Although their merit is never so high, even when not questionable, we can imagine that their work must have been quite popular, even in high quarters; among them Dohan might be the cleverest, but as a Japanese critic says, his colour-harmony is marred by ostentatious imprudence. I have seen the best representation of Sukenobu Nishikawa in “Woman Hunting Fireflies,” soft and delicate. The other artists I came to notice and even admire are Choshun Miyakawa, Masanobu Okumura, Shigemasa Kitawo, and other HEREDITY SUPERSTITION names. I think that the time should come when the original Ukiyoye art, too, should be properly priced in the West; we are still sticking to our hereditary superstition that no picture is good if we cannot hang it in the tokonoma, where we burn incense and place the flowers arranged to invoke the greyness of the air. But I wonder why we cannot put an Utamaro lady here on the Japanese tokonoma.
[X]
WESTERN ART IN JAPAN
The Japanese works of Western art are sometimes beautiful; but I can say positively that I have had no experience of being carried away by them as by good old Japanese art. There is always something of effort and even pretence which are decidedly modern productions. I will say that it is at the best a borrowed art, not a thing inseparable from us. I ask myself why those artists of the Western school must be loyal to a pedantry of foreign origin as if they had the responsibility for its existence. It would be a blessing if we could free ourselves in some measure, through the virtue of Western art, from the world of stagnation in feeling and thought. I have often declared that it was the saviour of Oriental art, as the force of difference in element is important for rejuvenation. But what use is it to get another pedantry from the West in the place of the old one? I have thought more than once that our importation of foreign art is a flat failure. It may be that we must wait some one hundred years at least before we can make it perfectly Japanised, just as we spent many years before thoroughly digesting Chinese art; but we have not a few pessimists who can prove that it is not altogether the same case. Although I have said that the foreign pedantry greatly troubles the Japanese work of Western art, I do not mean that it will create the same effect as upon Western artists. I am told the following story:
THE TAIHEIYO GAKWAI CLUB
A year or two ago a certain Italian, who had doubtless a habit of buying pictures (with little of real taste in art, as is usually the case with a picture-buyer), went to see the art exhibition of the Taiheiyo Gakwai Club held at Uyeno Park, and bought many pictures on the spot, as he thought they were clever work of the Japanese school. Alas, the artists meant them to be oil paintings of the Western type! The Italian’s stupidity is inexcusable; but did they indeed appear to him so different from his work at home? The saddest part is that they are so alien to our Japanese feeling in general; consequently they have little sympathy with the masses. It is far away yet for their work to become an art of general possession; it can be said it is not good art when it cannot at once enter into the heart. It is not right at all to condemn only the Western art in Japan, as any other thing of foreign origin is equally in the stage of mere trial. I often wonder about the real meaning of the modern civilisation of Japan. Imitation is imitation, not the real thing at all.
There are many drawbacks, as I look upon the material side, to the Western art becoming popular; for instance, our Japanese house—frail, wooden, with the light which rushes in from all sides—never gives it an appropriate place to look its best. And the heaviness of its general atmosphere does not harmonise with the simplicity that pervades the Japanese household; it always appears out of place, like a chair before the tokonoma, a holy dais. Besides, the artists cannot afford to sell their pictures cheap, not because they are good work, but because there are only a few orders for them. I believe we must undertake the responsibility of making good artists; there is no wonder that there is only poor work since our understanding of Western art is little, and we hardly try to cultivate the Western taste. If we have no great art of the Western school, as is a fact, one half the whole blame is on our shoulders.
Here my mind dwells in more or less voluntary manner upon the contrast with the Japanese art, while I walk through the gallery of Western art of the Taiheiyo Gakwai Club of this year in Uyeno Park. There are exhibited more than two hundred, or perhaps three hundred pieces—quite an advance in numbers over any exhibition held before; but I am not ready to say how they stand PERCEPTION OF REALISM on their merit. I admit, at the outset, that the artists of the Western school have learned well how to make an arrangement no artist of the pure Japanese school ever dreamed to attain; and I will say that it is sometimes even subtle. But I have heard so much of the artistic purpose, which could be best expressed through the Western art. Are they not, on the other hand, too hasty and too direct to describe them? Some of their work most nakedly confesses their artistic inferiority to their own thought. What a poor and even vulgar handling of oil! I have no hesitation to say that there is something mistaken in their perception of realism. (Quite a number of artists in this exhibition make mistakes in this respect.) Indeed there is no word like realism (perhaps better to say naturalism) which, in Japan’s present literature, has done such real harm; it was the Russian or French literature that taught us the meaning of vulgarity, and again the artists, some artists at least, received a lesson from these writers. It is never good to see pictures overstrained. Go to the true Japanese art to learn refinement. While I admit the art of some artist which has the detail of beauty, I must tell him that reality, even when true, is not the whole thing; he should learn the art of escaping from it. That art is, in my opinion, the greatest of all arts; without it, art will never bring us the eternal and the mysterious. If you could see some work of Nakagawa or Ishii exhibited here, you would see my point, because they are somehow wrong for becoming good work, while they impress with line and colour. I spoke before of effort and pretence; such an example you will find in Hiroshi Yoshida’s canvases, big or small, most of them being nature studies. (By the way, this Yoshida is the artist who exhibited two great canvases, called “Unknown,” or “World of Cloud,” painted doubtless from Fuji mountain, overlooking the clouds at one’s feet, and “Keiryu,” or “The Valley,” at the Government exhibition with some success some years ago.) I am ready to admit that the artist has well brought out his purpose, but the true reality is not only the outside expression. His pictures are executed carefully; but what a forced art! This is the age when all Japanese artists, those of the Japanese school not excepted, are greatly cursed by objectivity. Some one has said that the Japanese dress, speaking of Japanese woman as a picture, does serve to make the distance greater. I thought in my reflection on art that so it is with the Japanese art. And again how near is Western art, at least the Japanese work of the Western school! Such a nearness to our feeling and mind, I think, is hardly the best quality of any art. I have ceased for some time to expect anything great or astonishing from Wada or Okada or even Kuroda; we most eagerly look forward to the sudden appearance of some genius at once to frighten and hypnotise and charm us and make the Western art more intimate with our minds.
THE SPIRITUAL INSULARITY
I amused myself thinking that it was Oscar Wilde who said that Nature imitates art; is not the nature of Japan imitating the poor work of the Western method? Art is, indeed, a most serious thing. It is the time now when we must jealously guard our spiritual insularity, and carefully sift the good and the bad, and protect ourselves from the Western influence which has affected us too much in spite of ourselves. Speaking of the Western art in Japan, I think I have spoken quite unconsciously of the general pain, not only in art, but in many other things, from which we wish we could escape.
After I have said all from my uncompromising thought, my mind, which is conscious to some extent of a responsibility for Japan’s present condition in general, has suddenly toned down to thinking of the short history of Western art in Japan, that is less than fifty years. What could we do in such a short time? It may even be said that we did a miracle in art as in any other thing; I can count, in fact, many valuable lessons (suggestions too) from the Western art that we transplanted here originally from mere curiosity. Whether good or bad, it is firmly rooted in Japan’s soil; we have only to wait for the advent of a master’s hand for the real creation of great beauty. It seems to me that at least the ground has been prepared.
Charles Wirgman, the special correspondent sent to the Far East from the Illustrated London News, might be called the father of Western art in Japan; he stayed at Yokohama till he died in 1891 in his fifty-seventh year. He was the first foreign teacher from whom many Japanese learned the Western method of art; Yoshiichi Takahashi was one of his students. Before Takahashi, Togai Kawakami was known for his foreign art in the early eighties; but it is not clear where he learned it. Yoshimatsu Goseda was also, besides Takahashi, a well-known student of Wirgman, and Shinkuro Kunizawa was the first artist who went to London in 1875 for art study, but he died soon after his return home in 1877 before he became a prominent figure in the art world.
When the Government engaged Antonio Fentanesi, an Italian artist of the Idealistic school, in 1876, as an instructor, the Western school of art had begun to establish itself even officially. This Italian artist is still to-day respected as a master. He was much regretted when he left Japan in 1878. Ferretti and San Giovanni, who were engaged after Fentanesi, did not make as great an impression as their predecessor. However, the time was unfortunate for art in general, as the country was thrown into disturbance by the civil war called the Saigo Rebellion. The popularity which the Western art seemed to have attained had a great set-back when the pictures were excluded from the National Exhibition in 1890. But in the reaction the artists of the Western school gained more vigour and determination; Shotaro Koyama, Chu Asai, Kiyowo Kawamura, and others were well-known names in those days. Kiyoteru Kuroda and Keiichiro Kume, the beloved students of Raphael Collin, returned home when the China-Japan war was over; they brought back quite a different art from that with which we had been acquainted hitherto. And they led vigorously the artistic battle; the present popularity at least in appearance is owing to their persistence and industry. The Government again began to show a great interest in Western art; it sent Chu Asai and Yeisaku Wada to Paris to study foreign art. Not only these, many others sailed abroad privately or officially to no small advantage; you will find many Japanese students of art nowadays wherever you go in Europe or America.
THE GOVERNMENT’S INTEREST
We were colour-blind artistically before the importation of Western art, except these who had an interest in the so-called colour-print; but the colour-print was less valued among the intellectual class, as even to-day. Our artistic eye, which was only able to see everything flat, at once opened through the foreign art to the mysteries of perspective, and though they may not be the real essence of art, they were at least a new thing for us. There are many other lessons we received from it; it seems to me that the best and greatest value is its own existence as a protest against the Japanese art. If the Japanese art of the old school has made any advance, as it has done, it should be thankful to the Western school; and at the same time the artists of foreign method must pay due respect to the former for its creation of the “Western Art Japonised.” It may be far away yet, but such an art, if a combination of the East and West, is bound to come.
[APPENDIX I]
THE MEMORIAL EXHIBITION OF THE LATE HARA
The memorial exhibition of Busho Hara, a Japanese artist of the Western school, held recently in Tokyo to raise a fund for his surviving family as one of its objects (Hara passed away in October, 1913, in his forty-seventh year), had many significances, one of which, certainly the strongest, was in contradiction of the general understanding that Western paintings will never sell in Japan; even a trifling sketch in which the artist only jotted down his momentary memory fetched the most unusual price. Hara is a remarkable example of one who created his own world (by that I mean at least the buyers, though not real appreciators) among his friends through his personality, which strengthened his work; paradoxically we shall say he was an artist well known and utterly unknown; and when I say he was an utterly unknown artist, I have my thought that he never even once exhibited his work to the public, and his often defiant spirit and high aim made him scorn and laugh over people’s ignorance on art. How he hated the Japanese art world where real merit is no passport at all. But Hara’s friends are pleased to know from this exhibition the fact that even the public he ever so despised are not so unresponsive to his art, whose secret he learned in London.
Hara was, sad to say, also an artist whose Western art-work, like that of some other Japanese artists to whom quite an excellent credit was given in their European days, much declined or, better to say, missed somehow the artistic thrill since he left England in 1906. Why was that? What made him so? Was it from the fact that there is no gallery of Western art old or new in Japan where your work will only be belittled after you have received a good lesson there? or is it that our Japanese general public never have a high standard in the matter of art, especially of Western art? I think there are many reasons to say that the passive, even oppressive air of Japan, generally speaking, may have a perfectly disintegrating effect on an artist trained in the West; it would not be wholly wrong to declare that the real Western art founded on emotion and life cannot be executed in Japan. Hara made quite many portraits by commission since that 1906, some of which were brought out in this exhibition. As they are work more or less forced, we must go to his other works for his best, which he executed with mighty enthusiasm and faith under England’s artistic blessing. He writes down in his diary, the reading of which was my special privilege, on January 2nd of 1905, the following words: “At last Port Arthur has fallen. When the war shall be done that will be the time for our battle of art against Europe to begin. Oh, what a great responsibility for Japanese artists!”
Hara made a student’s obeisance toward Watts among the modern masters, whose influence will be most distinctly seen in one of his pictures in this exhibition called “The Young Sorrow” (the owner of this picture is Mr. Takashi Matsuda, one of a few great art collectors in Japan), in which a young sitting nude woman shows only her beautiful back, her face being covered by her hands. What a sad, visionary, pale clarification in colour and tone! Hara writes down when his mind was saturated with Watts at Tate’s or somewhere else: “What an indescribable sense of beauty! Art is indeed my only world and life. Again look at the pictures. How tender, how soft, and how warm in tone and atmosphere! And how deep is the shadow of the pictures! And that deep shadow is never dirty.” Again he writes down on his visit to Tate’s on a certain day: “It was wrong that I attempted to bring out all the colours from the beginning at once, and even tried to finish the work up by mending. There is no wonder my colours were dead things. We must have the living beauty and tone of colours; by that I do never mean showy. I must learn how to get the deep colour by light paint.” While he was saturated with Watts, he on the other hand was copying Rembrandt at the National Gallery. Hara’s copy of “The Jewish Merchant” is now owned by the Imperial Household in Tokyo. This copy and a few other copies of Rembrandt were in the exhibition. And Hara was a great admirer of Turner. Markino confesses in his book or books that it was Hara who first opened his spiritual eyes to Turner. At this memorial exhibition Turner is represented by Hara’s copy of Venice. There was in the exhibition “The Old Seamstress,” which I was pleased to say was one of Hara’s best pictures. Whenever I see Hara’s pictures of any old woman, not only this “Old Seamstress,” I think at once that what you might call his soul sympathy immediately responded to the old woman, since Hara’s heart and soul were world-wearied and most tender.
Markino has somewhere in the book the following passages: “First few weeks I used to take him round the streets, and whenever we passed some picture shops he stopped to look through the shop window, and would not move on. I told him those nameless artists’ work was not half so good as his own. But he always said: ‘Oh, please don’t say so. Perhaps my drawings are surer than those, and my compositions are better too. But the European artists know how to handle oils so skilfully. I learn great lessons from them.’”
Indeed when he returned home he had fully mastered the technique of handling oils from England, where he stayed some four years. It is really a pity that Hara passed away without having fully expressed his own art in his masterly technique, which he learned with such sacrifice and patience. His death occurred suddenly at the time when he was about to break away from his former self and to create his own new art ten times stronger, fresher, and more beautiful.
I wish to call the readers’ attention to Yoshio Markino’s My Recollections and Reflections, which contains the most sympathetic article on Busho Hara.
[APPENDIX II]
THE NERVOUS DEBILITY OF PRESENT JAPANESE ART
When I say that I received almost no impression from the annual Government Exhibition of Japanese Art in the last five or six years, I have a sort of same feeling with the tired month of May when the season, in fact, having no strength left from the last glory of bloom (what a glorious old Japanese art!), still vainly attempts to look ambitious. Although it may sound unsympathetic, I must declare that the present Japanese art, speaking of it as a whole, with no reference to separate works or individual artists, suffers from nervous debility. Now, is it not the exact condition of the Japanese life at present? Here it is the art following after the life of modern Japan, vain, shallow, imitative, and thoughtless, which makes us pessimistic; the best possible course such an art can follow in the time of its nervous debility might be that of imitation.
When the present Japanese art tells something, I thank God, it is from its sad failure; indeed, the present Japanese art is a lost art, since it explains nothing, alas, unlike the old art of idealistic exaltation, but the general condition of life. It is cast down from its high pedestal.
I do not know exactly what simplicity means, when the word is used in connection with our old art; however, it is true we see a peculiar unity in it, which was cherished under the influence of India and China, and always helped to a classification and analysis of the means through which the artists worked. And the poverty of subjects was a strength for them; they valued workmanship, or the right use of material rather than the material itself; instead of style and design, the intellect and atmosphere. They thought the means to be the only path to Heaven. But it was before the Western art had invaded Japan; that art told them of the end of art, and laughed at the indecision of æsthetic judgment and uncertainty of realism of Japanese art. It said: “It is true that you have some scent, but it is already faded; you have refinement, but it is not quite true to nature and too far away.” Indeed, it is almost sad one sees the artists troubled by the Western influence which they accepted, in spite of themselves; I can see in the exhibitions that many of them have long ago lost their faith by spiritual calamity, and it is seldom to see them able to readjust their own minds under such a mingled tempest of Oriental and Occidental. Is it not, after all, merely a waste of energy? And how true it is with all the other phenomena of the present life, their Oriental retreat and Occidental rush.
The present Japanese art has sadly strayed from subjectivity, the only one citadel where the old Japanese art rose and fell; I wonder if it is not paying a too tremendous price only to gain a little objectivity of the West.
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England.