The school thus entered into real activity at a date when the art was far gone in its decline; and its designs produced no arresting effect. Most of the work of these men is crude. Yet when we look at the products of the second quarter of the century in Yedo, we may very possibly feel that the Osaka output was at least no worse. It included chiefly theatrical portraits, all done with a peculiar hardness of line and cold brilliance of colour, and printed as a rule very skilfully. These by no means approach the works of Shunsho, Shunyei, and Sharaku, after which they were obviously patterned, nor even the works of Toyokuni; but the hard treatment so characteristic of them gives a certain dignity of effect which Kunisada's flowing and formless earthquakes of draperies generally lack.
The school does not call for elaborate treatment; the following men may be mentioned as among the best known: Hokushu, Hasegawa Sadanobu, Sadakage, Kagetoshi, Sadafusa, Sadatora, Sadamasa, Sadamasu, Sadahiro, Sadayoshi, Ashikuni, Ashiyuki, Hirosada, Shunshi, Horai Shunsho II, Hokumio, Hanzan, Yoshiiku, and Ranko. Others will be mentioned later as pupils of Hokusai or as landscape-painters.
The Renaissance of Landscape.
Like a beautiful island in the midst of a sea of wrecks, the landscape prints of the first half of the nineteenth century stand apart from the general debasement of print-designing. The great days of the figure-print were over; but now, into an art filled with the second-rate followers of Utamaro and Toyokuni, came the fresh and brilliant landscape genius of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Their work did not share in the general decline; it must be regarded as a new shoot sent up by the roots of a tree whose main trunk had already fallen into irreparable decay.
Landscape-prints were not a new thing; Utamaro and Toyohiro had already produced fine work of this nature, and interesting examples are to be found as we look backward through the work of Toyoharu, Shigemasa, Kiyonobu, and Masanobu—back, in fact, almost to the beginning of the art. But these earlier landscapes were, upon the whole, of subordinate importance; beside the figure-prints of the earlier masters, they seem crude and rudimentary. Previous to Hokusai and Hiroshige, they were chiefly of topographical, not of æsthetic, intention and interest. In the nineteenth century their importance became paramount.
"Japanese colour-prints devoted to landscape," writes Mr. Strange, "form a class apart in the art of the world. There is nothing else like them; neither in the highly idealistic and often lovely abstractions of the aristocratic painters of Japan, nor in the more imitative and, it must be said, more meaningless transcripts from nature, of European artists. The colour-print, as executed by the best men of the Japanese popular school, occupies an intermediate place; perhaps thus furnishing a reason why we Westerners so easily appreciate it. Its imagery and sentiment are elementary in the eyes of the native critics of Japanese high art. Its attempts at realism are in his eyes mere evidence of vulgarity. On the other hand these very qualities endear it to us. We can understand the first, without the long training in symbolism which is the essential of refinement to an educated man of the extreme East. And the other characteristic forms, in our eyes, a leading recommendation. In short, the landscapes of artists such as Hiroshige approach more nearly to our own standards, and are thus more easily acceptable to us than anything else in the pictorial arts of China and Japan; while they have all the fascination of a strange technique, a bold and undaunted convention, and a superb excellence of composition not too remote in principle from our own."
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!