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.
