Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

HOKUSAI: FUJI, SEEN ACROSS THE TAMA RIVER, PROVINCE OF MUSASHI.
One of the Series "Thirty-six Views of Fuji." Size 10½ × 15. Signed Hokusai I-itsu, hitsu.

Plate 49.

Hokusai was born in 1760, the son of a mirror-maker. He lived to the age of eighty-nine years—a long life, crowded with privation that wins our sympathy, and with incessant devotion to his art. When in his seventies, he said: "Ever since the age of six years I have felt the impulse to draw the forms of objects. Up to the age of fifty years I made a great number of drawings; but I am dissatisfied with everything that I created prior to my seventieth year. At the age of seventy-three I, for the first time, began to grasp the true forms and nature of birds, fishes, and plants. It follows that at the age of eighty I shall have made still greater progress; at ninety I shall be able to create all objects; at a hundred I shall certainly have attained to still higher, unimaginable power; and when I finally reach my one hundred and tenth year, every line, every dot will live with an intense life. I invite those who are going to live as long as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called the Old Man Mad with Painting." His dying words were: "If the gods had given me only ten years more—only five years more—I could have become a really great painter!"

Hokusai's education began as an apprentice to a wood-engraver, a valuable experience for his later career. At the age of eighteen he entered the studio of Shunsho and adopted the name of Shunro. Under this name he produced actors in the orthodox Shunsho manner and melodramatic illustrations for the popular romances of the day. About 1786 a quarrel with Shunsho, due to the pupil's insubordination, led to Hokusai's expulsion, and he thereupon launched out for himself, to begin his long life of poverty and madly enthusiastic labour.

His work may be divided roughly into three periods. In the first he followed the traditions of Shunsho, Shunyei, Utamaro, and others of his contemporaries, with great skill but no special originality. His countless book-illustrations of this time were all conceived with lively fancy and vigour; but perhaps the finest works of this, his conventional period, are the very wide prints and surimono in which, against a delicately suggested landscape, move extraordinarily graceful women's figures not unlike those of Utamaro. Already he was a master of drawing; but he kept incessantly at his studies under many teachers, learning, among other things, European perspective from Shiba Kokan. His work was done in this and the following periods under a dozen different names, of which Sori, Kako, Shunro, and Taito are the most important.

In 1812 began his second or realistic period, with the publication of the first book of his fifteen-volume series of drawings, the "Mangwa." In this epoch he turned from the styles of his predecessors and launched into a hitherto unknown journalistic realism. With a lively sense of the comic and the burlesque, and an insatiable interest in the homeliest details of life, he threw overboard all formal stylistic quality and set sail on a riotous voyage of naturalistic discovery.

The "Mangwa," which may serve as a type of his whole production in this realistic period, is praised sometimes as his greatest work. In it we shall find not only his most striking tours-de-force as a draughtsman but also the key to his weakness. All existence thrilled him as it did Walt Whitman; and each object on which he turned his eyes stirred him with the desire to record it in his pages. Day after day he worked like a madman, throwing off his sketches of man, beast, and phantom, of rock, river, and sea, in endless profusion and with inexhaustible ingenuity. And though we grant our admiration to the enthusiasm, sharp vision, and clever draughtsmanship of these sheets, we may still find in this undiscriminating passion a quality incompatible with the highest reaches of artistic greatness. There is something vulgar, childish, under-developed in the mental attitude revealed; it seems a coarse greed for all experience, unlighted by the power to judge and reject, or by any consciousness of the ranks and hierarchies of beauty. It is a vast and dull enthusiasm; a celebration of the victory of the will to live over the will to perfect; a triumph of meaningless sensation over the just judgments of the discriminating mind. All shapes seem equally interesting and beautiful to it—all smells equally sweet. As Pater writes of Balzac—a man who was in many ways not unlike Hokusai—this artist "had an excess of curiosity—curiosity not duly tempered with the desire of beauty."

I can never look through the "Mangwa" without a sense of distressing chaos and a longing for the purer beauties which more finely organized artists have evoked from the heterogeneous welter of the seen world. But just this welter is at this time Hokusai's theme. "A debauch of sketches," Fenollosa calls it. In this work Hokusai stands beside Harunobu exactly as Whitman stands beside Keats—a more interesting mind but a far less perfect artist.

"Hokusai is incomparable," writes the commentator who furnished the introduction to one of his books. "While all his predecessors were more or less slaves to classical tradition and inherited rules, he alone emancipated his brush from all such fetters, and drew according to the dictates of his heart." True: and this was his curse. No man has ever lived with heart profound and subtle enough for such emancipation. Nor have the supreme artists ever attempted it. In Hokusai's case this upstart-abandoning of all tradition was an error from which he was able later to retrieve himself; but so great was the impression produced by his vulgarities on the mob that even to this day popular Japanese art has remained under the cloud of it.

Hokusai himself did recover. In his third period, the stylistic one, the greatness that was in him transcended his petty interest in the trivial idiosyncrasies of seen things, and he created those visions which constitute his lasting glory. Between 1823 and 1830 he issued those series, "The Thirty-six Views of Fuji," "The Bridges," "The Waterfalls," "The Loocho Islands," and "The Imagery of the Poets," in which we hail him as master. No longer the dupe of realism, he brings us his dreams.