So much for that part of the decadence which was due merely to the desire for change. But there was another element of even more definite operation. It is fairly clear that part of the fatal development resulted from that slow drift toward realism which we have seen growing, period by period, since the days of the Primitives. The age of Harunobu, with its new technical resources, had abandoned pure decoration and aspired to put into its designs something of the flavour of life. The age of Kiyonaga, with its complete mastery of technique, had projected into its designs its observation of real beings—drawn with a fine idealization, but nevertheless based on a deep fidelity to concrete forms. The age of Utamaro had a choice of only two steps left to take if it were to advance to any new position—a step in the direction of still closer fidelity to nature, or a step in the direction of complete revolt from naturalism into regions of wild phantasy. Characteristically, it took both!
Particular instances will show this. Utamaro and Sharaku recorded the peculiarities of real things with a sharpness of observation and an accuracy of rendering that the earlier artists had never approached. And at the same time they used these sharply mastered details of nature as mere brick and mortar out of which to construct fantastic edifices of the most unbridled imagination. Because they were geniuses, they did this and created masterpieces; but they left to later times and lesser artists only the sterile heritage of a deadening realism which they had found it convenient to employ, but to which they themselves had never been truly subject.
At the beginning of this period Yeishi, Choki, Sharaku, and the young Utamaro produced work that ranks quite as high in beauty as that of preceding days. Yeishi's visionary figures of women, drawn with a disembodied and fragile grace, are in their way matchless things, whose only fault is their lack of virile strength. Choki's finest works are wholly beyond praise. Sharaku, the supreme master of actor-portraits and one of the great artists of the world, created designs of stupendous power; if there is any trace of decadence in him it is not weakness but brutality. Utamaro, in his earlier years at least, was as wholesome as Kiyonaga; and even when, in later times, he turned to figures that have about them an indescribable atmosphere of languor and decline, he made of them designs that are to many people the most beautiful productions of the whole school. In all of these men, technical power and sense of composition were of unimpaired vigour. Why, then it may be asked, should we speak of the decadence?
The answer lies partly in the fact that these productions, as a rule, express in their languid or overstrained figures tendencies of emotional super-refinement and nervous tension that impress every beholder with a sense of disintegration, and partly in the history of later days. For the moment, the rivalry between the great men of the period was so keen as to sustain what was, after all, the dying effort of their art. The successes of each one spurred the others on to new types and new feverish devices, feeding thus the flames of the desire for novelty among the people. But the end was at hand. By 1800, in the later work of Utamaro, in most of the work of Toyokuni, and in practically all the work of their followers, genuine artistic weakness appeared, sensationalism took the place of vigour, garishness supplanted harmony, and crude emotions, crude drawing, crude colour became the common feature. The ancient sense of style gave way to a desire to push pictorial effects beyond their legitimate boundary, and the edge of the abyss was in sight.
But before that moment came there remained sixteen years in the productions of which we shall find beauties less sane and sound than those of Kiyonaga, but nevertheless perpetually delighting.
Hosoda Yeishi.
Portrait of a Woman.
Out of the silence of dead years
Your slender presence seems to move—
A fragrance that no time outwears—
A perilous messenger of love.
From far your wistful beauty brings
A wonder that no lips may speak—
A music dumb save as it clings
About your shadowy throat and cheek.
Longing is round you like that haze
Of luminous and tender glow
Which memory in the later days
Gives vanished days of long ago.