Gustave Geffroy truly gauged the genius of Hokusai in speaking of his “flights beyond the horizon.” In the master we recognize the creator. He feels the mystery of the birth of mountains, as in that weird composition of Fuji, where the great cone is seen rising above circle upon circle of serpentine coils, forming the mystic tomoyé—symbol of creation and eternity. He feels the pulsation of the universe, and the life of ocean, and in a frenzy of creative power, beneath his hand the curved crests of foaming waves break into life, flashing into countless sea-birds born of the froth of ocean. He is the painter of chimera, the prophet of cataclysm; he “gives the world a shake and invents chaos.” How vivid is Holmes’ description of the wave in the seventh Mang-wa!
“Man becomes a mere insect, crouching in his frail catamaran, as the giant billow topples and shakes far above him. The convention of black lines with which he represents falling rain is as effectual as his conventions for water are fanciful. The storm of Rembrandt, of Rubens, or of Turner, is often terrible but never really wet; Constable gets the effect of wetness, but his storms are not terrible. Hokusai knows how a gale lashes water into foam, and bows the tree before it; how the gusts blow the people hither and thither, how sheets of drenching rain half veil a landscape, how the great white cone of his beloved Fuji gleams through a steady downpour! His lightning is rather odd in comparison with the realistic studies of the great artists of Europe, but what European ever tried an effect so stupendous as that recorded in ‘Fugaku Hiak’kei,’ where the snowy top of Fuji is seen at evening, crimson with the last fiery rays of sunset, while all the flanks of the mountain are hidden by a dark storm-cloud, through which the lightning flashes!”
Poetry and art are ever allied, and the vibrations of genius encircle the globe. Byron and Ruskin and Hokusai were contemporaries. Possibly at the very moment when the poet was immortalizing himself by composing his “Storm in the Alps,” the grand “old man, mad about drawing,” was sketching the peerless mountain:—
“Far along
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the loud thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.”
Lord Byron’s vivid pen also best describes the squally storms of both Hiroshige and Hokusai,—where