If you wished to know what I admire most in these forms of art, I might say to you, keeping, I hope, within the drift of what I have been writing, that it is their obedience to early rules which were once based on the first primeval needs of the artist. And if you pushed me further, and wished to make me confess what I thought that these necessities might be, and to make me give you a definition of them, and thereby force me into a definition of art itself, I should hesitatingly state that I do not like to define in matters so far down as causes. But if you would not tell, or take advantage of my having been drawn into such a position of doctrine, I might acknowledge that I have far within me a belief that art is the love of certain balanced proportions and relations which the mind likes to discover and to bring out in what it deals with, be it thought, or the actions of men, or the influences of nature, or the material things in which necessity makes it to work. I should then expand this idea until it stretched from the patterns of earliest pottery to the harmony of the lines of Homer. Then I should say that in our plastic arts the relations of lines and spaces are, in my belief, the first and earliest desires. And again I should have to say that, in my unexpressed faith, these needs are as needs of the soul, and echoes of the laws of the universe, seen and unseen, reflections of the universal mathematics, cadences of the ancient music of the spheres.
For I am forced to believe that there are laws for our eyes as well as for our ears, and that when, if ever, these shall have been deciphered, as has been the good fortune with music, then shall we find that all best artists have carefully preserved their instinctive obedience to these, and have all cared together for this before all.
For the arrangements of line and balances of spaces which meet these underlying needs are indeed the points through which we recognize the answer to our natural love and sensitiveness for order, and through this answer we feel, clearly or obscurely, the difference between what we call great men and what we call the average, whatever the personal charm may be.
This is why we remember so easily the arrangement and composition of such a one whom we call a master—that is why the "silhouette" of a Millet against the sky, why his placing of outlines within the rectangle of his picture, makes a different, a final, and decisive result, impressed strongly upon the memory which classifies it, when you compare it with the record of the same story, say, by Jules Breton. It is not the difference of the fact in nature, it is not that the latter artist is not in love with his subject, that he has not a poetic nature, that he is not simple, that he has not dignity, that he is not exquisite; it is that he has not found in nature of his own instinct the eternal mathematics which accompany facts of sight. For indeed, to use other words, in what does one differ from the other? The arrangement of the idea or subject may be the same, the costume, the landscape, the time of day, nay, the very person represented. But the Millet, if we take this instance, is framed within a larger line, its spaces are of greater or more subtle ponderation, its building together more architectural. That is to say, all its spaces are more surely related to one another, and not only to the story told, nor only to the accidental occurrence of the same. The eternal has been brought in to sustain the transient.
For fashions change as to feelings and sentiments and ways of looking at the world. The tasks of the days of Angelico, or of Rubens, or of Millet are not the same; religions live and disappear; nations come and go in and out of the pages of history: but I can see nothing from the earliest art that does not mean living in a like desire for law and order in expression. It is, therefore, because we consciously or unconsciously recognize this love of the unwritten harmonies of our arts, the power of recalling them to us, in some painter or in some architect, that we say that such a man is great. He is great because he is the same as man has been, and will be; and we recognize, without knowing them by name, our ancestral primordial predilections.
Yes, the mere direction or distance of a line by the variation of some fraction of an inch establishes this enormous superiority—a little more curve or less, a mere black or white or colored space of a certain proportion, a few darks or reds or blues. And now you will ask, Do you intend to state that decoration—? To which I should say, I do not mean to leave my main path of principles to-day, and when I return we shall have time to discuss objections. Besides, "I am not arguing; I am telling you."
This is the unity, this is the reality, which disengages itself from the art of Japan, even as we know it in common, through what we usually call "bric-à-brac." Our introduction to it is rather curious when one comes to think of it. Suddenly, owing to enormous social changes in Japan, involving vast fluctuations in fortunes, most of all that was portable was for sale, and flooded our markets. Ignorant dealers held in masses small treasures of temples, adornments of the wealthy, all the odds and ends of real art, along with the usual furniture, along with all the poor stuff that would naturally be made for us barbarians, and had been made for us for centuries through the trade of Holland. It was as if Paris or London had suddenly been unloaded of everything portable, from works of art to household furniture. Naturally the main-spring of it all,—the works of great draftsmen, for instance,—being more debatable, more inexplicable, more useless, in a word, or detained by stronger bands, just as it would be with us, have somewhat escaped the drain. Our perceptions have been confused in all this mixture by repetitions, imitations, which in every form of art, as we know so well in literature, degrade the perception and enjoyment of what is good. I can only wonder that the world has not been tired out and disgusted with Japanese bric-à-brac. And had we not been in such bad straits of taste ourselves, such would have been the case. I have always considered that the artist needed to be forgiven for his turn toward bric-à-brac; not for his liking to have odds and ends for help and refreshment, but for having too many; because his life is to make, not to collect. To others, that can be forgiven easily; for the pieces of the past are a consolation of the present, and one would like to feel that a man's likings are his important self, and are betrayed by his choices. "Dis-moi ce que tu aimes—je te dirai ce que tu es."
If one had time and did not do, what pleasure it might be to describe forever the innumerable objects and things that might be found here, even though words are a poor rendering of sight. And what pleasure it might be to try to describe the greatest of all bric-à-brac, the greatest remains of the higher arts—sculpture and painting.
I have begun some such letter for you, but I fear that it may never be finished. Nor do I see any way of giving an account of the history of painting in Japan, which would have to stand for a still further explanation. Should I study it further, can I do more than to increase my own knowledge,—and all knowledge is a burden,—and to give you cursory proof, by names and a few examples, that the art of painting and the art of sculpture are very old here? I should have to begin to ask myself for you if the earliest remains do not already prove still earlier schools and accepted or debated tradition, and I should then have still one thousand years of design to account for.