She is the moth-light playing on reality’s dusk,
Soon to die as a savage prey of the moment;
She is a creation of surprise (let me say so),
Dancing gold on the wire of impulse.”
Some one might say that Utamaro’s ladies are brainless, but is it not, as I said before, that the sacrifice of individuality or personality makes them join at once with the great ghosts of universal beauty and love? They are beautiful, because all the ghosts and spirits of all the ages and humanity of Japan speak themselves through them; it is perfectly right of him not to give any particular name to the pictures, because they are not the reflection of only one woman, but of a hundred and thousand women; besides, Utamaro must have been loving a little secrecy and mystification to play with the public’s curiosity.
We have his art; that is quite enough. What do I care about his life, what he used to wear and eat, how long he slept and how many hours he worked every day; in fact, what is known as his life is extremely slight. It is said that he was a sort of hanger-on to Juzaburo Tsutaya, the well-known publisher of his day, at the house within a stone’s throw of Daimon or Great Gate of Yoshiwara, the Nightless City of hired beauties THE UKIYOYE WOMAN and lanterns, where, the story says, Utamaro had his nightly revel of youthful days as a fatal slave to female enchantment; while we do not know whether he revelled there or not, we know that as Yoshiwara of those times was the rendezvous of beauty, good looks, and song, not all physical, but quite spiritual, we can believe that he must have wandered there for his artistic development. Indeed there was his great art beautifully achieved when he suddenly entered into idealism or dream where sensuousness and spirituality find themselves to be blood brothers or sisters. In the long history of Japanese art we see the most interesting turn in the appearance of a new personality, that is the Ukiyoye woman; and who was the artist who perfected them to the art of arts? He was Utamaro. You may abuse and criticise, if you will, their unnaturally narrow squint eyes and egg-shaped smooth face; but from the mask his woman wears I am deliciously impressed with the strange yet familiar, old but new, artistic personality. The times change, and we are becoming more intellectual, as a consequence, physically ugly; is it too sweeping or one-sided to say that? I have, however, many reasons for my wishing to see more influence of Utamaro’s art.
[IV]
HIROSHIGE
The Sumida River’s blue began to calm down, like that of an old Japanese colour-print, into the blue, I should say, of silence which had not been mixed with another colour to make life; that blue, it might be said, did not exist so much in the river as in my very mind, which has lately grown, following a certain Mr. Hopper, to cry, "Hiro—Hiro—Hiroshige the Great!” The time was late afternoon of one day in last April; the little boat which carried a few souls like mine, who, greatly troubled by the modern life, were eager to gain the true sense of perspective towards Nature, glided down as it finished the regular course of the “Cherry-blossom viewing at Mukojima.” And my mind entered slowly into a picture of my own creation—nay, Hiroshige’s. “Look at the view from here. (I was thinking of Hiroshige’s Sumidagawa Hanasakari among his Yedo pictures.) It may be too late now to agree with Wilde when he said that Nature imitates Art,” I said to my friend. He saw at once my meaning, though not clearly, and expanded on how artistically the human mind has been advancing lately; and I endorsed him with the fact that I have come to see, for some long time, the Japanese scenery through Hiroshige’s eye. My friend exclaimed: “Is it not the same thing, when you think Nature imitates Art, that your mind itself imitates the Art first?” It is not written in any book how much Hiroshige was appreciated in his day; but I believe I am not wrong to say that he is now reaching the height of popularity in both the East and the West, of popularity in the real sense, and you will easily understand me when I say that he is the artist of the future in the same sense that I disbelieve in the birth register of Turner and Whistler. He is, in truth, greatly in advance, even if I fancy he is an artist of the present day, your contemporary and mine; I always go to him to find where Nature is pleased to put her own emphasis. Every picture of his I see seems to be a new one always; and the last is ever so surprising as to leave my mind incapable for the time being of apprehension of his other pictures. One picture of his is enough; there is the proof of his artistic greatness.
NATURE IN HER EMPHASIS