We did not know until recently what meant the words realism and idealism (should we thank the Western critics?) except this: “The artist, whatever he be, idealist or realist or what not, is good when he is true to his art. I mean that technique or method of expression is secondary; even the seeming realistic picture of Oriental art is, when it is splendid, always subjective.” I have many reasons to call Hiroshige an idealist or subjective artist, now playing an arbitrary art of criticism after the Western fashion, as I only see his artistic wisdom, but nothing else in his being true to Nature; that wisdom, I admit, helped his art to a great measure, but what I admire in him is the indefinable quality which, as I have no better word, I will call atmosphere or pictorial personality. It seems that he learned the secret from Chinese landscape art how to avoid femininity and confusion; the difference between his art and that of the Chinese artist is that where the one drew a bonseki, or tray-landscape, with sand from memory, the latter made a mirage in the sky. When Hiroshige fails he reminds me of Emerson’s words of suggestion to look at Nature upside down through your legs; his success, as that of the Chinese artist, is poetry. And our Oriental poetry is no other kind but subjectivity. I have right here before me the picture called “Awa no Naruto,” which is more often credited to be the work of the second Hiroshige; now let me, for once and all, settle the question that there were many Hiroshiges. It is my opinion there was only one Hiroshige; I say this because in old Japan (a hundred times more artistic than present Japan) the individual personality was not recognised, and when an artist adopted the name of Hiroshige by merit and general consent, it meant that he grew at once incarnated with it; what use is there to talk about its second or third? I prefer to regard Hiroshige as the title of artistic merit since it has ceased in fact to be an individuality; indeed, where is the other artist, East or West, whose life-story is so little known as Hiroshige’s? And I see so many pictures which, while bearing his signature, I cannot call his work, because I see them so much below the Hiroshige merit—for instance, the whole upright series of Tokaido and Yedo, and so many pictures of the “Noted Places in the Provinces of Japan"—because they are merely prose, and even as prose they often fail. But to return to this “Awa no Naruto,” a piece of poem in picture, where the whirlpools of the strait, large and small, now rising and then falling in perfect rhythm, are drawn suggestively but none the less distinctly. I see in it not only the natural phenomenon of the Awa Strait, but also the symbolism of life’s rise and fall, success and defeat; I was thinking for some time that I shall write a poem on it, although I could not realise it yet.
HIROSHIGE THE CHINESE POET
I have my own meaning when I call Hiroshige the Chinese poet. Upon my little desk here I see an old book of Chinese prosody; there is a popular Chinese verse, Hichigon Zekku, or Four Lines with Seven Words in Each, which is almost as rigid as the English sonnet; and the theory of the sonnet can be applied to that Hichigon Zekku without any modification. We generally attach an importance to the third line, calling it the line “for change,” and the fourth is the conclusion; the first line is, of course, the commencing of the subject, and the second is “to receive and develop.” It seems that Hiroshige’s good pictures very well pass this test of Hichigon Yekku qualification. Let me pick out the pictures at random to prove my words. Here is the “Bright Sky after Storm at Awazu,” one of the series called Eight Views of the Lake Biwa; in it the white sails ready to hoist in the fair breeze might be the “change” of the versification. That picture was commenced and developed with the trees and rising hills by the lake, and the conclusion is the sails now visible and then invisible far away. Now take the picture of a rainstorm on the Tokaido. Two peasants under a half-opened paper umbrella, and the Kago-bearers naked and hasty, are the “third line” of the picture; the drenched bamboo dipping all one way and the cottage roofs shivering under the threat of Nature would be the first and second lines, while this picture-poem concludes itself with the sound of the harsh oblique fall of rain upon the ground. You will see that Hiroshige’s good pictures have always such a theory of composition; and he gained it, I think, from the Chinese prosody. In the East, more than in the West, art is allied to verse-making.
THE FAREWELL VERSE
When we consider the fact he was the artist of only fifty years ago, it is strange why we cannot know more of his own life story, and how he happened to leave the words that generally pass as a farewell verse as follows:—
“I leave my brush at Azuma, and go on the journey to the Holy West to view the famous scenery there.”
I cannot accept it innocently, and I even doubt its origin, as it is more prosaic than poetical. It is only that he followed after a fashion of his day if he left it, as the verse is poor and at best humorous. But when it is taken by the English seriousness, the words have another effect. Indeed, Hiroshige has had quite an evolution since he was discovered in the West; he is, in truth, more an English or European artist than a Japanese in the present understanding.
[V]
GAHO HASHIMOTO
The art of Gaho (Hashimoto’s nom-de-plume, signifying the “Kingdom Refined”) is not to discard form and detail, as is often the case with the artists of the “Japanese school,” while they soar into the grey-tinted vision of tone and atmosphere. His conventionalism—remember that he started his artist’s life as a student of the Kano school, whose absurd classicism, arresting the germ of development, invited its own ruin—was not an enemy for him by any means. With the magic of his own alchemy he turned it into a transcendental beauty, bearing the dignity of artistic authority. I am sure he must have been glad to have the conventionalism for his magic to work on afterward; and when he left it, it seems to me, he looked back to it with a reminiscence of sad longing. Conventionalism is not bad when it does not dazzle. To make it suggestive is an achievement. To speak of Gaho’s individuality in his pictures does no justice to him. His thought and conception are the highest, and at the least different from many KOKOROMOCHI IN PICTURE another artist in the West. It is not his aim at all to express the light and colour of his individuality. I believe that he even despised it. He had the volumes of the Oriental philosophy in himself; and his idea, I believe, was much influenced by the Zen sect Buddhism, whose finality in teaching is to forget your ego. Gaho often talked on Kokoromochi in picture, to use his favourite expression, which, I am sure, means more than “spirit.” “Now what is it?” he was frequently asked. “Is it in its nature subjective or objective? Or is it something like a combination of the two?” He was never explanatory in speech in his life. He thought, as a Zen priest, that silence was the best answer. Let me explain his Kokoromochi in picture by my understanding.