What remains of Koyetsu’s life is slight, as his day was not feminine and prosaic, like to-day, with love of gossip and biography-writing; he, with the friends of his day, Sambiakuin Konoye, Shokado, both of them eminent chirographers of all time of Japan, Jozan the scholar, Enshu the tea-master, and many others, realised the age of artistic heroism which is often weakened by the vulgarity of thought that aims at the Future and Fame. The utter rejection of them would be the prayer itself to strengthen the appreciation of art into a living thing. Koyetsu made his profession in his younger days the connoisseurship of swords as well as their whetting; it was for that service, I believe, that Iyeyasu, the great feudal Prince of Yedo, gave him a piece of land, then a mere waste, at Taka ga Mine of the lonely suburb of Kyoto, by the Tanba highway, where he retired, with a few writing brushes and a tea-kettle, to build his Taikyo An, or Abode of ABODE OF VACANCY Vacancy, giving his æsthetic fancy full swing to fill the “vacancy” of abode and life. He warned his son and family, when he bade them farewell, it is said, that they should never step into Yedo of the powerful lords and princes, because the worldly desire was not the way of ennobling a life which was worth living. We might call it “seihin”, or proud poverty that Koyetsu most prized, as it never allures one from the chasteness of simplicity which is the real foundation of art. There is reason to believe that he must have been quite a collector of works of art, rich and rare, in his earlier life; but it is said that he most freely gave them away when he left his city home for his lonely retirement; indeed he was entering into the sanctuary of priests. What needed he there but prayer and silence? There is nothing more petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to have a too close attachment to life and physical luxuries; if our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.
Koyetsu’s must have been a remarkable personality, remarkable because of its lucidity distilled and crystallised—to use a plebeian expression, by his own philosophy, whose touch breathed on the spot a real art into anything from a porcelain bowl to the design on a lacquer box; I see his transcendental mien like a cloud (that cloud is not necessarily high in the sky all the time) in his works that remain to-day, more from the reason that they carry, all of them, the solitary grace of amateurishness in the highest sense. To return to the unprofessional independence itself was his great triumph; his artistic fervour was from his priesthood. I know that he was a master in porcelain-making, picture-drawing, and also in lacquer-box designing (what a beautiful work of art is the writing box of raised lacquer called Sano Funahashi, to-day owned by the Imperial Museum of Tokyo); but it seems that he often betrayed that his first and last love was in his calligraphy. Once he was asked by Sambiakuin Konoye, a high nobleman of the Kyoto Court, the question who was the best penman of the day; it is said he replied, after a slight hesitation: “Well, then, the second best would be you, my Lord; and Shokado would be the third best.” The somewhat disappointed calligraphist of high rank in the court pressed Koyetsu: “Speak out, who is the first! There is nothing of ‘Well, then,’ about it.” Koyetsu replied: “This humble self is that first.” The remarkable part is that in his calligraphy Koyetsu never showed any streak of worldly vulgarity. Its illusive charm is that of a rivulet sliding through the autumnal flowers; when we call it impressive, that impressiveness is that of the sudden fall of the moon. To return to this THE STYLE CALLED “GYOSHO” hanging of his (thousand thanks to the Doctor) to which I look up to-day as a servant to his master, with all devotion. The sure proof of its being no mean art, I venture to say, is seen in its impressing me as the singular work of accident, like the blow of the wind or the sigh of the rain; it seems the writer (great Koyetsu) was never conscious, when he wrote it, of the paper on which he wrote, of the bamboo brush which he grasped. It is true that we cannot play our criticism against it; it is not our concern to ask how it was written, but only to look at and admire it. The characters are in the style called “gyosho,” or current hand, to distinguish from the “kaisho,” or square hand; and there is one more style under the name of “sosho,” or grass hand, that is an abbreviated cursive hand. As this was written in “gyo” style, it did not depend on elaborate patience but on the first stroke of fancy. I have no hesitation to say that, when it is said that the arts of the calligrapher and the painter are closely allied, the art of the calligrapher would be by just so much related with our art of living; the question is what course among the three styles we shall choose—the square formalism of “kaisho” or the “sosho”-like romanticism? It does no justice to call “gyosho” a middle road; when you know that your idealism is always born from the conventionalism of reality of “kaisho”-like materialism, it is not wrong to say that Koyetsu wisely selected a line of “gyosho”-like accentuation—not so fantastic as a “sosho” calligraph—with the tea-kettle and a few writing brushes, to make one best day before he fell into the final rest.
[II]
KENZAN
I used to pass by Zenyoji, a little Buddhist temple by the eastern side of Uyeno Hill (whose trees, almost a thousand years old, in the shape of a dragon, perhaps created by a Kano artist, have been ruined by the smoke that never departs from the railroad terminus), where I knew, from the calligraphic sign carved on a stone by the temple gate, that Kenzan Ogata, the famous artist on paper or porcelain, and younger brother of the great Korin, was buried in the graveyard within; but if I did not step in, as in fact I did not step in, although I passed by countless times, as I lived then in the neighbourhood of the temple in classical Negishi—classical in association with the nightingale and that wonderful pine-tree called Ogyo no Matsu (here also lived Hoitsu, the famous decadent of the early nineteenth century)—that was because I had little interest in any grave, even in Kenzan’s. And the temple looked so dusty, smoky, and altogether dirty. How sorry I felt in thinking that Kenzan’s artistic soul must be suffering from the snoring, growling, and hissing of the engines day and night. Alas, he could not foresee the future of a few hundred years when he died. But I welcomed the news when the sudden removal of the grave was reported as a result, a fortunate result indeed, of the expansion of the railway track; this time, to be sure, I thought, his grey-loving, solitary soul would be pleased to find a far better sleeping-place, as he was to be moved to the large old garden of the Kokka Club (a well-known artist club), with a deep pond where many gold fish peep underneath the umbrella-like lotus leaves in early summer, and in later autumn the hagi or two-coloured lespedezas (Kenzan’s beloved subject) would lean upon the water to admire their own images; and it is a matter thrice satisfactory to think that this new place is also in Negishi (which somehow recalls Hampstead, though there is no natural resemblance between them).
I was invited to attend the memorial exhibition of Kenzan’s work to commemorate the removal of his grave the other day. With the greatest anticipation I went there with two friends of mine, a fellow poet and an artist, both of them great admirers of Kenzan Ogata. When we entered the ground, we found at once that the Buddhist ceremony, that is the Sutra-reading called Kuya Nembutsu, around the newly dug grave by the lotus pond under the trees, was well started already; some ten or eleven priests, in fact the devoted members of the club, but in long black robes, were seen through the foliage from the distance, hopping around like the vagarious spirits of a moment (this fantastic ceremony, Kuya Nembutsu) while reciting the holy book; the voice of the recitation most musically broke the silence. We did not approach the grave, but went straight into the exhibition rooms, because we knew that the best prayer we could offer to Kenzan was to see and rightly appreciate his works of art. We all of us were unable to speak a word at the beginning, as our tongues (our heads too) lost their powers against his peculiarly distinguished art, which is the oldest and again the newest. When our minds became better composed, we sat in a corner of the room where the hangings of his flowers or trees, and the tea-bowls or incense-cases with his favourite designs, had been well arranged; we felt inclined to talk, even discuss his art.
THE OLDEST AND THE NEWEST
“What a pleasing egotism,” I ventured to say, “in that picture of lilies or this picture of fishes; the lilies and fishes are not an accessory as in many other Japanese pictures, but the lilies and fishes themselves in their full meaning. Again What a delightful egotism!”
“You might call flowers feminine,” my artist-friend interrupted me. “But I should like to know where is a thing more truly egotistic than the flowers.”