“That egotism in the picture,” I proceeded, “might be a real result from the great reverence and intense love of Kenzan for his subjects; we can see that his mind, when he painted them, was never troubled with any other thing or thought. You know that such only occurs to a truly gifted artist. After all, the greatness of Kenzan is his sincerity. And it goes without saying that the pictures on tea-bowls we see here are not things which were made to some one’s order. We become at once sincere and silent in their presence; to say that his art was spiritual is another way to express it—by that I mean that we are given all opportunities to imagine what the pictures themselves may not contain. Our imagination grows deeper and clearer through the virtue or magic of his work; and again his work appears thrice simplified and therefore more vital. The art really simple and vital is never to be troubled with any rhetoric or accessories of unessentials; before you make such a picture, you must have, to begin with, your own soul simplified and vital in the true sense. Kenzan had that indeed.”
“To call Kenzan’s work merely beautiful,” my friend-poet said, evidently in the same mind with myself, “whether it be the picture on paper or China-bowls, does no justice; what he truly aimed at was the artistic expression,—and he was EXPRESSION OF PERSONALITY most successful when he was most true. To him, as with the other great artists of East or West, the beauties only occurred—and Kenzan’s beauties occurred when his simple art was most decorative; in his decorativeness he found his own artistic emotion. It was his greatness that he made a perfect union of emotion and intellect in his work; to say shortly, he was the expression of personality.”
“What a personality was Kenzan’s! Again what a personality!” I exclaimed. I proceeded, as I wished to take up the talk where my friend poet had left off, “It is his personality by whose virtue even a little weed or insignificant spray of a willow-tree turns to a real art; he had that personality, because he had such a love and sympathy. Indeed the main question of the artist is in his love and sympathy; the external technique is altogether secondary. When you commune with the inner meaning, that is the beginning and also the ending. We see here the picture of a cherry-tree covered by the red blossoms, which might happen to be criticised as a bad drawing; but since it does appear as nothing but a cherry-tree, proud and lovely, I think that Kenzan’s artistic desire was fully answered. He was an artist, not merely either an illustrator or a designer. He was a true artist, therefore his work is ever so new like the moon and flowers; and again old, like the flowers and moon.”
“If the so-called post-impressionists could see Kenzan’s work!” my friend-artist suddenly ventured to exclaim, “I am sure that Vincent Van Gogh would be glad to have this six-leafed screen of poppy-flowers.”
“Really the picture is the soul of the flowers,” I said, “but not the external flowers. It is mystic as the flowers are mystic. And imagine Kenzan’s attitude when he drew that screen! I believe that he had the same reverence as when he stood in the religion of mysticism to paint a goddess; indeed his work was prayer and soul’s consolation. Though the subject was flowers, I have no hesitation to call the picture religious. I almost feel like lighting a candle and burning incense before this screen of poppies.”
As with other gifted artists, we see Kenzan’s real life behind his work. Some critic ably said that true art was an episode of life; I can imagine that, when his artistic fancy moved and his work was done, he must have thrown it aside into the waves of time, off-hand, most unceremoniously, and forgotten all about it. We can truly say of his works that they never owed one thing to money or payment for their existence—and that is the greatest praise we can give to any work of art. His material life might be said to have been quite fortunate in that he was invited to Yedo (present Tokyo) by the Prince of the Kanyeiji Temple of Uyeno, under whose patronage his THE BAPTISM OF POVERTY art was pleased to take its own free independent course; but his greatness is that when the Prince passed away and he was left to poverty, he never trembled and shrank under its cold cruel baptism; indeed that baptism made his personality far nobler, like the white flame from which the whiteness is taken out, and consequently his art was a thing created, as we say here, by the mind out of the world and dust. The works which to-day remain and are admired by us are mostly the work he executed after he reached his seventieth year. We have many reasons to be thankful for the fact that he left Kyoto, the old city of court nobles and ladies, somewhat effeminate, and the side of his brother Korin, whose great influence would have certainly made him a little Korin at the best; we see no distinction whatever in the work which he gave the world under Korin’s guidance. His art made a great stride after he appeared in the Yedo of the warriors and manliness and touched a different atmosphere from that of his former life; I will point, when you ask me for the proof, to the now-famous six-fold screen with the picture of plum-blossom, or the hanging also of the plum-blossom owned by the Imperial Museum. Oh, what a noble plum-blossom, which reminds us of a samurai’s heart, simple and brave!
[III]
UTAMARO
I feel I scent, in facing Utamaro’s ladies, whether with no soul or myriad souls (certainly ladies, be they courtesans or geishas, who never bartered their own beauty and songs away), the rich-soft passionate odour of rare old roses; when I say I hear the silken-delicate summer breezes winging in the picture, I mean that the Japanese sensuousness (is it the scent or pang of a lilac or thorn?) makes my senses shiver at the last moment when it finally turns to spirituality. It was our Japanese civilisation of soul, at least in olden time under Tokugawa’s regime, not to distinguish between sensuousness and spirituality, or to see at once the spiritual in the sensuous; I once wrote down as follows, upon the woman drawn by lines, or, more true to say, by the absence of lines, in snake-like litheness of attitude, I might say more subtle than Rossetti’s Lillith, with such eyes only opened to see love:
“Too common to say she is the beauty of line,