Chapter II: Part 2

Although the leaders of Ukiyo-ye followed so closely in the footsteps of Kiyonaga that his type of face stamps the years from 1780 to 1790, yet his style was too classic, too noble to suit the taste of the Yedo populace, which, in its thirst for realism, had become depraved. Rather than lower his standard he chose to resign, leaving the field to his followers, Yeishi, Utamaro and Toyokuni. These masters, at first as dignified in their method as Kiyonaga, now yielded to the public craze for the exaggerated, the abnormal and grotesque. It was an apotheosis of ugliness and vulgarity, a “Zolaism in prints.”

Coarse pictures of actors, masquerading in female dress, replaced the charming little domestic women of Harunobu and Koriusai,—the ladies of Japan, as we see them in reality,—and the noble figures of Kiyonaga. Gigantic courtesans, bizarre and fantastic, with delirious headgear, took the place of Shunsho’s fair children of the “Underworld,” who, in the modesty of their mien, seemed to belie the calling they so often deplored, as the songs of the Yoshiwara testify, plaintively sung to the syncopated rhythm of the samisen, tinkling through the summer nights.

The school of Ukiyo-ye was sinking into obscurity, when Hiroshige and Hokusai appeared, two children of light, dispersing the gloom: Hiroshige, the versatile painter, lover of landscape and ethereal artist of snow and mist; Hokusai, the prophet, and regenerator of Ukiyo-ye. He was the artisan-artist, in the land which recognizes no inferior arts, and the Mang-wa, consisting of studies as spontaneously thrown off as those in the sketch-book Giorgione carried in his girdle, was published for the use of workmen. Living in simplicity and poverty he gave his life to the people, and the impression of his genius is stamped upon their work. A true handicraftsman was Hokusai,—the Mang-wa a dictionary of the arts and crafts, as well as the inspired vehicle of art. In it “balance, rhythm and harmony, the modes in which Beauty is revealed, both in nature and art,” were manifested,—for he was a vital artist, laying bare the enigma of evolution, and the mystery of creation.

Utamaro.

Le Fondateur de L’École de la Vie.

The above title is quoted from the work of M. Edmond de Goncourt, “as one having authority,” there being many claimants to the leadership of Ukiyo-ye (the floating world), the Popular School of Japanese Art. In the life of Utamaro, M. de Goncourt, in exquisite language and with analytical skill, has interpreted for us the meaning of that form of Japanese art which found its chief expression in the use of the wooden block for colour-printing, and to glance appreciatively at the work of both artist and author is the motive of this sketch.

The Ukiyo-ye print, despised by the haughty Japanese aristocracy, became the vehicle of art for the common people of Japan, and the names of the artists who aided in its development are familiarly quoted in every studio, whilst the classic painters of “Tosa” and “Kano” are comparatively rarely mentioned. The consensus of opinion in Japan during the lifetime of Utamaro agrees with the verdict of M. de Goncourt. No artist was more popular. His atelier was besieged by editors giving orders, and in the country his works were eagerly sought after, when those of his famous contemporary, Toyokuni, were but little known. In the “Barque of Utamaro,” a famous surimono, the title of which forms a pretty play upon words, _maro_ being the Japanese for vessel, the seal of supremacy is set upon the artist. Here he is represented as holding court in a gaily decorated barge, surrounded by a bevy of beauty paying homage to his genius. He was essentially the painter of women, and though M. de Goncourt sets forth his astonishing versatility, he yet entitles his work, “Outamaro, le Peintre des Maisons Vertes.”

The beautiful inhabitants of these celebrated houses of the Yoshiwara (the flower quarter) of Yedo had ever been sought as models by the artists of Ukiyo-ye. But, alas! the sensuous poetic-artistic temperament of Utamaro, undisciplined and uncontrolled, led to his undoing. The pleasure-loving artist, recognizing no creed but the worship of beauty, refusing to be bound by any fetters but those of fancy, fell at last into the lowest depths of degradation, physical and moral. And this debasement of their leader, tainting his art, was reflected in the work of his brother artists and hastened the decadence of the Popular School.

To understand the influences which sapped the self-control of the gay and beauty-loving Utamaro, we have only to glance at the text by Jipensha Ikkou of “The Annuary of the Green Houses,” two volumes of prints in colour, so marvellously beautiful that they caused the artist to be recognized as, in a sense, the official painter of the Yoshiwara. The writer thus sums up the fatal fascination of the inmates, the courtesans of highest rank, who alone were depicted by Utamaro. “The daughters of the Yoshiwara are brought up like princesses. From infancy they are given the most finished education” (from the Japanese standpoint, be it observed). “They are taught reading, writing, art, music, _le thé_, _le parfum_” (in the game of scents, the art is to guess by inhaling the odour of burning perfumes the secret of their composition). “Their entourage is that of princesses, brought up in the seclusion of the palace. Coming from all parts of the ‘Land of the Rising Sun,’ they must discard their individual patois and learn to speak the archaic tongue, slightly modified, the poetical, the noble language of the court from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.”

In the home of the celebrated Tsutaya Juzabro, who edited the most beautiful books of the time, in his early impressionable youth lived Utamaro, within a stone’s throw of the great gate leading to the Yoshiwara. By day he devoted himself to his art, by night he surrendered himself to the fatal enchantment of that brilliant “Underworld,” until, like Merlin, ensnared by Vivian, with the charm of “woven paces and waving hands,” his art sapped by excesses, he became “lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.”

Let us, forgetting this sad sequel, glance at the works which testify to the life of high artistic endeavour led by Utamaro in the early part of his career. In the preface to the “Yehon Moushi Yerabi” (Chosen Insects), the master of Utamaro, Toriyama Sekiyen, throws so charming a sidelight upon the youth of the artist, that the temptation to quote is irresistible. The value of these Japanese prefaces to the world, to workers in every field, is incalculable. At the outset of his work, M. de Goncourt alludes to the well-known preface of Hokusai in the “Fugaku Hiak’kei,” and doubtless fortified himself by the stimulating example of the old master, when undertaking at the age of seventy the great task of presenting to the Western world, under the title of “L’Art Japonais,” a history of five noted painters, besides that of other artists in bronze and lacquer, pottery and iron—artists in a land where the terms artist and artisan are interchangeable, the only country where art industrial almost always touches grand art.

The translator of the preface of Sekiyen is gratefully referred to by M. de Goncourt as “l’intelligent, le savant, l’aimable M. Hyashi.” It may be considered a revolutionary manifesto of the Profane School, the school of real life, in opposition to the hierarchical Buddhist academies of Kano and Tosa, which had become stultified by tradition and stifled by conventional observances.

“Préface écrite par Toriyama Sekiyen, le maître d’Outamaro, célébrant le naturisme (sorti du cœur) de son petit, de son cher élève Outa.” “Reproduire la vie par le cœur, et en dessiner la structure au pinceau, est la loi de la peinture. L’étude que vient de publier maintenant, mon élève Outamaro, reproduit la vie même du monde des insectes. C’est la vraie peinture du cœur. Et quand je me souviens d’autrefois, je me rappelle que dès l’enfance, le petit Outa, observait le plus infini détail des choses. Ainsi à l’automne, quand il était dans le jardin, il se mettait en chasse des insectes, et que ce soit un criquet où une sauterelle, avait-il fait une prise, il gardait la bestiole dans sa main et s’amusait à l’étudier. Et combien de fois je l’ai grondé dans l’appréhension qu’il ne prenne l’habitude, de donner la mort à des êtres vivants. Maintenant qu’il a acquis son grand talent du pinceau, il fait de ces études d’insectes, la gloire de sa profession.”

The enthusiastic master of _le petit Outa_ proceeds to rhapsodize upon his pupil’s genius and intimate knowledge of the structure of insects. “He makes us hear,” he says, “the shrilling of the tamamoushi,” the cicada of Japan, whose endless peevish twanging upon one string forms an underlying accompaniment to the harmonies of long summer days. “He borrows the light weapons of the grasshopper for making war; he exhibits the dexterity of the earthworm, boring the soil under the foundations of old buildings; he penetrates the mysteries of nature in the groping of the larvæ, in the lighting of his path by the glow-worm, and he ends by disentangling the end of the thread of the spider’s web.”

The colour-printing of these insects is a miracle of art, says M. de Goncourt, and there is nothing comparable to it in Europe. Of the methods by which these colour prints are brought to such a height of perfection, it is almost impossible to speak authoritatively. They are the result of a threefold combination: of a paper marvellously prepared from the bark of the shrub, _Kozo_, diluted with the milk of rice flour and a gummy decoction extracted from the roots of the hydrangea and hibiscus; of dyes, into the secret of whose alchemy no modern artist can penetrate, it being safe to say the early “Tan-ye” and “Beni-ye” prints can never be reproduced; of the application of those colours by the master engraver’s fingers—that wizard hand of the Orient into whose finger-tips are distilled the mysteries of bygone centuries. A portion of the colour by means of this calculated pressure is drunk, absorbed into the paper, and only the transparency is left vibrating upon the fibres, like colour beneath the glaze.

The “Catalogue Raisonné” of M. de Goncourt is a prose masterpiece. His descriptive touches, like pastels set in jewels, captivate the imagination. Through him we see the albums, the fans, the kakemonos, the surimonos. Oh, the prints, with their wondrous backgrounds, the delight of Utamaro! Sometimes straw-yellow, the uniformity broken with clouds of ground mica; sometimes gray in tint, like the traces of receding waves upon the beach. Some silvered backgrounds throw moonlight reflections upon the figures; some are sombre, bizarre—all are marvellous beyond words. And the colours! we cannot define them in English. The “bleus” (malades des mauves), the “rose” (beni) “si peu de rose, qu’ils semblent s’apercevoir à travers un tulle; l’azur—délavé, et comme noyé dans l’eau,”—not colours, but nuances, which recall the colours. And the “Gauffrage,” so effective with the print artists, with us a mere confectioner’s touch!

It is said that “the æsthetic temperament of a nation is most subtly felt in the use of colour. Purity, coldness, sensuality, brightness, dullness of tints, are significant terms correlated to mental and physical human phenomena.” The assertion of Ruskin, that “the bodily system is in a healthy state when we can see hues clearly in their most delicate tints, and enjoy them, fully and simply, with the kind of enjoyment children have in eating sweet things,” is brought to mind in viewing the Japanese people upon the occasion of one of their great flower fêtes, feasting their eyes upon cherry blooms or trailing clusters of the wistaria.

Utamaro planned schemes of colour and devised harmonies—themes which, improvised upon and endlessly imitated by his artist confrères, filled his own countrymen with delight and ravished the hearts of Parisian painters. The influence of Utamaro, Hiroshige and the other masters of Ukiyo-ye revolutionized the colour-sense of the art world, so that Theodore Child, writing in 1892, remarks of the Japanese influence: “The Paris Salon of today as compared with the salon of ten years ago is like a May morning compared with a dark November day.”

The same keen observation and technical skill which would have made Utamaro a famous naturalist is shown in his marvellous studies of women. He was the first Japanese artist who deviated from the traditional manner of treating the face. The academic style demanded the nose to be suggested by one calligraphic, aquiline stroke, the eyes to be mere slits, the mouth the curled up petal of a flower. Utamaro blent with this convention, so little human, a mutinous grace, a spiritual comprehension; he kept the consecrated lines, but made them approach the human. These “effigies of women” became individuals; in one word, he is an idealist, he “makes a goddess out of a courtesan.” No detail of her anatomy escapes his eye, no grace of line or beauty of contour. M. de Goncourt, in detailing the great prints of Utamaro, transports us to the Orient. He unrolls the film of memory, so that again the Japanese woman stands, reclines, and lives before us.

“Vous avez la Japonaise en tous les mouvements intimes de son corps; vous l’avez, dans ses appuiements de tête, sur le dos de sa main, quand elle réfléchit, dans ses agenouillements, les paumes de ses mains appuyées sur les cuisses, quand elle écoute, dans sa parole, jetée de côté, la tête un peu tournée, et qui la montre dans les aspects si joliment fuyants d’un profil perdu; vous l’avez dans sa contemplation amoureuse des fleurs qu’elle regarde aplatie à terre; vous l’avez dans ses renversements où légèrement elle pose, à demi assise, sur la balustrade d’un balcon; vous l’avez dans ses lectures, où elle lit dans le volume, tout près de ses yeux, les deux coudes appuyés sur ses genoux; vous l’avez dans sa toilette qu’elle fait avec une main tenant devant elle, son petit miroir de métal, tandis que de l’autre main passée derrière elle, elle se caresse distraitement la nuque de son écran; vous l’avez dans le contournement de sa main autour d’une coupe de saké, dans l’attouchement délicat et recroquevillé de ses doigts de singe, autour des laques, des porcelaines, des petits objets artistiques de son pays; vous l’avez enfin, la femme de l’Empire-du-Lever-du-Soleil, en sa grace grâce languide, et son coquet rampement sur les nattes du parquet.”

To translate is to travesty, for the French language seems to be the only medium through which can be filtered the nuances of Japanese thought, which elude the ordinary elements of language, like the perfume of flowers, the bouquet of delicate vintages. Our blunt Anglo-Saxon mars that picture language, where one flexible, curved calligraphic stroke conveys to the æsthetically receptive oriental imagination what stanzas of rhyming rhapsody fail to define. Sir Edwin Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn approach the French, are, so to speak, orientalized. Ordinary English fails to give a Japanese equivalent. It is too emphatic, too objective; it suggests the dominant British hobnail upon the delicate Tea-house tatami—that immaculate, beautiful matting, into whose uniform lines embroidered draperies dissolve deliciously. Oh, those dreams of dresses!—the warp and woof of the visions of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, of Harunobu and Kiyonaga, Toyokuni and Kunisada, and all the rest, the idols of Parisian colourists!

“For us,” says M. de Goncourt, “Utamaro painted violet dresses, where, upon the border, _degradation rosée_” (fading into Beni, that mystic tint, the spirit of ashes of rose), “birds are swooping,—violet dresses, across which woven in light, zigzag insect characters, composing the Japanese alphabet,—violet dresses, where Corean lions, grim and ferocious, crouch, gleaming in shading of old bronze within the purple folds! Dresses of mauve, smoky, shading into bistre, where the purple iris unsheathes its head from the slender gray-green stalk!” Mourasiki-ya (maison mauve) was the name of the atelier of Utamaro. “Robes of that milky blue the Chinese call ‘blue of the sky after the rain,’ beneath clusters of pale rose peonies; dresses of silvery gray, fretted with sprays of flowering shrubs, making a misty moonshine; pea-green dresses, enamelled with rosy cherry blooms; green dresses, fading into watery tints, hidden by groups of the pawlonia, the coat of arms of the reigning family; purple costumes, channelled with water courses, where mandarin ducks pursue each other around the hem. Oh, the beautiful black backgrounds, controlling the scintillating mass of colour! Black robes sown with chrysanthemums, or showered with pine-needles, worked in white. Black dresses, where finely woven baskets are mingled with sceptres of office! ‘Oh! les belles robes!’ he cries, where flights of cranes dissolve into the distance, where birds are fluttering, where lacy fretwork of fans and little garlands are interwoven!—a motive delighted in by Utamaro as a framework for beloved faces.” All that is beautiful in nature and art lived and breathed in these dresses, upon which the loving hand of the painter left a grace in every fold.

The early inspirer of Utamaro’s genius was Kiyonaga, who had restored the glory of the school of Torii—the printer’s branch of Ukiyo-ye, which had sunk into temporary oblivion under the waning powers of Kiyomitsu. The atelier of Kiyonaga became the sanctuary of the artists of Ukiyo-ye, who, upon entering, forsook their individual traditions. There worshipped Toyokuni of Utagawa; Yeishi, the scion of classic and aristocratic Kano; and at the master’s feet sat the Young Utamaro, absorbing his methods until, in his early compositions, said M. de Goncourt, the technique and mannerisms of Kiyonaga “saute aux yeux.”

The influence of Kiyonaga pervades his most beautiful work; but later, under a life of constant self-indulgence, amongst associations all tending to demoralization, his genius suffered an eclipse. His loss of self-control affected his art, until the sweeping lines and noble contours which his brush had acquired in the atelier of Kiyonaga were lost or widely travestied into a “delirium of female tallness.” In these wild flights his brother artists followed in headlong pursuit, and the contagion of the movement swept the studios of Paris. In the modern poster we see the degenerate offspring of the genius of Utamaro, and of Toyokuni. Professor Fenollosa said, “The generation of Aubrey Beardsley prefer these tricks to the sober grace of Harunobu, Kiyonaga and Koriusai.” It is art born of excess, a “Zolaism in prints.”

The horrors of diseased imagination, the visions begotten of absinthe, which blot the brilliant pages of De Maupassant and the verse of Paul Verlaine, were reflected by Utamaro in his studies of the loathsome and the abnormal, where Montaigne declares, “L’esprit faisant le cheval eschappé, enfante des chimères.” The blasphemous impieties of this culte, deplored by all true Frenchmen, in the country of Hugo and Molière, were distanced by Utamaro, who suborned his art, his cynical brush caricaturing under the distorted figures of noted courtesans the saints and sages of the sacred Buddhist legends. Trading upon his vast popularity, he issued a pictorial satire upon one of the famous Shoguns, but this act of lèse-majesté brought him into disfavour with the reigning Shogun, the Louis XV of Japan, an artistic voluptuary, like his prototype, the subject of Utamaro’s cartoon, and the artist was condemned and cast into prison. From his cell the gay butterfly of the Yoshiwara emerged, spent and enfeebled, daring no more flights of fancy, and dying in 1806, before he reached his fiftieth year, from the effects of his confinement and the misuse of pleasure.

Oh, the pity of it! the profound pathos in the picture, in Sekiyen’s preface of the little “Outa” holding his treasured prize, “la petite bestiole,”—the childish artist-hands of the embryo master clasping the insect so gently to preserve its ephemeral life, yet later plunging into the dissipation and excesses which shortened his own. Living with the déclassé, however we may gloss their imperfections and cover with the cloak of charity their sorrowful calling, he became himself a cynic, an outcast, an iconoclast, learning that “hardening of the heart which brings

“Irreverence for the dreams of youth.”

Though Utamaro was one of the greatest of the popular artists, his demoralization led to the decadence of his school, which later was regenerated by the great master of Ukiyo-ye, Hokusai, the artist of the people. In Hokusai, “Dreaming the things of Heaven and of Buddha,” breathed the pure spirit of art,—that Spirit of poetry and purity which calls to us in Milton’s immortal lines:

“Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue; she alone is free.
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.”

The Romance of Hokusai.

Master of Ukiyo-ye.

“_From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-five I have learned a little about the real structure of nature,—of animals, plants and trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do—be it but a line or dot—will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I, to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five by me,—once Hokusai,—today Gwakio-rojin, ‘the old man, mad about drawing.’_”

“_Ars longa, vita brevis_,” though a time-worn aphorism, seems the best comment upon these words of Hokusai, which preface the “Fugaku Hiak’kei” (Hundred Views of Fuji). Judging from what he had accomplished, before his death in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, and the continual increase in his powers, it is easy to believe that had his life been extended to the limit he craved, the prophecy would have been fulfilled.

M. Louis Gonse says of Hokusai, “He is the last and most brilliant figure of a progress of more than ten centuries—the exuberant and exquisite product of a time of profound peace and incomparable refinement.”

From the standpoint of Buddhism, Hokusai was the crowning glory, the supreme efflorescence of countless previous incarnations. In his career he epitomized the theory of evolution, the embryonic stages being exemplified by his progress through the schools. Trained in the atelier of Shunsho, the most skillful exponent of Ukiyo-ye art, he rapidly absorbed the methods of his master; but even the Popular School was trammelled by convention, and Hokusai’s genius, rejecting academic fetters, winged its flight through all the realms of oriental art.

He drank at the fountain-head of China, then absorbed the traditions of the “two great streams of Kano and Tosa, which flowed without mixing to the middle of the eighteenth century.” Kano, springing from Chinese models, was transformed by the genius of Masanobu and his followers, and became the most illustrious school of painting in Japan. It was the official school of the Shoguns, in opposition to “Tosa”—that elegant and exquisite appanage of the Mikados, which represented aristocratic taste.

The Tosa school is characterized by extreme delicacy of execution and fine use of the brush, as in Persian miniature painting. The splendour of the screens of Tosa has never been surpassed, with their precious harmonies in colour and delicate designs (so often imitated in lacquer), against glorious backgrounds in rich gold-leaf.

He studied the technique of Okio, founder of the school of realism, which, maturing at Kyoto, led up to “Ukiyo-ye,” the popular art of the masses of Yedo. Ukiyo-ye, literally “The Floating World,” despised by the ascetic disciples of Buddha and Confucius for picturing the gay world of fashion and folly, was the name of the school which liberated Japanese art from the shackles of centuries of tradition.

Ukiyo-ye is the supreme expression, the concentrated essence of the schools, a river of art whose fount was India, Persia and China. For centuries it was forced into narrow channels by the haughty and exclusive aristocracy; but ever widening, its branches at last united and swept into their joyous current the common people of Japan, who, intuitively art lovers, had ever thirsted for the living stream. Now they beheld themselves reflected, in all the naturalness of daily life, yet with a spiritual rendering, “appealing,” said Jarves, “to those intuitions with which the soul is freighted when it first comes to earth, whose force is ever manifested by a longing for an ideal not of the earth, and whose presence can only be explained as an augury of a superior life to be, or else the dim reminiscence of one gone; and the recognition of this ideal is the touchstone of art—art which then becomes the solution of immortality.”

The originators of Ukiyo-ye, which included in its scope painting proper, book illustration and single-sheet pictorial prints, were Iwasa Matahei and Moronobu, followed in long succession by Shunsui, the precursor of Hokusai’s master, Shunsho; and united with it were the engravers of the Torii school, culminating in Kiyonaga (with whose grace and beauty of line Hokusai could never compete), the refined offshoot of the Kitao, and the elegant scion of Kano—Yeishi.

Hokusai’s individuality and independence long galled his master, and a final rupture was caused by the pupil’s enthusiasm for the bold and sweeping, black-and-white, calligraphic strokes of Kano. Then began a hard struggle for the youthful artist, who had no money and no influence. His father was a maker of metal mirrors, Hokusai’s real name being Nakajima Tetsu Jiro, but his pseudonyms were legion. In the atelier of Shunsho, he was called Shunro,—taking with the other disciples of this school of Katsukawa, the first syllable of his master’s name.

Cast adrift upon the streets of Yedo, he sold red pepper, and hawked almanacs, at the same time constantly studying, and seizing the best ideas from all the schools. Blent with an intuitive instinct for art, the Japanese nature is essentially histrionic, and throughout the whole career of Hokusai there is an element which is genuinely dramatic. C. J. Holmes, in his beautiful work on Hokusai, gives many romantic incidents in the artist’s life, and was it not by a theatrical _tour de force_ that he first won popular favour?

He chose no doubt a national holiday, perhaps the festival of “Cherry Viewing,” when Uyeno Park is thronged with sightseers of every station in life. Here in the heart of the great city of Tokyo is a hallowed spot—majestic, grand and peaceful, where in mystic solemnity the sacred cedars enshrine that wondrous necropolis of illustrious dead,—for at Uyeno lie buried six of the famous Shoguns.

In the courtyard of one of the temples, Hokusai erected a rough scaffolding, upon which was spread a sheet of paper, eighteen yards long and eleven in width. Here in the sacred heart of Japan, with tubs of water and tubs of ink, the master and predestined genius of his country manifested his power. He swept his huge brush this way and that, the crowd constantly increasing in density, many scaling the temple roof to see the marvellous feat,—a colossal figure, springing into life at the touch of the creator. All who know his work can in imagination picture the grand sweeping curves and graduated shadings that the magic broom evolved; and the artistic people gazed spell-bound, while many a murmured “Naruhodo!” (Wonderful) and sibilant inhalation of the breath marked their recognition of the master’s power.

Displaying less of the artist than the genius at legerdemain were Hokusai’s street tricks—almost reprehensible did we not know the dire straits to which genius is often reduced. An eager expectant crowd dogged his footsteps and watched with delighted curiosity, while he sketched landscapes, upside down, with an egg or a bottle, or a wine measure, anything that came to his hand,—changing with bewildering effect from huge figures of Chinese heroes and demigods to microscopic drawings on grains of rice, and pictures made out of chance blots of ink.

His fame was noised abroad, and at last reached the ears of the Shogun, and now an unprecedented honour was conferred upon the humble apostle of the artisan, for he was summoned before the august presence to give an exhibition of his skill. The Japanese are ever imitative, and Hokusai may have borne in mind the legend of his prototype Sesshiu, an artist-priest of the fifteenth century, who sketched before the Emperor of China a marvellous dragon, with splashes from a broom plunged in ink.

Still more spectacular and theatrical was Hokusai’s debut, for, spreading a sheet of paper before the feet of the monarch, he covered it with a blue wash,—then seizing a live cock, he daubed its feet with a red pigment, and let it run over the wet colour, when the Shogun and his astonished courtiers beheld a flowing stream of liquid blue, upon which appeared to float filmy segregated petals of red maple leaves. A mere trick!—unworthy of genius, we might say, but Hokusai had gauged his countrymen, and knew that his _jeu d’esprit_ would arouse and impress these aristocratic connoisseurs, jaded with ceremonial observances, more than any display of technical knowledge,—for the Japanese, as a nation, are naively childish in their love of novelty and amusement, and of the unusual and bizarre.

Is it not possible that this trickery of the master may have unconsciously supplied the motive for Hiroshige’s famous print of a Yedo suburb, chosen by Professor Fenollosa, in his beautiful work on Ukiyo-ye,—where he so poetically says, “the orange fire of maples deepens the blue of marshy pools”?

Space does not permit any detailed description of the compositions of Hokusai, and there is no complete catalogue of his works, the one nearest to accuracy being M. Edmond de Goncourt’s _Catalogue raisonné_. His fecundity was marvellous. He illustrated books of all kinds, poetry, comic albums, accounts of travels,—in fact his works are an encyclopedia of Japanese life. His paintings are scattered, and countless numbers lost, many being merely ephemeral drawings, thrown off for the passing pleasure of the populace. The original designs for the prints were transferred to the blocks, and lost, though the master rigidly superintended the reproduction of his works, and his wood-cutters were trained to follow the graceful sweeping curves with perfect accuracy, many of his compositions being ruled across for exact reduction.

Ukiyo-ye art is bound up with print development, and the climax of xylography had been reached in the time of Hokusai. Japanese book illustration, and single-sheet printing, revolutionized the world’s art. The great connoisseurs of colour tell us that nowhere else is there anything like it,—so rich and so full, that a print comes to have every quality of a complete painting.

Hokusai had served a four years’ apprenticeship to the school of engraving, and his practiced eye was ever ready to detect any inaccuracy in his workmen. “I warn the engraver,” he said, “not to add an eyeball underneath when I do not draw one. As to the nose, these two are mine,”—here he draws a nose in front and in profile,—“I will not have the nose of Utagawa.” The greatest difference exists in the beauty and colouring of the impressions, and the amateur, in his search for Ukiyo-ye gems, should not trust his unaided judgment.

M. Louis Gonse said of the surimono, “To me they are the most seductive morsels of Japanese art.” They are small, oblong prints, composed as programmes for festive occasions with a text of verse enriched by exquisite illustration. The surimono of Hokusai showed the influence of Tosa, the decoration being very elaborate, and delicate as a Persian miniature. In places, the surface of the print is goffered for ornament in relief, and the colouring is enforced by inlaying in gold, silver, bronze and tin.

Some of the best examples of Hokusai’s art are the “Waterfalls,” the “Bridges,” “Thirty-six Views of Fuji,” the “Gwafu,” the “Hundred Views of Fuji” (of which the finest edition was brought out in London with a commentary by Mr. F. V. Dickins), and the fifteen volumes of the “Mang-wa,”—a term hardly translatable, but signifying fugitive sketches, or drawing as it comes, spontaneously. The preface best gives us the intention of the master.

“Under the roof of Boksenn, in Nagoya, he dreamed and drew some three hundred compositions. The things of Heaven and of Buddha, the life of men and women, even birds and beasts, plants and trees, he has included them all, and under his brush every phase and form of existence has arisen. The master has tried to give life to everything he has painted, and the joy and happiness so faithfully expressed in his work are a plain proof of his victory.”

Hokusai has been called the king of the artisans, and it was for them especially that he composed the drawings of Mang-wa. His influence is expressed in all their works: in the structure of the roofs of temples, in houses and their interiors; upon the things of every-day life, as upon flowers and landscapes, upon lacquer, inros and netsukis, bronzes and ivory.

Gustave Geffroy truly gauged the genius of Hokusai in speaking of his “flights beyond the horizon.” In the master we recognize the creator. He feels the mystery of the birth of mountains, as in that weird composition of Fuji, where the great cone is seen rising above circle upon circle of serpentine coils, forming the mystic tomoyé—symbol of creation and eternity. He feels the pulsation of the universe, and the life of ocean, and in a frenzy of creative power, beneath his hand the curved crests of foaming waves break into life, flashing into countless sea-birds born of the froth of ocean. He is the painter of chimera, the prophet of cataclysm; he “gives the world a shake and invents chaos.” How vivid is Holmes’ description of the wave in the seventh Mang-wa!

“Man becomes a mere insect, crouching in his frail catamaran, as the giant billow topples and shakes far above him. The convention of black lines with which he represents falling rain is as effectual as his conventions for water are fanciful. The storm of Rembrandt, of Rubens, or of Turner, is often terrible but never really wet; Constable gets the effect of wetness, but his storms are not terrible. Hokusai knows how a gale lashes water into foam, and bows the tree before it; how the gusts blow the people hither and thither, how sheets of drenching rain half veil a landscape, how the great white cone of his beloved Fuji gleams through a steady downpour! His lightning is rather odd in comparison with the realistic studies of the great artists of Europe, but what European ever tried an effect so stupendous as that recorded in ‘Fugaku Hiak’kei,’ where the snowy top of Fuji is seen at evening, crimson with the last fiery rays of sunset, while all the flanks of the mountain are hidden by a dark storm-cloud, through which the lightning flashes!”

Poetry and art are ever allied, and the vibrations of genius encircle the globe. Byron and Ruskin and Hokusai were contemporaries. Possibly at the very moment when the poet was immortalizing himself by composing his “Storm in the Alps,” the grand “old man, mad about drawing,” was sketching the peerless mountain:—

“Far along
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the loud thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.”

Lord Byron’s vivid pen also best describes the squally storms of both Hiroshige and Hokusai,—where

“The big rain comes dancing to the earth.”

Was not Hokusai truly “a portion of the tempest”? as he represents himself, drawing Fuji, in winter, working in a frenzy of haste,—for the ground is covered with snow—two brushes in his hand, and wonder of wonders! one held between his toes. This picture, also from “The Hundred Views of Fuji,” prefaces Marcus B. Huish’s work on Japanese art.

The closing scene in the drama of Hokusai’s life is full of pathos. Though his whole career had been shadowed by poverty, and shrouded in obscurity, his art still held him earth-bound. Upon his death-bed he said, “If Heaven would only grant me ten more years!”

Then, as he realized that the end approached, he murmured, “If Heaven had but granted me five more years I could have been a real painter.”

So ended the life of the master of Ukiyo-ye. His body lies beneath the pines of Asakusa, but would we not gladly believe that his “soul turned Will-o’-the-wisp, may ever come and go at ease, over the summer fields,”—for this was the last expression of his passionate desire.

Hiroshige.

Landscape Painter and Apostle of Impressionism.

If the lovely “Land of the Rising Sun” should, during one of those volcanic throes which threaten her extinction, sink forever beneath the depths of ocean, she would yet live for us through the magic brush of Hiroshige. Gazing at his landscapes, the airy wing of imagination wafts us to a land of showers and sunsets—a fairy scene, where the rainbow falls to earth, shattered into a thousand prisms—where waters softly flow towards horizons touched with daffodil or azure tinted.

Here is a gliding _sampan_ with closed shutters. Inside, the lantern’s diffused light throws a silhouette upon the bamboo curtain, a drooping girlish head bending towards the unseen lover at her feet. Ripples play upon the water, stirred by the amorous breath of oriental night. In fancy we hear the tinkling of the samisen, touched by delicate fingers, sweetly perfumed.

Now we see rain upon the Tokaido. A skurrying storm. Affrighted coolies running this way and that. A mountain full of echoes and horror. Down it splash rivulets, running into inky pools. Darkness and terror and loneliness, and longing for warmth and shelter and the peace of home.

In marked contrast is one of the “Seven Impressions of Hakone.” A glad reveille. The sun breaks out, the clouds have burst asunder, masses of vapour float here and there. All is chaotic, untamed, a palette wildly mingled.

The Japanese so dearly love Nature, in all her moods, that when she dons her mantle of snow they hesitate, even when necessity compels, to sully its purity. In one of Utamaro’s prints, sweetly entitled by M. Edmond de Goncourt “La Nature Argentée,” a little musüme is seen searching the snowy landscape she loves, and, hating to blot the beautiful carpet, she cries, “Oh, the beautiful new snow! Where shall I throw the tea-leaves?” With Hiroshige, the artist of snow and mist, we feel this love, and so successfully, does he deal with a snowy landscape that we see the snow in masses, luminous, soft and unsullied, as if Nature had lent a helping hand to portray her pure white magic. So, without formula or technique, but absolutely and sincerely, he unrolls the winter pageant before us.

The Japanese landscape painter sums up nature in broad lines, to which all details are more or less subordinated. This rendering of the momentary vision of life and light,—the spirit, not the letter of the scene,—is what is meant by Impressionism. Whereas, however the French impressionists express light by modelling surfaces, the Japanese adhere rigidly to line, and rely upon gradations of colour and the effect of washes to produce the illusion of light. Their landscape is expressed in clear-cut lines and flat masses of colour. In the prints this virtue of abstract line is exemplified, the outline being the essential element of the composition, for upon line and arrangements of balanced colour the artist must depend, cramped as he is by the necessities of the wood-cut. And here he displays his wonderful ingenuity, his fineness of gradations and opposition, his boldness and infinity of device, and in spite of the limitations which hamper him, he realizes absolute values in the narrowest range, by virtue of his knowledge of lines and spaces.

“No scientifically taught artist,” said Jarves, “can get into as few square inches of paper a more distinct realization of space, distance, atmosphere, perspective and landscape generally, not to mention sentiment and feeling.”

This virtue of the line is the inheritance of the Japanese, the consummate handling of the brush almost a racial instinct. From China, far back in the centuries, came the sweeping calligraphic stroke, of which in Japan the school of Kano became the noblest exponent. “_L’école_,” said M. de Goncourt, “_des audaces et de la bravoure du faire, l’école tantôt aux écrasements du pinceau, tantôt aux ténuités d’un cheveu._”

As soon as the tiny hand of the Japanese baby can grasp the brush its art education begins. The brush is the Japanese alphabet—it is their fairy wand, their playmate—they learn to paint intuitively, though later the most assiduous study is given to acquire the characteristic touch of the school with which they affiliate. The brush is their _génie_, subservient to their imagination; they master and “juggle” with it. For no foreign taught technique will they barter their birthright.

And our masters and instructors in art more and more recognize the value of initial brush-work. The following excerpt from Walter Crane, in _Line and Form_, might serve as a preface to a work on Hokusai or Hiroshige: “The practice of forming letters with the brush afforded a very good preliminary practice to a student of line and form. An important attribute of line is its power of expressing or suggesting movement. Undulating lines always suggest action and unrest or the resistance of force of some kind. The firm-set yet soft feathers of a bird must be rendered by a different touch from the shining scales of a fish. The hair and horns of animals, delicate human features, flowers, the sinuous lines of drapery, or the massive folds of heavy robes, all demand from the draughtsman in line different kinds of suggestive expression.”

We are told that Hiroshige began his career by making pictures in coloured sands on an adhesive background, to amuse the public, and perhaps this artistic juggling helped him later in arranging his schemes of colour, for the limitations of the block demanded almost equal simplicity in composition.

The impressions of Lake Biwa, one of Hiroshige’s finest series of views, serve as a beautiful illustration of the almost exclusive use of line in bringing out the salient characteristics of the landscape. His sweeping brush shows us volcanic mountains, encircling the lake, like rocky billows, torn and jagged, for legend says that as the peerless mountain Fuji-san rose in one night, so the ground sank, and the space was filled by the beautiful lake named from its resemblance in form to the Japanese lute. The trees which fringe the shore, black and misty, upon close inspection resolve themselves into a network of criss-cross lines and blotches. The sampans’ sails, the waves, the rushes on the shore, the roofs of the village nestling beneath the cliffs, are all adroitly rendered by horizontal lines and skillful zigzags. The rest of the composition is a wash of shaded blues and grays, fading towards the horizon into smoky violets.

Biwa, the beautiful, suggestive of mystery, the four-stringed lute gives thee her name. Through the music of thy rippling eddies do sighs well up in thee, the murmur of the lost? A pall of darkness hovers over thee, pierced by a gleam of sunshine, beckoning like a lover’s hand.

Much diversity of opinion exists with regard to the identity of the artist, or artists, who designed the prints signed Hiroshige. The latest research, however, justifies the assertion that there was but one landscape painter, Hiroshige the Great.

The pupils,—notably one, who, among other names, signed Shigenobu, until after his master’s death, when he took the title of Hiroshige the Second, gradually assuming his full _nom-de-pinceau_, Hiroshige Ichiryusai,—faithfully imitated his style, also amplifying the multitudinous designs and sketches made by the master, yet the genius of the great artist is stamped upon his work, and as a clever critic tersely says: “Everything he touched was his autograph.”

Mr. John S. Happer, an indefatigable student of Ukiyo-ye and collector of nishiki-ye gems, during diligent research, discovered a clew that leads, beyond controversy, to the right attribution of the prints signed Hiroshige, and which he intends later to make public. Nearly all the important vertical sets, he says, most of which have been ascribed to the second Hiroshige, are by the first artist, although doubtless his pupils assisted him in his work, rendering their aid, as did the pupils of Hokusai in the preparation of the Mang-wa. Hiroshige also associated himself at times with other artists, one set of the Kisokaido, for example, being in part the work of Keisai Yeisen, and he supplied many backgrounds to the prints of Kunisada and Kuniyoshi.

In the catalogue of the “Collection Hayashi” only two prints are assigned to pupils of Hiroshige, one of them bearing the signature of Shigenobu.

The masterpieces signed Hiroshige are all by one great genius, the Apostle of Impressionism. “Hiro, Hiro, Hiroshige, great is Hiroshige,” cries Mr. Happer, in an outburst of enthusiasm. “Before Hiroshige there was no Japanese landscape master,—after him there is none.”

In the “Happer” Collection is a memorial portrait of Hiroshige by Kunisada (Toyokuni), the inscription upon which is of especial interest, confirming, as it does, the date of his death and proving that the “Meisho Yedo Hiak’kei,” the vertical set of Yedo views, so often ascribed to his successor, were by the master.

The inscription is thus quaintly interpreted by a Japanese student:

“Ryusai Hiroshige is a distinguished follower of Toyohiro, who was a follower of Toyoharu, the founder of the Utagawa School. At the present time, Hiroshige, Toyokuni and Kuniyoshi are considered the three great masters of Ukiyo-ye,—no others equal them. Hiroshige was especially noted for landscape. In the Ansei era, 1854-1859, he published the ‘Meisho Yedo Hiak’kei’ (‘Hundred Views of Yedo’), which vividly present the scenery of Yedo to the multitude of admirers.

“About this time also appeared a magazine entitled ‘Meisho Zuye’ (‘Sonnets on Yedo Scenes’), a monthly, illustrated by Hiroshige, and displaying his wonderful skill with the brush, to the admiration of the world. He passed away, to the world beyond, on the sixth day of the ninth month of this year, 1858, at the ripe age of sixty-two (sixty-one by our count). He left behind a last testament, or farewell sonnet, ‘_Azuma ji ni fude wo no-koshite tabi no sora; Nishi no mi kuni no Meisho wo Mimu._’ (Dropping the brush at Azuma, Eastern Capital, I go the long journey to the Western Country, Buddhist Heaven is in the West, to view the wonderful sceneries there; perchance to limn them too.)

“This by Temmei Rojin, picture by Toyokuni.

“Dated, Ansei 5, ninth month (October, 1858).”

The best known prints by Hiroshige are the “Fifty-three Stations between Yedo and Kyoto.” This Tokaido series was at first beautifully printed, but the later impressions show a sad decay in the colouring. The “Yedo Haik’kei” or “Hundred Views of Yedo,” give a panoramic vista of the Shoguns’ capital. The pictorial description of Yedo, in black and pale blue, is a lovely series. In many of these landscapes the Dutch influence is very marked, for the master of Hiroshige, Toyohiro, from whom he derived the first syllable of his _nom-de-pinceau_, had experimented in landscape painting after the Dutch wood-cuts which were scattered throughout the country. Although Hiroshige is best known through his landscapes, he, like most Japanese painters, was too universal an artist to confine himself solely to one branch. He loved every phase of nature, and in one of his well-known prints, “The Eagle,” his skill in the delineation of birds is best shown. In the later impressions a pale yellowish tone takes the place of the beautiful steel-blue background of the earlier prints, miracles of colour printing.

Athwart this background of ineffable blue, which loses itself in the mists that veil the sacred mountain, is seen, sweeping and sailing cruelly alert, the evil eagle of Hiroshige. His wicked gaze is set on nests of murmuring wood-doves, he eyes the callow sea-birds in their bed of rushes. The temple bell rings solemnly; the long vibrations cleave the azure dusk. It is the hour of rest and dreams. Begone, base harbinger of evil!

In the early prints by Hiroshige the colours are most beautiful, one soft tone fading imperceptibly into another, the blues and greens so marvellously blended as to be almost interchangeable. We are told that Michelangelo loved the companionship of the old workman who ground his colours; and of the Japanese, it is said, “this making one family of the greater artist and all who had to do with him has given that peculiar completeness, that sense of peace and absence of struggle which we feel in Japanese art.”

In vain Hiroshige fought, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, against introduction of cheap and inferior pigments, which were taking the place of the native dyes—Nature’s gifts, distilled by her artist children. Reds, yellows, blues and greens, intense and crude, were now imported, and Western commercialism sapped the virtue of the sincere and devoted artists and artisans of the Orient.

In describing the effect of colour in one of the Nikko temples, W. B. Van Ingen throws a searchlight upon the chemical secrets of this splendour, which he tells us, if asked to describe in one word, that word would be “golden.” “These colours,” he says, “are not imitations of colours. If vermilion is used, it is cinnabar and not commercialized vermilion which is employed, nor is something substituted for cobalt because it is cheaper and will ‘do just as well.’ Each colour is used because it is beautiful and frank as a colour, not because some other colour is beautiful. If lacquer is the best medium to display the beauty of the pigment, lacquer is used, and if water is better, lacquer is discarded, and if these colours are not imitations of colours, neither are they suggestions of colours. Pink is not used for red; if it is used at all, it is used for its own beauty, and feeble bluish washes are not made to do service for blue. The Oriental has not yet learned the doctrine of substitution; he knows that substitution is transformation.”

The secrets of colouring of the early prints, the joy of Parisian studios and which inspired Whistler, are lost. The delicious greens of old mosses, the pale rose tints, the veinings and marblings, the iridescent tints of ocean shells, the luminous colours of the anemone, the _bleus malades des mauves_—that divine violet, a benison of the palette handed down by those old Buddhist monks, the earliest painters of India and China.

These visions of colour are taking the place of obscurity and gloom, for the great impressionists, Claude Monet, Manet, the Barbizon school also and its disciples, have abjured the old dark shadows and substituted violet washes, seeming to share the privilege with the saints and sages of “seeing blue everywhere.” All true artists live “within the sphere of the infinite images of the soul.” These seers are their own masters, and, as Theodore Child says so exquisitely, “they are of rare and special temperaments, and through their temperament they look at nature and see beautiful personal visions. They fix their visions in colour or marble and then disappear forever, carrying with them the secrets of their mysterious intellectual processes.” Such a special temperament was bequeathed to Whistler. He submitted himself to the Japanese influence, not imitating but imbibing oriental methods, and following them, notwithstanding Philistine clamour, for the English art doctrines of the time were diametrically opposed to these innovations. Regardless of sneers, he followed the bent of his genius, which led him into oriental fields. He felt the sweet influence of such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige. He took advantage of the centuries of thought given to drapery, in the land where, as with Greece, dress is a national problem; where no fads and follies of fashion fostered by commercialism are allowed; where the artists design dress, and the people gratefully and sincerely adopt their ideas.

When we can follow them and allow art to rule, then hideous vagaries and vulgarities, distortions of the figure by hoops and wires, and monstrosities in sleeves will cease. Then may we hope to be an æsthetic nation. We need our American Moronobus to design and embroider and paint dresses for their beautiful and intuitively tasteful countrywomen.

The colour vision of the Oriental far surpasses our own. His eyes are sensitive to colour harmonies which, applied to landscape, at first seem unreal, impossible, until we realize that though they present objects in hues intrinsically foreign to them, yet the result justifies this arrangement, and its integrity is recognized, for the impression we receive is the true one. And this chaotic massing of colour we notice in a landscape by Hiroshige was employed by many of the old masters. Of the stormy passion of Tintoret, Ruskin says: “He involves his earth in coils of volcanic cloud, and withdraws through circle flaming above circle the distant light of paradise.”

There is a keynote to art, as to music, and to genius; through the inner vision this harmony is revealed. It lies within the precincts of the soul, beyond the reach of talented mediocrity, however versed in the canon of art. Nor can this occult gift be handed down. The most ardent disciples of Raphael tried in vain to express themselves after his pattern. The sublime inspiration which found its fullest outward manifestation in the Sistine Madonna rested there. The poets realized this colour vision, for Dante cried—