Chapter II: Part 2

He never jars you. His art is a grey ghost of melody born from the bosom of depth and distance, like a far-off mountain. And it gives you a thrill of large space that binds you with eternity, and you will understand that what you call reality is nothing but a shiver of impulse of great Nature. His art, indeed, is the highest art of Japan, which, I believe, will be also the highest art of the West. It quite often stirs me with a Western suggestion, which, however, springs from the soil of his own bosom. I know that there is a meeting-point of the East and West, and that, after all, they are the same thing. He found the secret of art, which will remind any highly developed mind of both the East and West of some memory, and let it feel something like an emotion and fly into a higher realm of beauty. (Gaho’s beauty is the beauty of silence.) It goes without saying that his art is simple, and his vision not complex. However, it is not only an Oriental philosophy to say that the greatest simplicity is the greatest complexity, and I will say that Gaho holds both extremes. The elements of his art embrace something older than art, larger than life, something which inspires you with the sense of profundity. They give us strange and positive pulses of age and nature, and the sudden rapture of dream, for which we will gladly die. They give us the feeling of peace and silence, and suggest something which we wish to grasp. The delight we gain from Gaho is purely spiritual. His pictures are living as a ghost which vanishes and again appears.

His conception of Buddhism was not sad, although this religion is generally said to be a pessimism, but joyous and sympathetic. I am sure that to associate Buddhism with something of grief and tears is not a proper understanding at all. (See Gaho’s pictures of the Buddha and _Rakans_, the Buddha disciples. They do not inspire any awfulness.) Tenderness and joy, with a touch of sorrow, which is poetry, are the road toward the Nirvana. For Gaho, silence meant the highest state of peacefulness. The sad joy, which is the highest joy, is an evolution which never breaks the euphony of life, while tears and grief are rebellious. His art inspires in us a great reverence, which is religious, and it is always justified. And it reveals a light of faith under which he was born as an artist, and he was glad to fulfil his appointed work. Then his aspiration is never an accident, but the force which he cherished and has made grow.

[Sidenote: GAHO’S THREE PERIODS]

Gaho’s life of seventy-five years, which had closed in the month of January, 1907, can be divided into three periods. The first is that in which he was engaged in the pursuit of the ancient method by copying the models after the fashion of the Kano school; the second was that in which he slowly broke loose from the trammels of the Kano school, and ventured out to make a thorough exploration of the conspicuous features of various other schools; and the final was that in which he revealed himself nobly, with all the essence of art which he had earned from his tireless journey of previous days. In one word, he was the sum total of the best Japanese art. It is said that his long life was but one long day of study and work. He shut himself in his silent studio from early morning till evening, from evening till midnight, sitting before a piece of spread silk, with a Chinese brush in hand, as if before a Buddhistic altar where the holy candles burn. Now his research went deep in the Chinese schools of the ages of Sung, Yuen, and Ming, and then his thoughts lingered by the glimmer of the Higashiyama school’s reminiscences. He confessed that he received no small influence from the Korin school, and I have more than one reason to believe that his knowledge of the Western art also was considerable. His catholicity of taste severely discriminated them, and his philosophy or conception of art stood magnificently above them, and never allowed them to disturb it under any circumstances. His great personality made him able to sing the song of triumph over his boundless artistic knowledge which had no power to oppress him. You might call his art a work of inspiration if you wish; but I am sure that he hated the word inspiration. It was through the religious exaltation of his mind that he could combine himself with Nature, and he and the subject which he was going to paint were perfectly one when the picture was done. His artist’s magic is in his handling of lines. He believed that Japanese painting was fundamentally one of lines. What a charm, what a variety he had with them! See the difference between the lines he used for the pictures of a tiger or a dragon in clouds, the Oriental symbol of power and exaltation, and a bird or other delicate subject. The lines themselves are the pictures. However, that does not mean to undervalue his equal pre-eminence in his art of colour.

[Sidenote: HIS FOUR YEARS OF PUPILAGE]

Gaho—or Gaho Hashimoto—was born in the fifth year of Tempo (1832) at Kobikicho, in Yedo, now Tokyo. From his seventh year he was taught how to draw and paint; at thirteen he became for the first time a pupil of Shosen Kano. It is said that Gaho was from an artistic family; we can trace back to Yeiki Hashimoto, who lived some time in the Meiwa (1764), and from whom the family line has continued unbroken down to the present. Yeiki was originally a native of Kyoto; and there he happened to be known to Suwonokami Matsudaira, the Shogun’s minister, who took him into his service; and on the lordship’s return to Yedo Mr. Hashimoto accompanied his master. And he happened to settle at Kobikicho, where the Kano family lived, and soon gained Kano’s friendship. Since that time the family line was continued by Ikyo, Itei, and Yoho. Gaho was Yoho’s son. The year after he became a student of the Kano school he lost his father and also his mother. It is said to be extraordinary that he was called upon to act, after only four years of pupilage, as an assistant to his master Shosen in painting personal figures on the cedar door of the Shogun palace. At twenty years of age he was made head pupil. When he married he was twenty-six years old, and he began to lead his independent life, which turned tragic immediately. While the problem of getting his subsistence was not easy, his wife, whom he married with hope, became insane.

Mrs. Hashimoto was obliged to withdraw to the Higuchi village in Saitama prefecture, where was an estate of her husband’s master, to avoid danger in the city; but she grew worse, and ran mad. And it is said that such a sad turn was from the reason that she was often tormented by some country ruffians. She was soon taken back to the city again, where she was put under her husband’s sole protection. Thus, when poor Gaho’s mind was completely engrossed with his family trouble, the great restoration of Meiji (1866) was announced, and the feudalism which had prospered for some three hundred years fell to the ground. Whole Japan was thrown at once in the abyss of social tumult and change; under the speedily felt foreign invasion she lost herself entirely. What she did was to destroy old Japan; she thought it proper and even wise. It was the darkest age for art; when people did not know of the safety of their own existence, it goes without saying that they had no time to admire art and spend money for it. It is perfectly miraculous to think how the artists managed to live; there are, of course, many heart-rending stories about them.

[Sidenote: TWENTY SEN FOR HIS THREE DAYS]

Gaho’s is sad enough, although it may not be saddest of all. He gave up his own painting temporarily, and tried to get a pittance by painting pictures on folding fans which were meant for exportation to China. And it is said that he was often scorned by his employer for his clumsy execution and, sadder still, he was told to leave his job. Is it Heaven’s right to treat one who was destined to be a great artist like that? He now resorted to a manual work of linking metal rings for making a sort of net-work; this chain-work, when finished, it is said, was made into something to be worn as an undergarment. Then he turned to take up the handicraft of making “koma,” or bridges (a kind of small wooden or bamboo pillow inserted between the body of a musical instrument and its strings), of the _shamisen_, a Japanese guitar; and he was paid, I am told, one sen for a single piece of that koma, and to make twenty it took him three days. Fancy his earning of twenty sen for his steady work of three days! To recollect it in his later days must have been for him the source of tears. And fancy again his immense wealth when he died, the wealth which, not his greed, but his single-minded devotion to art invited! In fact, there was no person so unconcerned of money as this Gaho. It was his greatness to believe amid the sudden falling of art that the Japanese art which had grown from the very soil a thousand years old could not die so easily, and that the people’s mind would open to it in a better condition; it was his prophetic foresight to behold the morning light in the midnight star. He was patiently waiting for his time when he should rise with splendour; and he never left himself to be ruined among the sad whirl of society and the nation’s unsympathetic commotion. He walked slowly but steadily toward the star upon which he set his lofty eyes. He stood aloof above the age. His life, not only in his art, was the song of triumph too.

To his relief, his insane wife died; and his appointment as a draughtsman at the Imperial Naval Academy meant for him a substantial help. He kept it up till the eighteenth year of Meiji, when the revival of Japanese art began to be chronicled, as Gaho expected, in the formation of art societies like the Kanga Kwai or Ryuchi Kwai. When he left the Naval Academy he was called to do service at the Investigation Bureau of Drawing and Painting in the Department of Education. His fellow-workers were the most lamented Hogai Kano, another great artist of modern Japan, and the late Mr. Okakura, that able art critic, in whose guidance Kano trusted. And those three men at the start are the true life-restorers of Japanese art. When the Tokyo School of Art was founded (22nd year of Meiji), Gaho was first made warden of the school, and then its director. And he was appointed professor when his investigation bureau happened to close up. However, he voluntarily resigned his professorship when Mr. Okakura, then the president of the school, was obliged to resign his office. Gaho took the principal’s chair of the Nippon Bijitsu when Okakura established it afterwards; but this school soon became a story of the past.

[Sidenote: GAHO’S SUCCESSORS]

Gaho has left his successors perhaps in those artists like Kwanzan Shimomura, Taikwan Yokoyama, Kogetsu Saigo and others, who are doing some noteworthy work. And I believe that he died at the right time if he must.

VI

KYOSAI

[Sidenote: THE WINE AND ARTISTS’ MINDS] [Sidenote: THE ILLUSTRATED AUTOBIOGRAPHY]

I acknowledged my friend’s characterisation, after some reluctance, of our Kyosai Kawanabe as a Japanese Phil May; as the artist of _Punch_ has often received the appellation of an English Hokusai, I do not see much harm, speaking generally, in thus falling into the feminine foible of comparison-making. Putting aside the question of the material achievement in art of those artists of the East and West, in truth so different (Kyosai surpassing the other, let me say, in variety), one will soon see that their innermost artistic characters are closely related; their seeming difference is the difference of education and circumstances from which even their original minds could hardly escape. I do not know much of the bacchanalianism of Phil May, but I know well enough that its sway is not so expansive in England as in Japan, at least old Japan, where the fantastic artists like Kyosai revelled around the ghosts they created in the sweet cup of _saké_. When we see Kyosai writing in front of his name the epithet Shojo, applied to the half-human red-haired bacchanals of Chinese legend, we might say he betrayed, beside his full-faced confession of the love of the cup, the fact of his natural attachment to Toba Sojo, that apostle of humour, whose pictorial wantonness may have given him many a hint; indeed he might have, like Phil May, adorned the pages of _Punch_, although many an admirer of his, like Josiah Conder in _Paintings and Studies by Kyosai Kawanabe_, a sumptuous book on the artist containing the representative work of his last eight years, sees only the serious side of his work. And when he changed the Chinese character of his name from that of “dawn” to that of “madness,” I think that he was laughing, at his own expense, over the lawless excitement he most comically acted when the excess of wine deceived him away from the imaginative path of inspiration, while, like Hokusai in the well-known epithet Gwakyo Rojin or Old Man Crazy at Painting, he sanctified to himself his own craze for painting. It is an interesting psychological study to speculate on the possible relation between the Japanese wine and our artists’ minds; I think it was a superstition or faith, I might say, founded on tradition, that they called the wine an invoker of inspiration, as I see the fact to-day that many of them find the divine breath in something else. However, I am thankful to the Japanese liquid with its golden flash, if it really acted as the medium through which Kyosai’s many pictures came into existence, while his many other works, for instance the frontispiece woodcut of Professor Conder’s Kyosai book, the elaborate picture of a Japanese beauty of the eleventh century, or the famous courtesan, Jigoku-dayu, in company with a demon, also the highly finished work owned by Mrs. William Anderson, or the other pictures I have seen more or less by accident, prove that he can be an equally splendid artist in a different direction while in perfect sobriety. He was born in the year 1831, that is about thirty years, roughly speaking, before the fall of the Tokugawa feudalism, when the age was fast decaying into loose morality and _saké_-drinking; and when he became a man, he found that the art’s dignity under whose kind shadow he had studied as a student of Tohaku Kano, the leading artist of that famous Kano family in those days, had fallen flat, and that his ability made no satisfactory impression on people who had likely forgotten their artistic appreciation in the tumult of the Restoration; and I think it was natural enough for Kyosai to call upon the wine, as we say here, to sweep away the grievance, and to invoke, through it, a divine influence upon his art. And it is the old Japanese way to speak of wine-drinking and general revel with innocent gusto, as I find in _Kyosai Gwaden_, an illustrated autobiography here and there humorously exaggerated but none the less sincere, from which all the writers on Kyosai, Professor Conder included, draw the materials of his life; he is often in danger of being criticised for his self-advertising audacity, this artist of fine madness. He often reminds me of Hokusai, not so much in his artistic expression as in temperament. The books, I mean _Kyosai Gwaden_, cannot be said, I think, to be more interesting in text than the pictures themselves; these are a series of off-hand sketches showing the actual scenes of his arrest and imprisonment, the story of which Professor Conder’s English propriety excluded, although it seems perfectly harmless as it was, on his part, merely the conduct arising out of merriment from excess of wine; beside, his sketches show us the sickening gloominess of prison life in those days when one’s freedom and right were denied rather than protected. Kyosai drank most terribly at a party held at a restaurant in Uyeno Park; he made on the spot the caricatures—while overhearing the talk of a foreigner on horseback who, being asked by a tea-house maid at Oji if he came alone, replied that he came accompanied by “a pair of fools"—in which he drew the picture of two people tying the shoe-strings of one man with the longest legs, and also the picture of men of the longest arms pulling out the hairs of Daibutsu’s nostrils. The authorities, though it is not clear how the matter came to their knowledge, stepped into the place and arrested him on the ground of insulting the officials; we must be thankful for the “enlightenment” of to-day when nobody would possibly get, as Kyosai got in 1870, ninety days in the cell from such pictures. The real meaning of Kyosai’s impromptu in art is rather vague; but it is in my mind a satirical love to understand them as a huge laughter over Japan’s slavishness to the West. And I often wonder if they are not caricatures which could be used to-day. Where is another Kyosai who could raise such a striking brush of scorn and sneer as to startle authority?

[Sidenote: THE PROUD PLEBEIANISM]

Kyosai used to absorb his spare time, while a young student at Kano’s atelier, in the study of the _No_ drama—out of natural love, I believe, combined with zeal to find an artistic secret in its heterogeneity, unlike the other students who sought their outside amusement nightly in popular halls of music and song; and it was an elderly lady of the Kano family who encouraged him by furnishing funds for teacher and costumes, being impressed, as a _No_ admirer herself, by the young man’s noble intention. It seems that Kyosai had not been able to fulfil the old lady’s desire to see him in one of her favourite pieces called _Sambaso_, whether from his imperfect mastering of it then or from some other reason, when she suddenly fell ill and died; doubtless, Kyosai took the matter to his heart of hearts. It was on the day of her third anniversary that he gathered all the musician accompanists of flute and drum before her lonely grave at Uyeno, and he, of course in the full costume of the character, performed the whole piece of the said _Sambaso_. Fancy the scene in the graveyard damp with mosses, dark with the falling foliage; and the actor is no other but fantastic Kyosai. Where could be found a more gruesome sight than that? This story among others we find in _Kyosai Gwaden_ is most characteristic in that no other artist of the long Japanese history, perhaps with the possible exception of Hokusai, could make it fit for himself; the story reveals Kyosai’s honesty almost to a fault, that sounds at once childish or madman-like, a temperament, unlike that of Southern Japan of female refinement and voluptuousness, which only the proud plebeianism of the Yedo civilisation (what an ultra-European imbecility of present Tokyo!) could create, the temperament, uncompromising, most difficult to be neutral. If we call Icho Hanabusa the most proper representative of old Yedo’s Genroku Age, the time when people found spirituality through the consecration of materialism, I think we can well call Kyosai the representative of the later Tokugawa Age (although his life extended a good many years into the present Meiji era) which, again like his own art, fell with the abruptness of an oak-tree. I have some reason when I beg your attention to the above characteristic story of Kyosai.

The love of the _No_ drama, the classic of lyrical fascination exclusively patronised by nobles and people of taste, would never be taken as strange in Kyosai who stayed sixteen long years with that master of the old Kano art, Tohaku Kano, till he parted from it in his twenty-seventh year perhaps for an art wider and truer, or, let me say, to find his own artistic soul all by his own impulse and strength; and when we see what attachment, even reverence, he had, during his whole life, toward the name of Toiku given him by the old master, the name we find in _Kyosai Gwaden_ and other books, we can safely say that his classic passion in general must have been quite strong. The question is where his plebeianism could find room to rise and fall. That is the point where, not only in his art, also in his personality, he showed in spite of himself a tragi-comic oddity, mainly from the rupture between the two extremes of temperament. I am told by his personal friend who survives to-day that he was rather pleased to shock and frighten the most polite society which reverently congregated in the silent house of the _No_ drama, to begin with, by his informal dress only suitable for the street shopkeeper or mechanic, then with his occasional shout of praise over the beautiful turn of the acting, in a voice touched with vulgar audacity; he exclaimed, “Umei!” Yedo slang for “splendid,” which was at least unusual for a _No_ appreciator. Nobody seemed, I am told, to criticise him when his good old heart was well recognised. So in his own art. I can point out, even from Professor Conder’s collection alone, many a specimen where the aristocratic aloofness of air is often blurred by his plebeianism—for example in the pictures of “Daruma,” “The Goddess Kwannon on a Dragon,” “Carp swimming in a Lake,” and others; the meaning I wish to impress on your mind will become clear directly when you compare them with the work of Sesshu, Motonobu, and Okyo on similar subjects. And again I have enough confidence to say that his elaborate pictures of red and green, after the Ukiyoye school, were more often weakened by the classic mist; although he did not wish to be looked upon as of that school, I think it was the main reason that he rather failed as an Ukiyoye artist. I endorse my friend to whom I praised and abused Kyosai lately only to get his true estimation, when he declared that Kyosai could not become one of the greatest artists of Japan simply from his inability to sacrifice his versatility; that versatility was the kind we can only find in Hokusai. He was the most distinguished example of one who failed, if he failed, from excess of artistic power and impulse.

[Sidenote: WEAKENED BY THE CLASSIC MIST]

Any one who sees _Kyosai Gwaden_ will certainly be astonished by his extraordinary persistence of study displayed in the first two volumes, in which he shows encyclopedically the delicate shades of variety of nearly all Japanese artists acknowledged great, from Kanaoka down to Kuniyoshi, also specimens of Chinese masters inserted at intervals. When I say that his artistic study was thorough even in the modern sense, I mean he always went straight to Nature and reality to fulfil what the pictures of old masters failed to tell him. _Kyosai Gwaden_ tells, as an early adventure in Nature study, how he hid in a cupboard a human head which he picked up from a swollen river and horrified the family with his attempt to sketch it in his ninth year; when fire broke out and swept away even his own house, he became an object of condemnation, as he acted as if it were the affair of somebody else, and was seen serenely sketching the sudden clamour of the fire scene. The books contain somewhere a page or two of unusually amusing sketches of his students at work on different living objects, from a frog and turtle to cocks and fishes; Kyosai’s love of fun in exaggeration (indeed exaggeration is one of the traits conspicuous even in his most serious work) again is seen in the sketches, when he made a monkey play at gymnastics and pull the hair of the earnest student with the brush. I often ask myself the question of the real merit of realism in our Japanese art, and further the question how much Kyosai gained from his realistic accuracy; I wonder what artistic meaning there is, for instance, when people, even acknowledged critics, speak with much admiration of the anatomical exactness of those skeletons fantastically dancing to the ghost’s music in that famous Jigoku-dayu picture. Let me ask again what the picture would lose, supposing, for instance, the most whimsical dancers around the courtesan’s gorgeous robe had two or three joints of bone missing; is not Kyosai’s realistic minuteness, which the artist was perhaps proud of displaying, in truth, rather a small subordinate part in his pictures? He was already in the present age, many years before his death, when many a weak artistic mind of Japan only received, from the Western art, confusion and reasoning, but not strength and passion. Now let me ask you: was it Kyosai’s artistic greatness to accept the Western science of art?

[Sidenote: THE REALISTIC MINUTENESS]

He was never original in the absolute understanding as Sesshu, Korin, in a lesser degree Harunobu and Hokusai were; it might be that he was born too late in the age, or is it more true to say that his astonishing knowledge of the old Japanese art acted to hold him back from striking out an original line? Education often makes one a coward. When I say that he was himself the sum total of all Japanese art, I do not mean to undervalue him, but rather to do justice to his versatility and the swing of his power. And it was his personality, unique and undefinable, that made his borrowing such an impression as we feel it in fact in his work. After all, he has to be judged, in my opinion, as an artist of technique.

I do not know what picture of his the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum have, except a few reproductions in books, which impressed me as poor examples. It is not too much to say that Professor Conder’s Kyosai book is the first and may be the last; there is no more fit man than he, who as Kyosai’s student knew him personally during the last eight years of his life. The book contains some good specimens which belong to that period; but what I most wish to see, are the pictures he produced in his earlier age. He is one of the artists who will gain much from selection; who will ever publish a book of twenty or thirty best pieces of his life’s production?

VII

THE LAST MASTER OF THE UKIYOYE ART

Yoshitoshi Tsukioka, as Kuniyoshi’s home student of high talent in his younger days, it is said, had a key to the storehouse entrusted to his care, where Kuniyoshi treasured foreign colour-prints of saints or devils strayed from a Dutch ship, Heaven’s gift most rare in those days, which made him pause a little and think about a fresh turn for his work. When we know that vulgarity always attracts us first and most, provided it is new to us, we cannot blame Yoshitoshi much when he reproduced in his work, indeed, stealing a march on his master, an immediate response to the Western art, whose secret he thought he could solve through varnishing. Doubtless it was no small discovery for Yoshitoshi. And the general public were equally simple when “Kwaidai Hyaku Senso,” his first attempt after the new departure, quite impressive as he thought, was well received by them; when he went too far in this foreign imitation through his little knowledge, as in his “Battle at Uyeno,” he varnished the whole picture. We have another instance that time is, after all, the best judge, as we know that those pictures of Yoshitoshi’s early days, when he had not yet found his own art, are most peacefully buried under the blessed oblivion and heavy dusts to-day. You cannot make an art only by wisdom and prayer, and it is better to commit youthful sin when one must, like Yoshitoshi, with his period of foreign imitation, since his later work would become intensified, chastened, and better balanced by his repentance.

[Sidenote: THE SUCCESS OF FAILURE]

To speak most strictly, Kuniyoshi should be called the last master of the Ukiyoye school, this interesting branch of Japanese art interpreting the love and romance of the populace, peculiarly developed through the general hatred of the aristocratic people; but I have reason to call Yoshitoshi Tsukioka the very last master of that school, in the same sense that we call Danjuro or Kikugoro the last actors, not less by the fact of the age, already heterogeneous, naturally weakened for holding up the old Japanese purity, against which he struggled hard to find an artistic compromise, than by his own gift. I have often thought that, if he had been born earlier, he might have proved himself another Hokusai, or, better still, if the time were still earlier, when love and sensuality were the same word in peace and prosperity, he would not have been much below Utamaro. If he failed, as indeed he failed, now, looking back from to-day, it was the failure of his age. Although it may sound paradoxical, I am pleased to say that his failure was his success, because I see his undaunted versatility glorified through his failure; he helps, more than any other artist, the historian of Japanese art to study the age psychologically—in fact, he serves him more than Hokusai or Utamaro. He is an interesting study, as I said before, as the last master, indeed, as much so as Moronobu Hishikawa as the recognised first master. I say Yoshitoshi failed, but I do not mean that he was a so-called failure in his lifetime; on the contrary, he was one of the most popular artists of modern Japan—at least, in the age of his maturity; what I should like to say is that the artistic success of one age does never mean the success of another age, and Yoshitoshi’s success is, let me say, the success of failure when we now look back upon it. I can distinctly remember even to-day my great disappointment, now almost twenty-five years ago, as a most ardent admirer of Yoshitoshi, when, appearing before the publisher’s house as early as seven o’clock the morning after I had read the announcement of his new picture of a dancer, I was told that the entire set of copies was exhausted; his popularity was something great in my boyhood’s days. It was in 1875 that he first took the public by storm with his three sheets of pictures called “Ichi Harano,” an historical thing which showed Yasumasa, a court noble, playing a bamboo flute under the moonlight, perfectly unconscious of a highwayman, Hakama Dare by name, following him, stepping softly upon the autumn grasses, ready to stab the noble with his sword. The popularity of this picture was heightened by the fact that Danjuro, the greatest tragedian of the modern Japanese stage, wanted to reproduce the pictorial effect in a play, and have Shinsuke Kawatake write up one special scene to do honour to Yoshitoshi, under the title “Ichi Harano, by Yoshitoshi, Powerful with his Brush.” It was a great honour indeed, such as no artist to-day could expect to receive. We have many occasions, on the other hand, when Yoshitoshi served the actors and his bosom friends, Danjuro and Kikugoro, to popularise their art. Since the day of the First Toyokuni, it had been the custom for the artists of this popular school to work together with the stage artists.

[Sidenote: THE CARVER AND PRINTER]

Yoshitoshi brought out the series of three called “Snow, Moon, and Flower,” two of them commemorating Danjuro in his well-known rôle of Kuyemon Kezuri, and one Kikugoro in Seigen, whose holy life of priesthood was disturbed by love beyond hope. Although I hesitate to say they are the best specimens—yes, they are in their own way—they have few companions in the long Ukiyoye annals as theatrical posters, for which exaggeration should not be much blamed. The striking point of emphasis in design, hitting well the artistic work, make them worthy. I have them right before me while writing this brief note on Yoshitoshi. I recall what I heard about the Kezuri picture; it is said that the artist spent fully three days to draw this “hundred-days wig,” to use the theatrical phrase. What an astonishing wig that rôle had to wear. And what painstaking execution of the artist; and again what wonderful dexterity of the Japanese carver and printer. At the time when these pictures were produced it is not too much to say that the arts of carving and printing had reached the highest possible point—that is to say, they had already begun to fall. I am pleased to attach a special value to them as the past pieces which well combined those three arts. By the way, the name of the carver of those pictures is Wadayu. Now, returning to Yoshitoshi and his actors-friends. The former was always regarded by the latter as an artistic adviser whose words were observed as law; Yoshitoshi was the first person Danjuro used to look up when in trouble with the matter of theatrical design in dress. I have often heard how the artist helped Kikugoro. This eminent actor once had a great problem how to appear as Shini Gami, or the Spirit of Death, in the play called _Kaga Zobi_, and asked Yoshitoshi for a suggestion; and it is said that a rough sketch he drew at once enlightened Kikugoro’s bewildered mind, and, as a result, he immortalised the rôle. It was the age when realism, of course, in more vague, doubtful meaning than the present usage, had completely conquered the stage, the old idealistic stage art having fallen off the pedestal. Certainly Danjuro, the first of all to be absorbed in that realism which prevailed here twenty or twenty-five years ago, did never serve the stage art for advancement, but, on the contrary, it was the realism, if anything, that cheapened, trivialised, and vulgarised the time-honoured Japanese art; but it seemed that there was nobody to see that point of wisdom. It is ridiculous to know how Danjuro insisted, as Tomonori, in the play of _Sembon Sakura_, that the blood upon his armour should be painted as real as possible, and troubled the great artistic brush of Yoshitoshi on each occasion during the whole run of the play; but how serious the actor was in his thought and determination! Again that realism was the main cause why Yoshitoshi’s art failed to compete with the earlier Ukiyoye artists like Shunsho, Utamaro, and even Hokusai; it was an art borrowed from the West doubtless, when I observe how Yoshitoshi, unlike the earlier artists, was delighted to use the straight, forceful lines as the modern Western illustrators; the picture called “Daimatsuro” is a fit example in which he carried out that tendency or mannerism with most versatility. I daresay that his pictures, whether of historical heroes or professional beauties, which were least affected by the so-called realism or Western perspectives and observed carefully the old Ukiyoye canons, limiting themselves in the most artistic shyness, would be only prized as adorning his name as the last master; for the ninety per cent. we have no grief for their hastening into blessed dusts. I have in my collection the three-sheet picture called “Imayo Genji,” showing the view of Chigoga Fuchi at Yenoshima, with the romantic posture of four naked fisherwomen, which is dated very early in Yoshitoshi’s artistic life, no doubt being the work of the time when he was still a home student at Kuniyoshi’s studio or workshop; you can see the artist’s allegiance to his teacher in those somewhat stooping woman figures; there is no mistake to say that Yoshitoshi, at least in this picture, had studied Hiroshige and Hokusai to advantage for the general effect of rocks and fantastic waves.

[Sidenote: “IMAYO GENJI"]

Although it is clear that it is not a specimen of his developed art, I have in mind to say that it will endure, perhaps as one of the best Ukiyoye pictures of all ages, through its youthful loyalty to the traditional old art and the painstaking composition for which the best work is always marked. How artistically troubled, even lost, are his later works, though once they were popular and even admired!

[Sidenote: THE FAINT ECHO OF OKYO]

Although he was, as I said above, most popular in the prime of his life (by the way he died in his fifty-fourth year in June of 1892), he had many years of poverty and discouragement when he complained of the fact that he was born rather too late; his hardship, not only spiritual, but material, soon followed after the happy period of student life with Kuniyoshi, when his artistic ambition forced on him independence. It was the time most inartistic, if there was ever such a time in any country, when the new Meiji Government had hardly settled itself on the sad ruins of the Tokugawa feudalism, under which all prosperity and peace, even art and humanity, were buried, and the people in general even thought the safety of their lives was beyond reach, now with the so-called Civil War of Meiji Tenth, and then with that or this. How could the artists get the people’s support under such a condition of the times; indeed, Yoshitoshi fought bitterly for his bare existence then. It was the time when he was extremely hard-up that his home-students, Toshikage and Toshiharu, bravely served him in the capacity of cook or for any other work; we cannot blame him that he tried, with such pictures as the series called “Accident of the Lord Ii,” to amuse and impress the people’s minds, which grew, in spite of themselves, to love battle and blood. And the best result he received from such work, happy to say for his art, was the realisation of failure. But he was quite proud, I understand, when he published it, and even expected a great sale. And when he could not sell it at all, it is said, he determined that he would run away alone from Tokyo for good, leaving his students behind. Although there is no record of its sale to-day, I am sure that it did not sell well, or, in another way of saying, it sold well enough to save him from the shame of running away. Doubtless the people demanded pictures of such a nature, perhaps to illustrate the time’s happening, as it was the time before the existence of any graphic or illustrated paper, and to fill that demand Yoshitoshi brought out a hundred pictures of battles and historical heroes, more or less in bloody scenes, which are mostly forgotten. It was in 1885 that he fairly well found his own art (good or bad) with the historical picture, “Kiyomori’s Illness”; the chief character, the Lord Kiyomori, suffered from fever and dream, as we have it in legend, as a destiny brought from his endless brutality and covetousness; the fact that Yoshitoshi’s mind was much engaged in the study of the Shijoha school at that time will be seen, particularly in this picture, of which the background is filled with the faint echo of great Okyo in the drawing of the Emma, or Judge of Hades, the green demon, and other things of awful demonstration. “Inaka Genji,” a picture to commemorate the occasion of Ransen’s changing his name to Tanehiko, and “Ukaino Kansaku,” a picture of the spirit of a dead fisherman being saved by the holy prayer of the priest Nichiren, are the work of about the same time. When Yoshitoshi began to publish his series of one hundred pieces under the name of “Tsuki Hyakushi,” or “One Hundred Views of the Moon,” his popularity almost reached high-water mark; I can recollect with the greatest pleasure how delighted I was to be given a few of these moon pictures as a souvenir from Tokyo when I was attending a country grammar school, and I can assure you that my artistic taste and love, which already began to grow, expressed a ready response to value. Among the pictures, I was strongly attracted by one thing, which was the picture of a crying lady alone in a boat, with a _biwa_ instrument upon her knees; from admiration I pasted the picture on a screen, which remained as it was during these twenty years, unspoiled, spotless, and perfect, and I had the happy occasion to see it with renewed eyes lately when I returned to my country home. I felt exactly the same impression, as good as at the first sight of twenty years ago. Although the series carry the title of moon, nearly all of the pictures have no moon at all; it was the artistic merit of the artist to suggest that they were all views of the moonlight. We can point out many shortcomings in his work as a pure Ukiyoye artist; but, after all, I think that nobody will deny his rare and versatile talent. If only he had been born at the better and proper time! And if we must blame his degeneration, I think it is quite safe to say that the general public has to share equally in the criticism. He was an interesting personality, full of stories and anecdotes, which the English people would be glad to hear about when they are well acquainted with his work; but I will keep them for some other occasion, because I wish at present to introduce him simply through his work. Let it suffice to say that he was humane and lovable, having a great faith in his own class of people—that is, the plain street-dwellers; when I say he was, too, the artist or artizan of Tokyo or Yedo, like Utamaro, Hokusai, and Kuniyoshi, I mean that he was gallant and chivalrous, always a friend of the lowly, and a hater of sham.

[Sidenote: THE HATER OF SHAM]

He was born in 1839, to use the Japanese name of the era, the Tenth of Tempo, at Shiba of Yedo, present Tokyo. When a little boy, he was adopted by the family of Tsukioka; his own name was Yonejiro. Like other Japanese artists, he had quite many _gago_ or _noms de plume_; to give a few of them, Ikkasai, Sokatei, Shiyei, and others. Although he did not change his dwelling-place as Hokusai did, he moved often from one house to another; it was at Miyanaga Cho of Hongo where he married Taiko. He bought a house at Suga Cho, Asakusa, in 1885; but his sensitive mind was disturbed when he was told by a fortune-teller that the direction of his house was unlucky, and was again obliged to move to Hama Cho of Nihonbashi, when he was taken ill with brain disease. As I said before, he died in June of 1892. The students he left behind include many artists already dead; to give the best known, Keishu Takeuchi; Keichu Yamada and Toshihide Migita are the names of artists still active to-day.

VIII

BUSHO HARA[A]

[A] See the Appendix

Often I tried to write about Busho Hara the artist (I use the term in the most eclectic Japanese conception, because his art served more frequently to make his personality distinguished through its failure rather than through its success); that my attempt turned to nothing was perhaps because my mind, solitary and sad like that of Hara, did not like to betray the secret of the recluse whose silence was his salutation. Besides, my heart and soul and all were too much filled with this Busho Hara from the fact of his recent unexpected death—(by the way, he was in his forty-seventh year, that interesting age for an artist, as it would be the beginning of a new page, good or bad); and I am, in one word, perfectly confused on the subject. When I wish to think of his art alone, and even to measure it, if possible, through the most dangerous, always foolish way of comparison with others, I find always, in spite of myself, that my mind, even before it has fairly started on his art, is already carried away by the dear, sweet, precious memory of his rare personality. “Above all, he was rarest as friend,” my mind always whispers to me every two minutes from the confusion of my thought, this and that, and again that and this, on him. To say that I think of him too much and for too many things would be well-nigh the same as to say that I am unfitted to tell about him intelligibly. I confess that I had a little difference with him on the subject of his own art here and there, while I was absorbed in his conversation or criticism (I always believed and said—did he dislike me when I said that?—he was a better and greater critic than artist), now by the cozy fire of a winter evening, then with the trees and grasses languid with summer’s heat; he was the first and last man to whom I went when I felt particularly ambitious and particularly tired, and I dare say that he was pleased to see me. My own delight to have him as my friend was in truth doubled, when I thought that his personality and art, remarkable as they are honest, true, and sympathetic, were almost unknown at home except in a little narrow community; as I said before, he was a recluse. In England, many readers of Mr. Markino’s book, _A Japanese Artist in London_, will remember Hara’s name, as it is frequently repeated in the book; and a certain well-known English critic had an occasion once or twice to mention his name and kindly comment on his work in the _Graphic_. That was in 1906, when he was about to leave London after a few years’ stay there. “Shall I go to England again for a change or to take a few pictures of mine?” he often exclaimed. England was his dream, as she is mine. How unfalteringly our talk ran; every time the subject was England and her art.

[Sidenote: HIS DREAM OF ENGLAND]

“Now is it settled, let us suppose,” Hara would say in the course of talk, slightly twisting his sensitive mouth, holding up straight back his well-poised head (what a philosopher’s eyes he had, gentle and clear), “that we shall go to England some time soon in the future. Yes, we shall go there even if we are not begged by Japan to leave the country. The most serious question is, however, where we shall sleep and dine. I have had enough experience of a common English boarding-house; I am haunted even to-day by the ghosts of Yorkshire pudding and cold ham. And suppose that a daughter or a son of that boarding-house might sing aloud a popular song every Saturday evening; I should like to know if there is anything more sad than that. Still, suppose that one next to you at table will ask you every evening how your work might sell; certainly that will be the moment when you think you will leave England at once for good. But it is England’s greatness that she has art appreciators as well as buyers. Oh, where is the true art appreciator in Japan, even while we admit that we have the buyers? I will take a few pictures with me when I go to England next, and show them to the right sort of people; really, truly, only London of all the cities of the world has the right sort of people in any line of profession. Besides, I should like to examine the English art again and let the people there listen to my opinion; I was not enough prepared for such a work when I went there last.”

[Sidenote: THE ENEMY IN HIS OWN SELF]

But I believe that his own self-education in art, which he most determinedly started at the National Gallery, where he was forcibly attracted by Rembrandt and Velasquez, must have been happily developed, when the same _Graphic_ critic spoke of his “sensitive and searching eyes,” and (printing Hara’s intelligent rendering of Rembrandt’s “Jewish Merchant” on the page) said that it proved the painter was at the root of the matter, and declared that the critic had rarely seen better or more intelligent copy, and again to prove that Hara was not merely a copyist or imitator, he also reproduced on the same page his original work called “The Old Seamstress.” And I am doubly pleased to find that the same English critic mentioned him somewhere as a “keen and acute critic, but generous withal”; I was so glad to have Hara as my friend for the rare striking power of his critical enlightenment (Oh, where is another sane artist like himself?), even when he failed to make a strong impression on me with his art. It was his immediate question on his return home how to apply the technique of oil painting he learned in London to Japanese subjects; if he failed in his art, as he always believed and I often thought he did, it was from the reason, I dare think, that he had indeed too clear a view of self-appraisal or self-criticism under whose menace he always took the attitude of an outsider towards his own work. How often I wished he were wholly without that critical power, always hard to please, altogether too fastidious! His artistic ambition and aim were so absolute and most highly puritanic; as a result, he was ever so restless and sad with his art, and often even despised himself. He had a great enemy, that was no other but his own self; he was more often conquered by it than conquering it. I have never seen in my life a more sad artist with the brush, facing a canvas, than this Busho Hara. Besides, his poor health, which had been failing in the last few years, only worked to make his critical displeasure sharper and more peculiar; and he utterly lost the passion and foolishness of his younger days. How often we promised, when we parted after a long chat, which usually began with Yoshio Markino, dear friend of his and mine in London, and as a rule ended with reminiscences of our English life, that we would hereafter return to our younger age, if possible to our boys’ days, and even commit the innocent youthful sins and be happy; but when we met together again, we were the same unhappy mortals, Hara with a brush, I with a pen. He always looked comforted by my words when I told him my own tragedy and difficulties to write poetry; both of us exclaimed at once with the same breath and longed for life’s perfect freedom. How he wished to cut away from himself and bid a final farewell to many portrait commissions, and become a lone pilgrim on Nature’s great highway with only his brush and oil; that was his dream.

[Sidenote: AT THE HOSPITAL]