Although the criticisms provoked by Mr. Strange's essay were unjust
to Japanese art, they were natural, and indicated nothing worse
than ignorance of that art and miscomprehension of its purpose. It
is not an art of which the meaning can be read at a glance: years
of study are necessary for a right comprehension of it. I cannot
pretend that I have mastered the knowledge of its moods and tenses,
but I can say truthfully that the faces in the old picture-books and
in the cheap prints of to-day, especially those of the illustrated
Japanese newspapers, do not seem to me in the least unreal, much less
"absolutely insane." There was a time when they did appear to me
fantastic. Now I find them always interesting, occasionally beautiful.
If I am told that no other European would say so, then I must declare
all other Europeans wrong. I feel sure that, if these faces seem to
most Occidentals either absurd or soulless, it is only because most
Occidentals do not understand them; and even if his excellency the
Japanese Minister to England be willing to accept the statement that no
Japanese women ever resembled the women of the Japanese picture-books
and cheap prints, I must still refuse to do so.[1] Those pictures, I
contend, are true, and reflect intelligence, grace, and beauty. I see
the women of the Japanese picture--books in every Japanese street. I
have beheld in actual life almost every normal type of face to be found
in a Japanese picture-book: the child and the girl, the bride and the
mother, the matron and the grandparent; poor and rich; charming or
commonplace or vulgar. If I am told that trained art critics who have
lived in Japan laugh at this assertion, I reply that they cannot have
lived in Japan long enough, or felt her life intimately enough, or
studied her art impartially enough, to qualify themselves to understand
even the commonest Japanese drawing.
Before I came to Japan I used to be puzzled by the absence of facial
expression in certain Japanese pictures. I confess that the faces,
although not even then devoid of a certain weird charm, seemed to me
impossible. Afterwards, during the first two years of Far-Eastern
experience,--that period in which the stranger is apt to imagine
that he is learning all about a people whom no Occidental can ever
really understand,--I could recognize the grace and truth of certain
forms, and feel something of the intense charm of color in Japanese
prints; but I had no perception of the deeper meaning of that art.
Even the full significance of its color I did not know: much that was
simply true I then thought outlandish. While conscious of the charm
of many things, the reason of the charm I could not guess. I imagined
the apparent conventionalism of the faces to indicate the arrested
development of an otherwise marvelous art faculty. It never occurred to
me that they might be conventional only in the sense of symbols which,
once interpreted, would reveal more than ordinary Western drawing can
express. But this was because I still remained under old barbaric
influences,--influences that blinded me to the meaning of Japanese
drawing. And now, having at last learned a little, it is the Western
art of illustration that appears to me conventional, undeveloped,
semi-barbarous. The pictorial attractions of English weeklies and of
American magazines now impress me as flat, coarse, and clumsy. My
opinion on the subject, however, is limited to the ordinary class of
Western illustration as compared with the ordinary class of Japanese
prints.
Perhaps somebody will say that, even granting my assertion, the meaning
of any true art should need no interpretation, and that the inferior
character of Japanese work is proved by the admission that its meaning
is not universally recognizable. Whoever makes such a criticism must
imagine Western art to be everywhere equally intelligible. Some of
it--the very best--probably is; and some of Japanese art also is.
But I can assure the reader that the ordinary art of Western book
illustration or magazine engraving is just as incomprehensible to
Japanese as Japanese drawings are to Europeans who have never seen
Japan. For a Japanese to understand our common engravings, he must have
lived abroad. For an Occidental to perceive the truth, or the beauty,
or the humor of Japanese drawings, he must know the life which those
drawings reflect.
One of the critics at the meeting of the Japan Society found fault with
the absence of facial expression in Japanese drawing as conventional.
He compared Japanese art on this ground with the art of the old
Egyptians, and held both inferior because restricted by convention. Yet
surely the age which makes _Laocoön_ a classic ought to recognize that
Greek art itself was not free from conventions. It was an art which
we can scarcely hope ever to equal; but it was more conventional than
any existing form of art. And since it proved that even the divine
could find development within the limits of artistic convention, the
charge of formality is not a charge worth making against Japanese
art. Somebody may respond that Greek conventions were conventions
of beauty, while those of Japanese drawing have neither beauty nor
meaning. But such a statement is possible only because Japanese art
has not yet found its Winckelmann nor its Lessing, whereas Greek art,
by the labor of generations of modern critics and teachers, has been
made somewhat more comprehensible to us than it could have been to our
barbarian forefathers. The Greek conventional face cannot be found in
real life, no living head presenting so large a facial angle; but the
Japanese conventional face can be seen everywhere, when once the real
value of its symbol in art is properly understood. The face of Greek
art represents an impossible perfection, a superhuman evolution. The
seemingly inexpressive face drawn by the Japanese artists represents
the living, the actual, the every-day. The former is a dream; the
latter is a common fact.
[Footnote 1: That Japanese art is capable of great things in ideal
facial expression is sufficiently proved by its Buddhist images. In
ordinary prints the intentional conventionalism of the faces is hardly
noticeable when the drawing is upon a small scale; and the suggestion
of beauty is more readily perceived in such cases. But when the
drawing has a certain dimension,--when the face-oval, for instance,
has a diameter of more than an inch,--the same treatment may seem
inexplicable to eyes accustomed to elaborated detail.]