A few general remarks about the treatment of faces in ordinary Japanese
drawing may help to the understanding of what that treatment teaches.
Youth is indicated by the absence of all but essential touches, and
by the clean, smooth curves of the face and neck. Excepting the
touches which suggest eyes, nose, and mouth, there are no lines. The
curves speak sufficiently of fullness, smoothness, ripeness. For
story-illustration it is not necessary to elaborate feature, as the age
or condition is indicated by the style of the coiffure and the fashion
of the dress. In female figures, the absence of eyebrows indicates the
wife or widow; a straggling tress signifies grief; troubled thought is
shown by an unmistakable pose or gesture. Hair, costume, and attitude
are indeed enough to explain almost everything. But the Japanese artist
knows how, by means of extremely delicate variations in the direction
and position of the half dozen touches indicating feature, to give some
hint of character, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic; and this hint
is seldom lost upon a Japanese eye.[1] Again, an almost imperceptible
hardening or softening of these touches has moral significance. Still,
this is never individual: it is only the hint of a physiognomical law.
In the case of immature youth (boy and girl faces), there is merely a
general indication of softness and gentleness,--the abstract rather
than the concrete charm of childhood.
In the portrayal of maturer types the lines are more numerous and
more accentuated, illustrating the fact that character necessarily
becomes more marked in middle age, as the facial muscles begin to show.
But there is only the suggestion of this change, not any study of
individualism.
In the representation of old age, the Japanese artist gives us all the
wrinkles, the hollows, the shrinking of tissues, the "crow's-feet,"
the gray hairs, the change in the line of the face following upon loss
of teeth. His old men and women show character. They delight us by a
certain worn sweetness of expression, a look of benevolent resignation;
or they repel us by an aspect of hardened cunning, avarice, or
envy. There are many types of old age; but they are types of human
conditions, not of personality. The picture is not drawn from a model;
it is not the reflection of an individual existence: its value is made
by the recognition which it exhibits of a general physiognomical or
biological law.
Here it is worth while to notice that the reserves of Japanese art in
the matter of facial expression accord with the ethics of Oriental
society. For ages the rule of conduct has been to mask all personal
feeling as far as possible,--to hide pain and passion under an exterior
semblance of smiling amiability or of impassive resignation. One key to
the enigmas of Japanese art is Buddhism.
[Footnote 1: In modern Japanese newspaper illustrations (I refer
particularly to the admirable woodcuts illustrating the _feuilletons_
of the Ōsaka _Asahi Shimbun_) these indications are quite visible even
to a practiced foreign eye. The artist of the _Asahi Shimbun_ is a
woman.
I am here reminded of a curious fact which I do not remember having
seen mention of in any book about Japan. The newly arrived Westerner
often complains of his inability to distinguish one Japanese from
another, and attributes this difficulty to the absence of strongly
marked physiognomy in the race. He does not imagine that our more
sharply accentuated Occidental physiognomy produces the very same
effect upon the Japanese. Many and many a one has said to me, "For a
long time I found it very hard to tell one foreigner from another: they
all seemed to me alike."]
V
I have said that when I now look at a foreign illustrated newspaper or
magazine I can find little pleasure in the engravings. Most often they
repel me. The drawing seems to me coarse and hard, and the realism of
the conception petty. Such work leaves nothing to the imagination, and
usually betrays the effort which it cost. A common Japanese drawing
leaves much to the imagination,--nay, irresistibly stimulates it,--and
never betrays effort. Everything in a common European engraving is
detailed and individualized. Everything in a Japanese drawing is
impersonal and suggestive. The former reveals no law: it is a study of
particularities. The latter invariably teaches something of law, and
suppresses particularities except in their relation to law.
One may often hear Japanese say that Western art is too realistic;
and the judgment contains truth. But the realism in it which offends
Japanese taste, especially in the matter of facial expression, is not
found fault with merely because of minuteness of detail. Detail in
itself is not condemned by any art; and the highest art is that in
which detail is most exquisitely elaborated. The art which saw the
divine, which rose above nature's best, which discovered supramundane
ideals for animal and even floral shapes, was characterized by the
sharpest possible perfection of detail. And in the higher Japanese
art, as in the Greek, the use of detail aids rather than opposes the
aspirational aim. What most displeases in the realism of our modern
illustration is not multiplicity of detail, but, as we shall presently
see, _signification_ of detail.
The queerest fact about the suppression of physiognomical detail in
Japanese art is that this suppression is most evident just where we
should least expect to find it, namely, in those creations called
"This-miserable-world pictures" (Ukiyo-yé), or, to use a corresponding
Western term, "Pictures of this Vale of Tears." For although the
artists of this school have really given us pictures of a very
beautiful and happy world, they professed to reflect truth. One form
of truth they certainly presented, but after a manner at variance with
our common notions of realism. The Ukiyo-yé artist drew actualities,
but not repellent or meaningless actualities; proving his rank even
more by his refusal than by his choice of subjects. He looked for
dominant laws of contrast and color, for the general character of
nature's combinations, for the order of the beautiful as it was and
is. Otherwise his art was in no sense aspirational; it was the art of
the larger comprehension of things as they are. Thus he was rightly a
realist, notwithstanding that his realism appears only in the study
of constants, generalities, types. And as expressing the synthesis of
common fact, the systematization of natural law, this Japanese art
is by its method scientific in the true sense. The higher art, the
aspirational art (whether Japanese or old Greek), is, on the contrary,
essentially religious by its method.
Where the scientific and the aspirational extremes of art touch, one
may expect to find some universal aesthetic truth recognized by both.
They agree in their impersonality: they refuse to individualize. And
the lesson of the very highest art that ever existed suggests the true
reason for this common refusal.
What does the charm of an antique head express, whether in marble, gem,
or mural painting,--for instance, that marvelous head of Leucothea
which prefaces the work of Winckelmann? Needless to seek the reply from
works of mere art critics. Science alone can furnish it. You will find
it in Herbert Spencer's essay on Personal Beauty. The beauty of such a
head signifies a superhumanly perfect development and balance of the
intellectual faculties. All those variations of feature constituting
what we call "expression," represent departures from a perfect type
just in proportion as they represent what is termed "character;"--and
they are, or ought to be, more or less disagreeable or painful
because "the aspects which please us are the outward correlatives of
inward perfections, and the aspects which displease us are the outward
correlatives of inward imperfections." Mr. Spencer goes on to say that
although there are often grand natures behind plain faces, and although
fine countenances frequently hide small souls, "these anomalies do not
destroy the general truth of the law any more than the perturbations of
planets destroy the general ellipticity of their orbits."
Both Greek and Japanese art recognized the physiognomical truth which
Mr. Spencer put into the simple formula, "_Expression is feature in the
making_" The highest art, Greek art, rising above the real to reach the
divine, gives us the dream of feature perfected. Japanese realism, so
much larger than our own as to be still misunderstood, gives us only
"feature in the making," or rather, the general law of feature in the
making.