surfaces of works that have survived time, nor of the men who made them,
of their characters, the accidents of their lives, and their technical
beliefs. It would be simply a history of humanity at a given place. It
could not be solved by a mere account of the place and the race,
according to some of our later scientific fads. I was writing to you but
yesterday, and trying to make out that the work of art is often a
contradiction of the period, or a step in advance; that the moods of
feeling of the future are as often reflected by art as the habits of the
present. But whatever personal sense of solitariness or of antagonism
has inspired or oppressed the artist, he must have had partners since he
has had admirers, even when he antagonizes his time. However transient
certain of his forms, however much to us who come afterward they
indicate the _period_, he has expressed not his time, but the needs of
others who have been looking in the same ways, and yet have had no
voice. And even if they have not quite sympathized, the accumulations
of like tendencies have become stronger and clearer in their
descendants. To reflect fully, then, in words, the face of the work of
art, one would have to melt into it in some way the gaze of those who
have looked at it; to keep upon it still the gentle looks of the pitiful
and the loving, the rapt contemplation of the saints, the tender or
mocking smile of women, the hard or contemptuous appreciation of rulers,
the toleration of the wise, all of which have been in reality a part of
the very work. Their negations or sympathies have fallen on the work,
and these ineffable delicacies of impression are transmitted in it to
successive generations, even as the shadowing of innumerable years of
incense-burning has browned the gold and blackened the azure, as
concealment in the shade has sometimes paled, sometimes preserved, the
edges of the outlines and the modeling of the colors, or exposure and
heat and damp have cracked and channeled and dusted all surfaces. You
see what I should consider a true carrying out of such a task, and how
unsatisfied I should be with anything that I could accomplish, unless it
were to stand to you as something fragmentary and evanescent. One thing
I should like to do,--should I remain long enough, and be able to get it
from the few acquaintances who may know,--and that is, to save some part
of the artists themselves out of that obscurity by which the lives of
great workers are almost always clouded. To me Rembrandt, and Balzac,
and Delacroix, each contradictory to his surroundings, have become more
intelligible through the record of their every-day struggle, the
exactness of measurement which one can place upon the personal
circumstances in which they carried out their work, the limitations of
its exact meaning and importance in their own eyes, as we follow them in
the daylight of favor, or in the gloomy endings that so often close the
lives of great artists.
I hear occasionally of the wanderings of Kano Motonobu, the founder
of the great school and family of artists who have lasted through four
centuries to the present day, and have filled Japan and the temples
here with works better or poorer, until the family name becomes a
burden. I hear about Okio, the charmer, the painter of everything and
of animals, who began as a little child, by sketching on the earth with
bamboo sticks when he followed his parents into the fields to work. One
might perhaps learn about Hokusai, who is tabooed here, and about whom
I dare not inquire, but whose charming last letter, as given by Mr.
Morse, comes back to my memory--it is so gay and so sad, so triumphant
over circumstances, so expressive of the view of the world which
explains his woodcuts. I quote from memory: "King Em-mā" (he writes
to a friend)--"King Em-mā" (the ruler of the under world) "has become
very old, and is thinking of retiring from business; so that he has
ordered a little country house to be built, and he asks of me to come
to him that I may paint him a 'kakemono'; so that in a few days I must
be ready to travel and to take my sketches with me. I shall take up my
residence at the corner of the Street of the Under World, where it will
give me much pleasure to receive thee, when thou hast the opportunity
to come over there."
Or this mocking challenge to old age, at the end of one of the volumes
of his pictures of Fuji:
"Since my sixth year I have felt the impulse to represent the form of
things; by the age of fifty I had published numberless drawings; but I
am displeased with all I have produced before the age of seventy. It is
at seventy-three that I have begun to understand the form and the true
nature of birds, of fishes, of plants, and so forth. Consequently, by
the time I get to eighty, I shall have made much progress; at ninety, I
shall get to the essence of things; at a hundred, I shall have most
certainly come to a superior, undefinable position; and at the age of a
hundred and ten, every point, every line, shall be alive. And I leave it
to those who shall live as I have myself, to see if I have not kept my
word. Written, at the age of seventy-five, by me, formerly known as
Hokusai, but now known as Gakyo Rojin (The Old Man gone Mad for
Painting)."
... I had been intending to add, when I interrupted myself some way
back, that I enjoyed in this art of Japan--at least in this drawing
which they call painting--the strange nearness I seem to be in to the
feelings of the men who did the work. There is between us only a thin
veil of consummate skill. The habit and the methods resulting from it,
of an old obedience to an unwritten law common to all art, have asked
for the directest ways of marking an intention or an observation.
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION ON OLD LACQUER.]
This reference to a previous tradition of meaning, of ideal arrangement
by rule, this wish for synopsis, this feeling for manners of expressing
one's self in the thing seen, will naturally make art out of anything.
And it is not wonderful that what we call handwriting may then give full
play to art, in a written language of which ideography is the key.
Given the Chinese characters, their original intentions, the
associations, historical and literary, connected with them, is it
anything strange in reality, however strange to our habits, to find
writing a form of art in Japan? It may have all I have just referred to,
and be full of the meaning of ideas, and be literature, and then it can
be made conformable to the laws of beauty of form and spacing; and above
all, to give character of style, and character of personality, to look
more or less grave, or elegant, or weighty, according to circumstances,
be elegiac, or lyric, or epic, and reflect on its face the intentions of
the text. And again it will be the mark or _sign_ of the person; so that
my Japanese friends can object to Hokusai's bad writing, as betraying
something not refined, for a weighty argument against his other works
done with a similar implement, the brush, which is the pen of the far
East.
It will then be in what we call drawing--which is an abstraction, the
synopsis of the outlines of things meeting together, of their relative
intensities, of their own colors, of their relations to the place they
are in, that is to say, the picture--that this art of Japan, the
daughter of the art of China, will attain its highest form; so that in
reality those of us who think of it as appearing at its best only in
color, in external charm, have not understood it. An etching of
Rembrandt could fairly be said to represent, not so much in itself, but
in its essence, what a great Chinaman would have liked to do in India
ink--the material of all others which, even to us, is his especially.
The line, the abstract line of Rembrandt, its elegance, its beautiful
patterning of the surface, is concealed to us by the extraordinary
richness of some of his modeling and the extreme gradations of what we
call light and shade. But it is there all the same, as a geologic
foundation, in the same way that inside of the Titian's splendor of
surface there is a decorative substructure as well balanced and fixed
as a Venetian brocade--just as the works of other great colorists, as we
call them (to designate more complex men), imply, in their constitution
and the mechanism of their technic, powers of design and drawing
sufficient to furnish out armies of such draftsmen as flourish, for
instance, in the Paris of to-day. It is this surplus of richness that
conceals the identity. Our arts have undertaken an enormous accession of
truths and ambitions upon which the arts of the extreme East have never
ventured. They have attained their end, the end of all art, at an
earlier mental period. They are younger, perhaps even more like
children, and their work cannot involve the greater complications of
greater age; but it has also all that grasp of the future that belongs
to youth, and that has to be accompanied by deficiencies of knowledge;
that is to say, of later acquirement and the practice of good and evil.
And it is impossible to look at the expression of nature, or of any
intention made by the child in full sincerity, without realizing that
the aim of the artist, be he even Michael Angelo, is to return to a
similar directness and unity of rendering. Not that the Eastern artist,
any more than the child, could be conscious of deficiencies of which he
had not thought. He has been satisfied, as we have been satisfied, but
for a longer time and under a greater prestige. As the fruit painted by
the Greek deceived the birds, and the curtain painted by the Greek
painter deceived his fellow-artist, so the horses of Kanaoka have
escaped from their "kakemonos," and the tigers sculptured in the
lattices of temples have been known to descend at night and rend one
another in the courtyards. O---- tells me the Chinese story of the
painter forced to let go his painting of the moon for a nominal sum to
repay an oppressive money-lender, and how, when the banker happened to
unroll it, the whole room was illumined, and he grew into a habit of
spending evenings in the mild effulgence of the painted rays. But when,
after an absence, he looked at it again, the moon was gone,--where old
moons go,--and he was enraged at the painter, though he might well have
noticed that for many days the moon had not been so bright, and indeed
had seemed to be ill drawn. O---- tells me that the artist got it back
for little, and waited the necessary number of days to have its crescent
reappear again; and A---- says that, though the picture is lost to-day,
he hopes to find it again in China in following years.
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION FROM HO-RIU-JI.]
These stories serve as a way of stating to you that as long as new wants
were not felt, newer accuracies did not begin to exist, and these
limitations are naturally seen to be more easily put up with in a
civilization of uninterrupted tradition. To acquire something when one's
hands are full, something has to be dropped. In the stations of our own
progress in art, the advance has at every stage involved some
deficiency, or failure, or weakening on another side. This is the only
explanation I can make for painting in the extreme East not having taken
up portraiture--that is to say, not having triumphed in it, while
sculpture has reached out toward it in a splendid way. We have seen the
same thing in the transition from the Middle Ages, when sculpture
outreaches painting in the direction of reality. But then sculpture is
to a certain extent easier and in a certain way inferior, because it
gives a sort of duplicate of the object, not a relation of it to other
things.
So that the Japanese have not come to the work from the "model," which
has at so many periods and so long been ours. Theirs are types of types;
they are not, as with us, persons, and the pursuit of beauty in the
individual has not been followed apparently by the art of the far East.
The personal love and preference of the artist embodied in another
person their art does not show; nor have their artists given a nameless
immortality to certain human beings, so that for ages their types, their
images, their moods, their characters, their most transitory variations
of beauty, have been proposed to us as an example. Have you ever
reflected how the nameless model reigns in the memory of man with a
personal fame more intimate than that of Cheops, or Helen, or Cæsar,
because the artist has been obliged to build upon this person his own
dream of the world--as with the Roman girl who is the Madonna of San
Sisto?
... So, again, the Eastern artists have suggested, and implied, and used
light and shade, and perspective, and anatomy, and the relations of
light to color, and of color to light, only so much as they could take
into their previous scheme.
In many cases their success is still an astonishment to us. Certainly
their records of motion, their construction of plants and flowers and
birds, we have all appreciated; and their scientific, easy noting of
colored light in landscape made even Rousseau dream of absorbing its
teaching into his pictures, which certainly represent the full Western
contradictory idea, in the most complicated acceptance of every
difficulty.
The artist here, then, has not made separate analytical studies of all
the points that trouble us, that have cost at times some acquirement of
the past, in the anxiety for working out a new direction; as to-day, for
instance, in learned France, where the very art of painting, as a mirror
of the full-colored appearance of things, has for a quarter of a century
been in peril, under the influence of the academy drawing-school, the
model in studio light, and the vain attempt to rival the photograph. And
perhaps it is needless to repeat again how we have lost the sense of
natural decoration and expression of meaning by general arrangement of
lines and spaces, so that again in France we are astonished at M. Puvis
de Chavannes, who uses powers that have once been common to almost all
our race.
Here the artist does not walk attired in all the heavy armor which we
have gradually accumulated upon us. His learning in side issues is not
unnecessarily obtruded upon me, so as to conceal the sensitiveness of
his impressions or the refinement of his mind. As for us, we have
marched on in a track parallel to science, striving now for centuries to
subdue the material world--to get it into the microcosm of our
paintings. Each successive great generation has taken up the task,
heavier and heavier as time goes on, halting and resting when some new
"find" has been made, working out a new discovery often with the risk of
the loss of a greater one.
But how often the processes have covered up what is most important,--to
me at least,--the value of the individual, his aspirations, and indeed
the notions or beliefs that are common between us.
Sometimes this covering has been sordid and mean, pedantic or
unesthetic, sometimes most splendid. But how difficult it has been
always for the many to read, for instance, in our great Rubens, the
evidences of a lofty nature, the devout intentions of a healthy mind!
Not that we can turn back to-day and desert. From the time when the
Greek first asserted in art the value of personal manhood to the date of
the "impressionist" of to-day, the career has been one. And certainly in
the art of painting a vaster future lies before us, whenever we are
ready to carry the past. But remember that whatever has been really
great once will always remain great.
Even if I were competent to make more than approaches to reflection,
this place of dreams is not well chosen for effort. I feel rather as if,
tired, I wished to take off my modern armor, and lie at rest, and look
at these pictures of the simplicity of attitude in which we were once
children. For, indeed, the meaning of our struggle is to regain that
time, through toil and the fullness of learning, and to live again in
the oneness of mind and feeling which is to open to us the doors of the
kingdom.
[Illustration]
[5] Carved button used for suspending the tobacco-pouch to the
belt.
[6] A nest of small boxes carried suspended from the belt.
SKETCHING
NIKKO SAN, August 12.
The enchantment of idleness is no longer to be lived in, of mere
enjoyment of what I see. I have now to feel the bitterness of work, of
effort of memory and analysis, and to become responsible to myself for
what I see, and for the accuracy with which I see it; just as my
quieting inhalation of the Buddhist air is disturbed by the intellectual
necessity of giving to myself some account of formulas, and later,
unfortunately, of rendering to you this same account of my impressions.
And yet I feel so delightfully lazy, so much as if I were in a Newport
in which all should be new. All this place has become more and more
enchanting. I am sure that I shall go with the regret of not having
painted whatever I shall leave untried; all so preferable, undoubtedly,
to what shall have been done. Everything here exists for a painter's
delight, everything composes or makes pleasant arrangements, and the
little odds and ends are charming, so that I sometimes feel as if I
liked the small things that I have discovered better than the greater
which I am forced to recognize.
And, then, all looks wild and natural, as if undisturbed by man; but no
one can tell in a place where nature is so admirable, so admired, and so
adored.
I like the old roads between _yashiki_ walls, broken up with torrents
and bridges; and the small shrines and sacred trees, which have no great
point but that they are pretty, and so far away--in the infancy of the
world. Stones and rocks that are sacred--why and wherefore no one
exactly knowing; only that it is so, and has been so for a long, long
time.
Three thousand years ago Europe was so, with paganism--the peasant or
earth belief--gradually lost to our comprehension except through
hearsay. So we are accustomed to write of the sacred grove; and here it
is, all about me, as if history were made living. The lovely scenery
reminds me continually of what has been associated with it; a
civilization which has been born of it, has never separated from nature,
has its religion, its art, and its historic associations entangled with
all natural manifestations. The great Pan might still be living here, in
a state of the world which has sanctified trees and groves, and
associated the spirit-world with every form of the earthly
dwelling-place. I feel as if I were nearer than I can be through books
to the old world we try to rebuild by collation of facts and documents.
Could a Greek come back here he would find his "soul-informed rocks,"
and all that he thought divine or superstitious, even to the very
"impressions of Aphrodite." The sacredness that lives here in mountains
would seem all natural to him, as would the stories of mountain gods who
ages ago met here the advance of the Buddhist priests. For Buddhism has
joined with the earthly faith in attaching religious value to solitary
places and mountain heights, and many are the stories which link these
two beliefs from the early times. As, for instance, when Shodo Shonin in
his wanderings came here and "opened up" the mountains of Nikko. For
this saintly discoverer, dwelling in early youth among sacred caves, and
a devout reverer of the native and Buddhist deities, had long dreamed of
wondrous things on distant mountains, of celestial or spiritual beings,
visible even to the eye, and pursued his search according to holy vows
and under celestial guidance.
[Illustration: BED OF THE DAYAGAWA, NIKKO.]
Where the red lacquer bridge now goes over the Dayagawa, Shodo Shonin
first crossed upon the fairy snake bridge, which, like a rainbow
spanning the hills, was thrown over for him by a mysterious colossal god
of the mountain. Here, a few yards off, he built the shrine in honor of
his helper, the "great King of the Deep Sand." This was in the year 767
of our era; and in 782, after much previous exploration, he reached the
summit of Nan-tai-san, and met the tutelary gods of Nikko, who promised
to watch over the welfare of Japan and the progress of the new religion.
These three gods were long worshiped thereafter at the foot of the
mountain, on the bank of the lake named Chiuzenji, by him, along with
the Buddhist incarnations whose temple he established there. So that
these primordial divinities were looked upon by certain Buddhist eyes as
what they named "temporary manifestations" of the great essences known
as Amida, Buddha, and Kuwan-on.
Last evening, near the back of the rock upon which is the tomb of
Iyéyasŭ, I followed some zigzag stone steps that lead up to a little
shrine, dark among the trees, in which is the figure of an old man with
powerful legs--the master pilgrim Enno-Sho-kaku. Why his shrine was
exactly there I have not clearly made out; but certainly, as a mountain
spirit, his being here is appropriate. For, born a miraculous child, he
loved from infancy the solitariness of woods far up the mountains. The
rain never wet him; no living things of the forest were ever hurt by
him, even through chance; he lived, as they might, on nuts and berries,
clothed in the tree's own dress, of the tendrils of the wistaria. Thus
he passed forty years among mountains and waterfalls, under directions
received in dreams, to bring the wild places beneath the dominion of
Buddha. Two hill spirits served him and provided him with fuel and
water. The life of nature became his, and he moved through water or
through air as easily as his mind dwelt in the present and in the
future.
Naturally, too, when he touched the world of men he was maligned and
persecuted; but even then, when exiled to an island in the sea, he could
fly back at night to revisit his mother, or ascend his beloved
mountains, while submitting obediently in the daylight to the presence
of his guards. Naturally, too, his evil days came to an end, and he was
freed, and finally flitted away toward China, and has never reappeared.
With him in the little shrine are his faithful imps, painted red and
green, and out of the darkness his wooden image, with a long white
beard, looked absolutely real in the rainy twilight. Enormous iron
sandals hung on every side, offerings of pilgrims anxious to obtain legs
as sturdy as those of the pilgrim patron. Had I been able to leave my
own I should have done so, for never have I felt as weakened and
unenergetic as I have become in this idle climate. We could just see the
white stone steps of the little road as we came down the steep hill
through the wood to the gate of Iyémitsŭ's tomb.
August 16.
The languor that oppresses me does not disappear, and I live with
alternations of exertion that reflect the weather. There has been an
immense amount of sunshine and the same amount of rain, compressing into
a single day as much as would suffice at home for weeks of summer and
winter. Suddenly, from hot blue skies, come down the cloud and the wet.
The lovely little hills or mountains opposite our house round out, all
modeled and full, in glossy green, to be painted in another hour with
thin washes of gray, thickened with white, as in the single-colored
designs of the old Limoges enamels. Then their edges grow sharp and
thin, and are stamped against further mists, like pale prints of the
Japanese designs, making me see those pictures increased to life-size.
And I realize how accurate these are, even to the enlarged appearance of
the great trees which fringe their tops and edges, as these are seen
through the broken, wet veil of moisture. And even here, again, I am
puzzled as to whether art has helped nature.
[Illustration: MOUNTAINS IN FOG BEFORE OUR HOUSE.]
August 17.