of artistic appreciation of the Western mind, when only Hokusai’s
and Hiroshige’s pictures, let me say, of red and green in tone of
conception, called its special attention, and I even thought that our
Japanese art, with the silence of blue and grey, would be perfectly
beyond its power of reach. When Nature soars higher, she turns at once
to the depth of dreams, whose voice is silence. To express the grey
stillness of atmosphere and tone is the highest art, at least, to the
Japanese mind. Not only in the picture, but in the “tea house” or
incense ceremony, or in the garden, the appreciation of silence is the
highest æsthetics. It gives you a strong but never abrupt thrill of the
delight which is nobly touched by the hands of sadness, and lets you
lose yourself in it, and slowly grasp something you may be glad to call
ideal. And the same sensation you can entertain from Gaho’s art, which
you might think to be reminiscent of a certain artistic paradise or
Horai, the blest—one of his favourite subjects—enwrapped in silent air.
You may call it idealism if you will, but it was nothing for him but
the realisation. While you think it was his fancy, he saw it with his
own naked eyes. It is true that he had been delivered from idealism.
And I should say that dream, too, is not less real than you and I.
[Sidenote: NOTHING BUT THE REALISATION]
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]