PANEGERYIC READ BY MR. YONE NOGUCHI ON
THE OCCASION OF THE EXHIBITION.
TRANSLATED BY HIMSELF.
The time was late afternoon of a day in April some fourteen or fifteen
years ago (I wonder if anywhere in the world but in Japan in spring one
could have such a feeling as if drinking sadness from the cup of joy),
when I, greatly troubled by the modern life in the West - I was only just
returned from America where I lived for quite a long time - from an eager
desire to gain a true sense of perspective towards Nature, glided down
the flower-reflecting water by Mukōjima with two or three souls like myself,
carried by a Cherry-blossom-viewing boat.
I confess that I
used then to see anything and everything through my westernized blue
eyes
and even cursed the degenerated Japan in meaningless foolish
imitation of the West ; but now seeing the calmly-settled deep blue of
this Sumida River whereon we were gliding, and thinking that it was the
very blue like that of an old Japanese colour-print, my westernized blue
eyes
suddenly changed, I felt, into Japanese black eyes. The blue
of the Japanese colour-prints up to the time of Hokusai and Hiroshige
is, unlike the western blue pigment which is glad to mix with another
colour to make life active, a thing highly homogeneous, therefore a colour
as it was before it knew any other colour to mix with. Thus baptised under
the blue of the Sumida River in late afternoon of one spring day, I ceased
at once to be a westerner, and my mind entered slowly into a pictorial
domain of Hiroshige, and smiled upon myself that I was certainly affected
like Mr. Happer who cried, Hiro-Hiro-Hiroshige the Great!
How many pictures Hiroshige drew with the Sumida River as subject! Before
my imaginary eyes, several horizontal pictures of Tōto Meisho
depicting the sight of Mukōjima appeared as if a revolving lantern; when
thinking about the particular one entitled Sumidagawa Hanazakari or the
Sumida River in Glory of Blossom,
this very Mukōjima beautifully
coloured by the cherry-blossoms began to look to me just like that picture
of Hiroshige. I could not help exclaiming, in spite of myself, Why,
Nature imitates Art as Wilde once exclaimed, - the Mukōjima of to-day
imitates Hiroshige's picture of olden time!
I and my friends, now gliding through the delightful sights of the Sumida
River which Hiroshige loved so dearly and drew in his many pictures, argued,
discussed and again expanded on how the human mind has been advancing
lately artistically. There is no doubt that our minds (yours as well as
mine) are glad to imitate a rare respectable art whenever they see it.
You will think, I am sure, it is nothing so strange that my mind so full
of Hiroshige's pictures could not help seeing the views right before myself
as nothing but pictures of Hiroshige. It is not true that the Mukōjima
of to-day imitated Hiroshige's picture of olden time
; the fact is
that my own poor mind was imitating the art of Hiroshige. To say differently,
Hiroshige awakened suddenly in my mind; and again to use another expression,
we (you as well as I) are all an artist called Hiroshige at least for
landscape art, - just as it is said, we are all Hamlet, men and women.
As we are already all Hiroshige, we can naturally be moved by him and
feel with his art as if our own creation. A Hiroshige hidden in our own
minds found our representative artist in the real Hiroshige who was born
in 1797 and died in 1858; he is, in truth, the only one native and national
artist of Japan.
I said just now that we, as Japanese, are all Hiroshige; and there even in the West are many persons who would be pleased to call themselves a Hiroshige like ourselves. Whistler, for example, the most famous among them. George Moore once remarked that art is born in parochialism and dies in universalism; though it is a striking expression quite natural to his literary fibre, such language should be taken, I think, only as an emphasis upon the value of true parochialism. The stars, flowers and moon, real in Japan, are equally real stars, flowers and moon in the West; the pictures of Hiroshige true in Japan would be equally true even when brought into the very centres of London and Paris, - I mean that among the landscapes of London and Paris will be found this native artist of Japan, Hiroshige, hidden under the surface. And a great western artist who happened to touch first with the hidden Hiroshige in the West was Whistler himself; just like us Japanese, he was also a Hiroshige, and with Hiroshige's eye, Whistler looked and gazed on the views by the Thames. As a result that he saw Nature through Hiroshige's eye for his own western landscape art, he, this great Whistler, created the rare, peculiar pictorial effect of his own.
The western landscape art, from that of Constable and Corot to that
of late Sir Alfred East, would be called the product of an environment,
because of its lack of a certain dash in abstraction or quintessences.
However splendidly it is drawn, it will never escape from the details
of incidental phenomena, since it is always too closely attached to reality.
The general landscape painting of the West, I dare say, follows usually
after the path or so-called stock-in-trade (large well-balanced masses
of trees in the undulating foreground, and a long stretch of stream near
by, and then a vista of sky and some disturbed clouds beyond, something
of a view like that), which was justified for many years; it is not like
Hiroshige's pictures where individuality of Nature is suddenly seen isolated
from the entire; the art that a Herculean artistic arm grasped in a moment
of rare special gesticulation of Nature, to use Whistler's classic remark,
is creeping up a bit.
The word composition
the
Western artists fondly use, just like harmony
for musicians
and meter
for poets, is uncertain, vague and often neutral
in its own meaning; it always betrays the real individual expression of
Nature. It is my opinion that a true landscape artist should respect the
word isolation
but not composition;
by that I
mean that he must see the natural phenomena in a striking special moment
when, being isolated, it flatly refuses to move and act in uniformity
with the other phenomena. Such an artist was our Hiroshige. His now famous
pictures, all of them are the things that transmit and convey the rare
individuality that Nature revealed in her blessed isolation. His art,
following after a cardinal principle of architecture, that is concentration,
discarded off-hand all the extraneous small details which were apt to
blur and weaken the important vividness; his handling of this secret of
concentration
(of course it was never Hiroshige's alone in
our world of Oriental art) was quite marvelous. Therefore he was extremely
suggestive at his very best. The western landscape art, whether it be
above photograph or beneath photograph, attempts usually to imitate Nature
or to take her copy; the artist may become a softvoiced lover toward Nature,
but not a conqueror wildly waging an artistic battle against her is he.
The better landscape artist of the West might become a theoriser of pigments
or something of a metaphysician or, as Alfred East was, a writer of prose-poems;
but since he is often bound by the common circumspect knowledge, and seldom
escapes from such an old habit in expressing some meaning or purpose,
it is natural that he fails to create a poetical landscape picture whose
life is nothing but suggestion. Enter into Nature, and forget her. Again,
depict Nature, and transcend her. I like to interpret such phrases by
saying that one should be like Hiroshige himself who paid no attention
to the small inessential details, when he grasped firmly the most important
point of Nature which he had wished before to see, hold and draw. To transfer
such a moment one has only to depend on the power of suggestion; surely
there is no other method than that. It was Whistler who saw clearly this
point first in the West; his distinguished service in becoming a great
believer in Hiroshige (using him to advantage from his whole-hearted appreciation)
at an early day when the Japanese colour-prints were practically unknown,
should be recognized along with those wise critics who already recongnised
Wagner and Whitman in the day when the former was ridiculed as a musician
without music, the latter as a poet without poetry. It seems that my imagination's
eyes see this wonderful Jimmy Whistler with Hiroshige's colour-prints
right before him, now straightening up his famous spectacles on his nose,
then exclaiming, How amazing! Oh, how amazing!
I was told
in London that he saw first something of Hiroshige's at a dirty Chinese
tea-house by London Bridge, and again that he came in touch first with
Hiroshige from a wrapper on a pound of tea; but both stories may be wrong,
the truth being that Hiroshige's landscapes were sent by an insignificant
western missionary strayed into old Japan, to show him some specimens
of a barbarous life. At any rate, it sounds more true and real when the
story is more striking and amusing. There is nothing more interesting
and mysterious in the the world's annals of art than how Hiroshige entered
into Europe. It is common enough to say that the real art will become
the final conqueror; but Hiroshige is the best and greatest example of
it. And when I muse on the phrase that life is short but art is long,
I cannot help feeling choked under its sad reality.
Any suggestive art should have the idiom of expression at once vivid
and simple. Every picture of Hiroshige at his best that I see, indeed,
seems to be so new and impressive; and the last one is even so surprising
as to leave my mind incapable for the time being of apprehension of his
other pictures. One picture of his is quite enough as just one picture
of any other great master of the world is enough for us; that is, is it
not, the sure proof of his artistic greatness. I hear recently much about
polyphonic prose
from the American literary world ; it is
but a new movement to break away from the old wearied habit and inspire
into letters a living freedom, the taste and feeling of an author being
its only law. Such is, I dare say, another proof that our Japanese literature
is far ahead of the literature of the West; or to say differently, it
hints the point that the western literature is speedily approaching the
Japanese literature. Here we have Heike-mono-gatari or the Epic
of the Heike Clan.
There we have the Noh plays. They are nothing
but polyphonic prose
which is supposed to be new in the West.
To put aside the question of literature, and return to that of Hiroshige.
It was he that fully practised amid the pigments the theory of polyphonic
prose
; he arranged and rearranged and then unified by his own special
taste the realism and idealism or the reality and imagination to perfection.
I might be blamed as a vague critic, if I say that any artist, whatever
he be, idealist or realist or what not, is always good when he is true
to his own art; but it is true, I think, that even the seeming realistic
picture of Japanese art, when it is splendidly executed, is always subjective.
I will say that the good picture, although it might appear idealistic
superficially, is surely a work which never forgets the part of realistic
expression. Hiroshige's landscapes are exactly like that. Perhaps he might
be called a realist or objective artist from the point that our artistic
mood is slowly but steadily led into trees, sky, rivers and mountains
through his just expression of the relation between Nature and men; but
who can declare that he was an artist who only and realistically followed
after superficial Nature? The realistic elements of his art played successfully
the most important service to bring out more distinctly the indefinable
quality, which, as I have no better word, I will call atmosphere or pictorial
personality; I think that it is more true to call him an idealist or subjective
artist. He is the most national landscape artist of Japan; and it seems
that he learned this secret from Chinese landscape art - how to avoid
feminity and confusion. And then Whistler, on the other hand, learning
from Hiroshige how to cut off the confused feminine reality, created here
a new phase of western landscape art which combined reality and imagination
with rhythmic harmony. See the picture, for instance,
Old
Battersea Bridge
at the Tate Gallery, that famous nocturnal
arrangement of blue and gold, of which I wrote:
A voice of the rockets
To break the sky;
Then the flash
Only to make the darkness intense.
Might I ever become that voice ?
The light precious, of a moment and death, is it not that of our lives?
To face only the sky, even for a moment, and forget the land,
And become a rider of the winds;
What a joy in parting from life's confusion,
To find a greater song amid the clouds.
The voice of the rocket
Then the flash -
Is it not that of my soul born to please the people below,
And to take pain of death in her own keeping alone?
One will easily see how this picture soars out of the superficial reality, and that again by the lovely support of realistic technique the inner poetical note heightens gracefully and rhythmically.
When we think that this particular picture was a thing which inspired
Ruskin to call him a conceited wilful impostor or charlatan, we have only
to wonder how blind a large majority of critics of those days were to
our Oriental art; and again we cannot help wondering how speedily the
western art as well as literature are, ever since, coming nearer to ours.
While Ruskin sadly missed grasping a prophet's fame, Whistler presented
a living instance that art only sends out his sparkling life from a struggle
against vulgarity. The faithful followers of Whistler may say anything
they please; but they will be unable to deny the fact that he owes many
things to our Hiroshige. Now apart from the central artistic question,
turn your attention to a small point in the placing of the signature.
The signature for a western artist means only a sign, nothing else; how
to place the signature for our Japaness artists is a serious matter, since,
it is thought, it keeps an important relation with the whole picture;
therefore it has been studied carefully. Whistler whose sharp tasteful
curiosity saw this point, hastened to devise his own signature in the
shape of a butterfly. When you see Arrangement in Black: Portrait
of Senor Pablo de Serasate,
or Portrait of Monsieur Theodore
Duret,
or Portrait of the Artist
or Arrangement
in Black: Portrait of Mr. Louis Huth,
it will be plain what a serious
value is given by his written seal of a butterfly. Certainly it is never
a question of mere signing for Whistler's picture, but quite an important
part of his own art.
There are many cases in which our Japanese art or literature or what
not, when seen through a westerner's blue eye, comes out suddenly revealing
a strange meaning or what we never before had expected to exist. I have
one instance in the words that generally pass as Hiroshige's farewell
verse, saying: I leave my brush at Azuma, and go on the journey
to the Holy West to view the famous scenery there.
I cannot accept
it innocently, and even doubt its origin, as it is more prosaic than poetical.
It is only that he followed perhaps after a common fashion of his day
if he really left it when he died, as the verse itself is poor and at
best only humorous; but when it is taken by the western seriousness, translated
into English, the words grow to carry another strong effect. Thus Hiroshige,
since discovered in the West, was interpreted and reconstructed by a decidedly
new understanding; so he is to a certain great degree, a discovery or
creation of the westerners. I think, therefore, it is proper (and even
a courtesy) to look upon him with the western point of criticism; and
Hiroshige seen through the Japanese eye would be more or less different
from the Hiroshige in the West.
It goes without saying that
our recent criticism of Hiroshige is pleased to put its foundation on
the western opinion.
I said before that Hiroshige owes much to Chinese landscape art; and
I like now to think of him as a Chinese poet. Upon my little desk here
I see an old book of Chinese prosody; there is a popular Chinese verse,
Shichigon Zekku, or Four Lines with Seven Words in Each, which is almost
as rigid as the English sonnet; and the theory of the sonnet can be applied
to that Shichigon Zekku without any modification. We generally attach
an importance to the third line, calling it the line for change,
and the fourth is the conclusion; the first line is, of course, the commencing
of the subject, and the second is to receive and develop.
It seems that Hiroshige's good pictures very well pass this test of Shichigon
Zekku qualification. Let me pick out the pictures at random to prove my
words. Here is the Bright
Sky after Storm at Awazu,
one of the series called Eight Views
of the Lake Biwa; in it the white sails ready to hoist in the fair breeze
might be the change
of the versification. That picture was
commenced and developed with the trees and rising hills by the lake, and
the conclusion is the sails now visible and then invisible far away. Now
take the picture of a rainstorm
on the Tōkaidō. Two peasants under a half-opened paper umbrella, and
the Kago-bearers naked and hasty, are the third line
of the
picture; the drenched bamboo dipping all one way and the cottage roofs
shivering under the threat of Nature would be the first and second lines,
while this picture-poem concludes itself with the sound of the harsh oblique
fall of rain upon the ground. You will see that Hiroshige's good pictures
have always such a theory of composition; and he gained it, I think, from
the Chinese prosody. In the East, more than in the West, art is allied
to verse-making.
A certain critic of modern English poetry who believes that the unit
of the true poem is not the foot, number of the syllables, the quantity,
or the line, talks on the Greek word strophe,
from the point
of emphasizing the necessary element of circular swing or return; and
if we can interpret this strophe as obvious effort at balance or prizing
of the sense of contrast, I think that Hiroshige fully and truly practised
it in all the pictures of his landscape. Now take a little vertical print
entitled the Bow-Moon
,
one of twenty-eight moon sceneries,
where the slender moon, white, in tranced ecstasy, climbs up from between
the crags, as Arthur Davison Ficke writes, straying like some lonely
bride through the halls of Kubla Khan.
How well-balanced is the
bow-moon with the leaping torrent below in the picture. And what a pictorial
contrast in these walled crags on either side, with the ghostly pilgrim
of heaven between. And again how the poem inscribed on the top keeps a
balance with Hiroshige's signature below on the left. This lovely rhythmic
performance in art of balance is so old in the pictorial kingdom of the
East; our Japanese artists, indeed all of them, have the secret of it
in their blood hereditarily. But it will give certainly a valuable suggestion
to the western artists.
Hiroshige in the West
is entering, I think, into his third
period, that is to mean the period of adjustment or real criticism, when
his pictures hitherto unknown, what a fragment they be, will receive full
justice from their artistic merits alone. The first period when he was
a mere curiosity, and the second period when he suffered, as Hokusai once
suffered, from an undiscriminating foolish reception, are now, I hope
at least, a past story. But I feel ashamed to say that he is only entering
into his second period in Japan where he was born and worked.
One more word at the end. I always say what use is there to talk on
Hiroshige the Second or Third. I like to understand the word Hiroshige
not personally, but as a very synonym or title of artistic merit
in landscape pictures. If there are pieces, as in fact there are many
examples, much below the Hiroshige merit, while bearing his own signature,
I shall never care (who will care?) whether they are called the work of
the Second or Third.