Nikko, August 2.
I fear that of all my description the refrain of the words gold and bronze will be all that you will retain. How can I have any confidence in my account of anything so alien, whose analysis involves the necessary misuse of our terms, based upon another past in art?—for words in such cases are only explanations or easy mnemonics of a previous sight. But soon I shall have photographs to send, and if I can summon courage for work, in this extreme heat and moisture, I shall make some drawings. But again, these would not give the essential reasons for things being as they are; and whatever strange beauties would be noted, they might appear to have happened, if I may so say, and not to have grown of necessity. It is so difficult for our average way of accepting things to think of what is called architecture without expecting structures of stone—something solid and evidently time-defying.
And yet, if architecture represents the needs of living of a people, the differences that we see here will have the same reasonableness that other devices show elsewhere. The extreme heat, the sudden torrents of rain, will explain the far-projecting and curved roofs, the galleries and verandas, the arrangements for opening or closing the sides of buildings by sliding screens, which allow an adjustment to the heat or the damp. But weightier reasons than all these must have directed in the construction of such great buildings as the temples, and I thinkthat, putting aside important race influences, these sufficient reasons will be found in the volcanic nature of Japan and its frequent earthquakes. Whatever was to be built must have had to meet these difficult problems: how successfully in the past is shown by a persistence of their buildings which to us seems extraordinary, for many of them are lasting yet in integrity for now over a thousand years.
I speak of the influences of race, because it is evident that very many traditions, prejudices, and symbolic meanings are built into these forms, and that many of them must have come through the teachings of China. Everywhere the higher architecture, embodied in shrines and temples, is based on some ideal needs, and not essentially upon necessities; is, in fact, a record or expression of a religious idea or mystery. In this case I am too profoundly ignorant, as most of us are, to work out origins; but my mind feels the suggestion of an indefinite past, that once had meanings and teachings, just as my eye recognizes in the shape of the massive temples the image of a sacred box, or ark, once to be carried from place to place. There is, perhaps, in this direction a line of study for the men to come.
Like all true art, the architecture of Japan has found in the necessities imposed upon it the motives for realizing beauty, and has adorned the means by which it has conquered the difficulties to be surmounted. Hence no foundations, which would compromise the super-imposed building by making it participate in the shock given to its base. Hence solid pedestals, if I may so call them, or great bases, upon which are placed only, not built in, the posts which support the edifice, leaving a space between this base and the horizontal beams or floors of the building. The building is thus rendered elastic, and resumes its place after the trembling of the earthquake, and thewaters of bad weather can escape without flooding any foundations.
The great, heavy, curved roof, far overhanging, weighs down this structure, and keeps it straight. An apparently unreasonable quantity of adjusted timber and beams supports the ceiling and the roof. Complicated, tremendous corbelings, brackets grooved and dovetailed, fill the cornices as with a network; but all these play an important practical part, and keep the whole construction elastic, as their many small divisions spread the shock.
Still more, in such a building as the charming pagoda at Iyéyasŭ's shrine, which is full one hundred feet high, slight-looking and lithe, the great beam or mast which makes its center does not support from the base, but is cut off at the foundation; and hence it acts as a sort of pendulum, its great weight below retarding the movement above when the earthquake comes.
I have heard the whisper of a legend saying that the architect who devised this, to correct the errors of a rival and partner, was poisoned in due time, in jealous return. For those were happy times when backbiting among artists took the more manly form of poisoning.
Now besides all this, which gives only the reason for the make of certain parts which together form the unity of a single building, there are other principles before us. The relation of man to nature, so peculiarly made out in the Japanese beliefs, is made significant, symbolized, or typified through the manner in which these buildings are disposed. A temple is not a single unity, as with us, its own beginning and end. A temple is an arrangement of shrines and buildings meaningly placed, often, as here, in mountains—a word synonymous with temples; each shrine a statement of some divine attribute, and all these buildings spread with infinite art over large spaces, open, or inclosed by trees and rocks. The buildings are butparts of a whole. They are enveloped by nature, the principle and the adornment of the subtle or mysterious meaning which links them all together.
Besides all this is the religious symbolism underlying or accompanying all, as once with us, of which I know too little to speak, but which can be felt and occasionally detected because of many repetitions. But this would carry me beyond my limits; and, indeed, we find it very difficult to obtain any more information from our instructors, whether they do not know securely, or whether they reserve it for better minds and worthier apprehensions. Nor do I object to this Oriental secrecy or mystery, as it adds the charm of the veil, which is often needed.
And I should wish that soon some one might undertake to make out in full the harmony of proportions which has presided over these buildings. It is evident that a delicate and probably minute system of relations, under the appearance of fantasy, produces here the sense of unity that alone makes one secure of permanent enjoyment. My information on the subject is fragmentary: I know that the elegant columns are in a set relation to the openings of the temple; that the shape of these same columns is in another relation to their exquisite details; that the rafters play an important part, determining the first departure. I have seen carpenter's drawings, with manners of setting out work and measurements, and I feel that there is only a study to carry out.
Nor is my wish mere curiosity, or the interest of the antiquarian. What we need to-day is belief and confidence in similar methods, without which there is nothing for ourselves but a haphazard success; no connection with the eternal and inevitable past, and none with a future, which may change our materials, but will never change our human need for harmony and order.
You have heard of the little gardens, and of their exquisitedetails, in which the Japanese makes an epitome of nature, arranged as if for one of his microscopic jewels of metals, ivory, or lacquer.
Here in our own garden there would seem no call for an artificial nature. The mountain slope on which we live must have always been beautiful of itself; but for all that, our garden—that is to say, the space about our landlord's house and our own—has been treated with extreme care. Our inclosure is framed towards the great temple groves, and the great mountains behind them, by a high wall of rock, over which, at a corner edged with moss, rolls a torrent, making a waterfall that breaks three times. The pool below, edged with iris that grow in the garden sand, is crossed by a bridge of three big flat stones, and empties secretly away. On each side of the fall, planted in the rock wall, stands a thick-set paulownia, with great steady leaves, and bending towards it a willow, whose branches drop far below itself and swing perpetually in the draught of the waterfall. Bunches of pink azalea grow in the hollows of the rocks, and their reflections redden the eddies of the pool. Steps which seem natural lead up the wall of rock; old pines grow against it, and our feet pass through their uppermost branches. On the top is planted a monumental stone, and from there a little path runs along, leading nowhere nowadays, as far as I can make out. I am right in calling this mass of rock, which is a spur of the mountain's slope, a wall; for I look down from its top to the next inclosure far below, now overgrown and wild. What is natural and what was made by man has become so blended together, or has always been so, that I can choose to look at it as my mood may be, and feel the repose of nature or enjoy the disposing choice of art.
Where the little bridge crosses over, and where mossy rocks dip down a little to allow a passage, edged by a maple and a pine, I look over across the hidden road to adesertedyashiki, with one blasted tree, all overgrown with green and melting into distances of trees which, tier behind tier, reach to a little conical hill, that is divided and subdivided by sheets of mist at every change of heat and damp, so that I feel half as if I knew its forms perfectly—half as if I could never get them all by heart.
In the sand of our little garden are set out clumps of flowers, chrysanthemum mostly, and occasionally iris and azalea; and the two houses make its other two sides. The priest's house, an old one, with large thatched roof projecting in front and supported there by posts covered with creepers, is nearer the water. I see the little priest with his young neophyte curled on the mats in the big front room whose whole face is open; while in a break, or wing, is the opening to the practical housekeeper side of the dwelling.
Our own house, which faces south like the priest's, completes the square, as I said. It is edged on the outside by a small plantation of trees with no character, that stretch away to the back road and to a wall terracing a higher ground behind. There a wide space overgrown with bushes and herbage, that cover former care and beauty, spreads out indefinitely toward conical hills hot in the sun, behind which rises the great volcanic slope of Nio-ho. A little temple shrine, red, white, and gold, stands in this heat of sunlight and makes cooler yet the violets and tender greens of the great slopes. This is to the north. When I look toward the west I see broad spaces broken up by trees, and the corner of Iyéyasŭ's temple wall half hidden by the gigantic cedars, and as I write, late in the afternoon, the blue peak of Nan-tai-san rounded off like a globe by the yellow mist.
The garden, embosomed in this vastness of nature, feels small, as though it were meant to be so. Every part is on a small scale, and needs few hands to keepthings in order. We have a little fountain in the middle of the garden, which gives the water for our bath, and sends a noisy stream rolling through the wooden trough of the wash-room. The fountain is made by a bucket placed upon two big stones, set in a basin, along whose edge grow the iris, still in bloom. A hidden pipe fills the bucket, and a long, green bamboo makes a conduit for the water through the wooden side of our house. With another bamboo we tap the water for our bath. In the early morning I sit in the bath-room and paint this little picture through the open side, while A——, upstairs in the veranda, is reading in Dante's "Paradiso," and can see, when he looks up, the great temple roof of the Buddhist Mangwanji.
Occasionally the good lady who takes care of our priest's house during his weeks of service at the temple of Iyémitsŭ salutes me while at my bath, for the heating of which her servant has supplied the charcoal. She is already dressed for the day, and in her black silk robe walks across the garden to dip her toothbrush in the running water of the cascade. Then in a desultory way she trims the plants and breaks off dead leaves, and later the gardener appears and attends to one thing after another, even climbing up into the old pine tree, taking care of it as he does of the sweet-peas; and I recall the Japanese gardener whom I knew at our Exposition of 1876, as I saw him for the last time, stretched on the ground, fanning the opening leaves of some plant that gave him anxiety.
Thus the Japanese garden can be made of very slight materials, and is occasionally reduced to scarcely anything, even to a little sand and a few stones laid out according to a definite ideal of meaning. A reference to nature, a recall of the general principles of all landscapes,—of a foreground, a distance, and a middle distance;that is to say, a little picture,—is enough. When they cannot deal with the thing itself—when they do, they do it consummately—they have another ideal which is not so much the making of a real thing as the making of a picture of it. Hence the scale can be diminished, without detriment in their eyes, until it becomes lilliputian to ours. All this I take to be an inheritance from China, modified toward simplicity. I do not know to what type our little garden belongs. For they have in their arrangements manners of expressing ideas of association, drawing them from nature itself, or bringing them out by references to tradition or history, so that I am told that they aim to express delicate meanings which a Western imagination can hardly grasp; types, for instance, conveying the ideas of peace and chastity, quiet old age, connubial happiness, and the sweetness of solitude. Does this make you laugh, or does it touch you—or both? I wish I knew more about it, for I am sure that there is much to say.
I have spoken of simplicity. The domestic architecture is as simple, as transitory, as if it symbolized the life of man. You can see it all in the drawings, in the lacquers, and it has recently been treated completely in the charming book of Professor Morse. Within, the Japanese house is simplicity itself; all is framework, and moving screens instead of wall. No accumulations, no bric-à-brac; any lady's drawing-room with us will contain more odds and ends than all that I have yet seen together in Japan. The reserved place of honor, a sort of niche in the wall, the supposed seat of an ideal guest, has upon its bench some choice image on a stand, or a vase with elegant disposal of flowers or plants, and above it the hanging roll with drawing or inscription. Perhaps some other inscription or verse, or a few words on a tablet upon some cross-beam, and perhaps a small folding screen. Otherwiseall works of art are put aside in the fireproof store-house, to be brought out on occasions. The woodwork is as simple as it can be—occasionally, some beautiful joinery; always, when it can be afforded, exquisite workmanship; and, above all, exquisite cleanliness. For there are no beds—only wadded coverlets and the little wooden pillow, which does not disturb the complicated feminine coiffure in the languors of the night. No tables; food is laid on the cleanly mats, in many trays and dishes. No chairs; the same mats that serve for bedstead and table serve for seats with, perhaps, a cushion added.
And this is all the same for all, from emperor's palace to little tradesman's cottage. There is nothing, apparently, but what is necessary, and refinement in disposing of that. The result is sometimes cold and bare. There is the set look of insisting upon an idea—the idea of doing with little: a noble one, certainly; as, for instance, when the emperor's palace at Kioto is adorned merely by the highest care in workmanship and by the names of the artists who painted the screen walls—in solitary contradiction to the splendor and pomp of all absolute rulers, no storehouse for the wasted money of the people, but an example of the economy which should attend the life of the ruler. It is possible that when I return I shall feel still more distaste for the barbarous accumulations in our houses, and recall the far more civilized emptiness persisted in by the more esthetic race.
Nikko, August 12.
I need not tell you that the pervading manner of spending time and money is always within our reach. We do not go after the owner and seller of bric-à-brac; he comes to us.
Coming from afar,—from Tokio, a hundred miles away, and from Ozaka, four times that distance,—bales of merchandise are unloaded at our door, or at our friends' for us. Patient pack-horses stand in the inclosure of the yards; big parcels, and piles of boxes and bundles, encumber the verandas. Weary hours, beginning with excitement and ending with gentle disappointment, are spent in indecision of judgment and uncertainty of purchase. But there remains always at the bottom of the boxes a delusive hope, and some treasure may perhaps reward our patience.
And then, besides occasional beauties in color or design, there is something in looking over all these débris of civilization in their own home; and odds and ends, having not much more excuse for themselves than that they remain, help to explain either the art or the habits of the country, or its history, or the nature we see about us. We have found almost nothing among the things brought us which can rank as work of high art, and I am afraid that we must be looked down upon by our friends for purchases which have no excuse in any lofty esthetic code. But they have the charm of being there, and of explaining, and in another way of teaching, even when they are bad, and often because they are bad. Because their verypoverty helps to a classification and to an analysis of the means through which the artist worked, and to a knowledge of the prevalent subjects and arrangements which he found ready to his hand, bequeathed to him by an earlier and nobler choice.
From all this poor stuff exhales the faded scent of a greater art and refinement, which is now invisible, or destroyed, or subsisting only in fragments, difficult of access, or which are far away. And there is a peculiar unity in the arts of the extreme East. We must remember that this very sensitive Japanese race has developed in its art, as in everything, without being subjected to the many direct and contradictory influences which have made our Western art and civilization. There have been here, within historic times, no vast invasions of alien races, bringing other ways for everything in thought and in life, and obliging an already complex civilization to be begun over and over again on readjusted bases; no higher living and advanced thought obliged to yield for times and half times, until the grosser flames of energy could be purified; no dethronement, within society tried by every other calamity, of the old primeval faith. Instead of a tempest of tastes and manners of feeling blowing from every quarter, and in which the cruder dislikes have held for centuries the balance against cultured likings and devotion, Japan has been carried on in one current, in which have mingled, so as to blend, the steady influences of the two most conservative civilizations of India and of China.
All here to-day, and for far back, is interwoven with Chinese thought, breaks through it, returns to it, runs alongside of it. And through Buddhism, its fervor, its capacity for taking up in its course boulders of other creeds or habits, a something different, higher in aspiration and in form, has lived with everything else and affected all.
This impressionable race found, contrasting with and supporting its nature, secure, steady, undeviating guides, so that these foreign ideals have persisted here with a transplanted life. In fact, it is possible to look to Japan to find something of what ancient China was. So much of what has here been done, as their language does to-day, saves for us a hint or a reflection of the great Chinese ages, when China had not yet been conquered by the foreigner, and when energies apparently unknown to the China of to-day flourished with the strength of youth. The art and literature of Japan, therefore, represent in great part the Chinese prototype—an original which for us has practically disappeared. We cannot easily know what arrangements and compositions, what free interpretations of the world, or severe imitations of nature, the old Chinese adopted, but they are reflected or continued in the styles and subjects and treatments of what we call Japanese. The limits and definitions of each may be clear to the Japanese critic, but to our casual Western eye they merge or derive one from the other, like some little-known streams which make one river.
Almost all the arrangements that we know so well on Japanese drawings, screens, bronzes, lacquers, ivories, etc., have Chinese prototypes. And all this is over and above the constant use of Chinese legend, and story, and philosophy, which are to Japan what Greece and Rome used to be to us—a storehouse of associated meanings and examples.
Would it amuse you if I made out some of the types that you see?
Here are the pine-tree and the stork, emblems of long life; or the bamboo and the sparrow, which typify the mildness and gentleness of nature.
The willow waves in the wind to and fro, and the swallows swing forth and back again.
The names of Color and of Love are joined by a similarity of sound, and probably by a mystic association: and so you will see upon the screens that the leaves of the maple turn red in autumn, when the stag calls the doe. The cherry-blossom's splendor is for show, like the pheasant's plumage.
Long centuries ago the plum became the poet's tree, because of an early poet's verses; and the nightingale, also a singer and a poet, is associated with the tree.
The tiger hiding in the jungle has a background of bamboo, as the oxen have the peach-tree, from an old Chinese sentence: "Turn the horse loose on the flower-covered mountain, and the ox into the orchard of peaches."
The cock stands on the unused war-drum, which is a Chinese symbol of good government, the aim of which is peace.
Or, again, legends and stories are referred to.
The cuckoo flies across the crescent of the moon, and the story of Yorimasa is called up, who slew with bow and arrow the mysterious monster that had tormented the life of the Mikado Narihito. I despair of telling the story without great waste of words, and I half-regret having chosen the example; but, perhaps, it is all the more Japanese for its complication.
You must know that the Mikado—this was about the year 1153—had been ill night after night with terrible nightmares, to the confusion of his numerous doctors; and that his many feminine attendants had done all they could to soothe him, to no avail. Every night, at the hour of the Bull (twoA. M., an hour when evil power is great), the dovecote was fluttered by this fearful visitation. But, at length, either these gentle dames or other watchers noticed that before each access a cloud had drifted over the palace, and that, resting just above the sleeping-apartments, two lights shone out from the dark mass.Then the bells of the city temples sounded the hour of the Bull. The gentlemen of the palace and the imperial guards were set on watch, the priests prayed to ward off the evil influence; but uselessly. Then Yorimasa—a brave warrior, a famous archer, one of the guards—was allowed, or ordered, to try to destroy the evil thing, whatever it might be. He, with a follower, watched nightly until the dark cloud and the shining orbs were near, when the great bow of Yorimasa was discharged, and a strange and wonderful beast fell blinded to the ground.
The sword of Yorimasa despatched it in nine separate blows, and the thing,—said to have had something of the monkey, the tiger, and the serpent,—was burned to ashes. For this Yorimasa was given the girl he loved, the Lady Iris-flower (who, therefore, had not watched in vain), and with her the celebrated sword called Shishino-o (King of Wild Boars). Now the imperial deputy, as he presented this sword to Yorimasa, tried him with a punning verse, while a cuckoo sang. This is what the verse said:
"The cuckoo above the clouds, how does it mount?" But it meant, "Like the cuckoo to soar so high, how is it so?" To which Yorimasa answered, filling in the necessary couplet, "The waning moon sets not at will," which might also mean, in modest disclaimer of ambitious effort, "Only my bow I bent; that alone sent the shaft." And so this moon stands in the picture, as in the verses, for the bent bow of Yorimasa.
It is a shorter story, that which makes the allusion in the type of the chrysanthemum and the fox. It is a variation of the perpetual story. The prince royal of India had a lovely mistress, who had bewitched him, and who fell asleep one day in a bed of chrysanthemums, where her lover shot at and wounded a fox in the forehead. The bleeding temple of the girl discovered the evil animal she really was. For the fox, as in China, is in Japan a wickedanimal, capable of everything in the way of transformation and suggestion.
There are endless stories about him, and the belief or superstition is still very strong. O—— was talking to us lately about the scorcerers and spiritual mediums and fortune-tellers, and, as an explanation of the power of some medium, told us that he claimed to have in his service tame foxes. Only, when I asked where they might be lodged in the little city house, he explained that they were not living in the body, and therefore cumbersome, but were the spirits of foxes, thus subservient, and able to penetrate everywhere and report.
The badger also is a misleading creature, and the cat is considered uncertain.
Or take the way in which Hokusai refers to ancient story when, at the end of one of his books, he makes a picture of the devoted knight Kojima Takanori clad in armor, covered with the peasant's rain-cloak; and he is writing on the trunk of the cherry-tree the message of warning for his master, the Emperor Go-Daigo Tenno. But instead of the old verse, Hokusai has put: "In the sixth year of the era Tempo, in the month of April, my seventy-sixth year, this is written by me, formerly by name Hokusai, but now more correctly known as 'The Old Man gone Mad for Painting.'"
Here I have been wandering into Japan, while my theme was rather the persistence of Chinese subjects, or of subjects connected with China, the list of which would be endless, from Shoki, the devil-killer, hunting his prey of imps over sword-guards and round the corners of boxes, to pictures of aphorisms, such as this saying of Confucius, of which I found a drawing yesterday: "Avoid even the appearance of evil; do not stop to tie your shoes in the melon-patch of an enemy." And so these innumerable subjects are common property, and serve as afield for the artist to try to be himself, to bring out the story or part of it, or his way of looking at it, or its decorative capacity, or any way of anchoring the Japanese imagination. I cannot say that for many of the ordinary arrangements, the most simple and conventional, one does not often suffer the boredom of repetition, as we do at home, with the eagle and the stars, and armorial bearings, and the stereotyped symbolism of churches. But it suffices to see the thing well done again, to start once more into some new enjoyment of the choice of subject.
So there can exist with regard to these subjects, apparently mere motives of form, and partly because they are conventional, a deeper convention or meaning, more or less visible to the artist when at work, according to his temperament or his school, as in our poetry, where an idea may or may not be overlaid with realistic or esthetic decoration.
PAINTING BY CHIN-NAN-PIN.
I reach out for the first design that my hand can find, which turns out to be a drawing by Chin-nan-pin. I have chosen at haphazard, but the choice is perhaps all the better. We shall have no example of a great man to deal with, but merely the work of a remarkable Chinaman who, somewhere in the early eighteenth century, happened to come to Japan, or to be born there, so as to fit into a certain Chinomania then prevalent. The photograph that I send you is a poor one. You can merely discern the pattern, or what might be called the masses, of the design. A horse is tied to a tree,—a horse of Japan,—and a monkey slides down the trunk and clutches at the halter that prevents escape. I need not ask you to admire the stealthy and yet confident step of the ape, and the motions and repugnance and fright of the horse. I don't think that they could be better given. Withal, there is a gravity of general outline and appearances, and a pleasantly managed balance of the full and empty spaces. But thesedecorative points are not those I wish to refer to just now. What I wish to indicate now is that this subject, which might have suited a Dutchman for realism and for its choice of the accidental, will mean, if you wish to see it, the natural resistance and struggle of the inferior nature against a superior mastery which it does not understand, and which at first appears capricious and unreasonable. Without being quite certain of the accuracy of my definition, I know that the design is based upon a like convention.
This may not be spirituality, but how far it is from what we call realism, and how wise the acceptance by the artist of a convention which allows him to give all his energies to a new interpretation, through his own study of nature! As with those who have chosen distinctly religious subjects, and whose vitality and personality can triumph and coexist with the absence of novelty in the theme, so the artist in more ordinary subjects may be wise in keeping to themes which are known to those whom he addresses, and in which they can fully grasp and enjoy his success. These general themes allow a stricter individuality in the artist who uses them, when he is capable, and make his want of individuality tolerable, and even laudable and pleasant, when, like most of us, he has little of his own. Then he can never be so offensive if we do not like him. Those that we do not like are often offensive because their personal vanity appears upon a solid ground of their own stupidity. Perhaps this is why the Japaneseobjet d'artnever offends, at least in the older work done under the general influences that have obtained with the race.
Hence, also, their astonishing variety. A thousand times, many thousand times, you will have seen the same subject, but never the same rendering, never the sameobject, twice repeated. That is to say, that whenever it isworth while we can get at the most valuable and costly part of the work of art, the humanity that made it, the love of something that went with the work. It is this that makes the mystery of the charm of innumerable little pieces of older work, like the metal-work that belongs to the old swords, any one of which is superior to anything that we do, unless in the rare cases when we bring in the expensive life of a great master to rival it—some part of the work left by a Barye, a Cellini, a Pisano.
All that our great men have done is exactly opposite to the tendency of our modern work, and is based on the same ground that the Japanese has lived and worked on—i. e., the reality and not the appearance, the execution and not the proposition of a theme. The whole principle is involved in the analysis of, say, a successful study from nature—a beautiful painting, for instance, of a beautiful sky. In such a case the subject is all provided; the importance of the result depends upon the artist's sensitiveness to the facts supplied to him, upon his use of his hereditary and acquired methods of recording them, and upon his personal variation of those methods. No one dreams of praising the art of the sky itself, that is to say, the fact that the facts existed; to praise the artist for the thing having occurred from which he worked. It is this apparent want of comprehension of the first principles of the plastic arts in our poor work, and in a vast proportion of our best, that makes any reasonable man a pessimist as to our near future. Every poor element of our civilization is against it, and our influences are now deteriorating the art of Japan. We value material or the body instead of workmanship or the right use of the body; and instead of style and design, the intellect and the heart. To us a gold object seems spiritually precious, and we hesitate at working in other than costly materials. To the Japanese workman wood and gold have been nothing but the meansto an end. We had rather not do anything than do anything not enduring, so that when our materials are difficult, the life has flown that was to animate them; the Japanese is willing to build a temporary architecture, and make a temporary lacquer, which holds more beauty and art than we to-day manage to get in granite or in metal.
And when the Oriental workman takes the hardest surfaces of steel or of jade, he has had the preparations for using it with mastery; it is again plastic and yielding for him, as the less abiding materials have been before. Nor would the Japanese artist understand the point of view of many of our men, who do their best to put an end to all art, so lost are they in our vanity of "advertisement." The Japanese would never have invented the idea of doing poorly the work one is forced to do to live, so as to reserve vast energy for more important or influential work that might draw attention to him. The greater part of our "decoration" is carried out just the contrary way to his. Our artists accept as a momentary curse the fact that to live they may have to draw patterns, or work in glass, or paint or model subsidiary ornamentation. They look forward to the glorious time when they may wreak their lofty souls in the dignity of paint mixed with the sacred linseed oil, or in the statue done in bronze or carved in marble by other hands than theirs. And yet if their nature be not too far removed from ours, the habit of doing less than their best, the habit of doing poorly, the scorn of anything but the fine clothes of a fine material, will never be gotten over, and throughout this little cheapness of soul, this essential snobbishness, will be felt to puzzle and disconcert those who wish to admire.
That is to say, that they too often do not look to the end, but to the means, while to the artist the means are a mere path—as with the Greeks, whose work will live, even if its very physical existence is obliterated, becauseit is built in the mind, in the eternity of thought. So Greek art existed, and has lived, and lives, the most flourishing and richest that we know of—with less to represent it than we turn out daily. So it lived, when it had no longer anything of its own body to represent it, in everything that was done in every country which kept its lessons; and lives still, without examples to refer to, even into the very painting of to-day. It is the principle of the proper place of means that makes the little piece of Japanese metal-work—for instance, the sword-guard or the knife-handle—an epitome of art, certainly a greater work of art than any modern cathedral. And as certainly we shall never even produce good ordinary ornamental work until we feel the truth that I have lamely indicated.
"I might perhaps do as well as this," said an intelligent architect, as we looked at some excellent but not noblest details of French Renaissance, "but how could I spend the time on it? And not only that, but how could I have spent the time previous to this in doing other similar work to train me? I can only make a project, have it carried out by the best commercial firm, not anxious to change the course of trade, and shut my eyes to the result. I should never be criticized, because I did not give more than my bargain." And yet to give more than your bargain is merely to give art.
Look at this littlenetsuke,[5]orinro,[6]or sword-guard, and follow the workman as you admire each detail of the execution. He has chosen some subject or some design which may have an associated meaning, or may be of good omen, and bear good wishes, or he may have chosen out of the entire world of observation, of fancy, or of tradition; and may have chosen just as much because it fits well the space which he has to cover.
He will take as well a design that has been used a hundred times as a newer one. For he has toreinventit in execution, even as the Greek sculptor who recut again the "egg and dart," or the orator who is to expound and carry out to success some argument all ready in his mind—as the old architect who rebuilt a glorious Greek temple upon the rules and canons of proportion that others had used before him. But he has to see that this design in his mind—or nearer yet, perhaps on paper—shall fit the spaces of the material and of the object which he is to make, so that it shall be made, as it were, for that place only. He will then go again to nature,—perhaps working directly from it, perhaps only to his memory of sight,—for remember, that in what we call working from nature—we painters—we merely use a shorter strain of memory than when we carry back to our studios the vision that we wish to note. And more than that, the very way in which we draw our lines, and mix our pigments, in the hurry of instant record, in the certainty of successful handling, implies that our mind is filled with innumerable memories of continuous trials.
The workman then goes to nature, and finds in it the reality and the details of his design, even, let us say, to the very markings of a tree trunk that he has chosen: they are all there, since they exist in the design, and the design is good. But they exist only in so far as they exist also in the ivory that he cuts—in the veining of the tortoise-shell or malachite that is to render it. Now with patient pleasure he can hunt out these associations; he can use gold, or silver, or vulgar lead, or lacquer, or the cutting and filing of steel, or the iridescence of mother-of-pearl for his leaves, or his stems, or the water, or the birds,—for the clouds or the moonlight,—for the sunshine and the shadow,—for the light and dark,—for the "male and female" of his little manufactured world.
These he will model, chisel, sink, or emboss as the story needs, and do it coarsely, or loosely, or minutely, or delicately, as the unity of his little world requires. And he will work in a hurry, or work slowly, he will varnish it and rub it down, and polish it again, and bake it many times, and let it weather out of doors, or shut it up carefully from the smallest track of dust, or bathe it in acids or salts, and all this for days and months in the year. And when he has finished,—because to do more or less would not be to finish it,—he has given me, besides the excellency of what we call workmanship, which he must give me because that is the bargain between us—he has given me his desires, his memories, his pleasures, his dreams, all the little occurrences of so much life. As you see, he is following the law ofTao, so that however humble his little world, it has a life of its own which cannot be separated from its materials; no picture of it, no reproduction, will give its full charm, any more than a photograph gives that of a human being. Take out the word Japanese wherever I have put it, take out the actual materials that I have mentioned, and the description and the reasoning will apply. That is all there is to any work of art. It does not exist in a fine abstract of intention—nor again in the application of some method of toil—to define "technic," as so many young idiots most excusably try to persuade themselves. It exists in an individual result with origins so powerful and deep that th ey are lost in shade.
To go on, I wish to put it that the same reasons will cause the artist, then, to elaborate profusely, to work in long patience, to use precious materials, to work slightly or carelessly, to finish his work with minute details, or to sketch rapidly with the end of a brush filled with the single color of India ink.
There is no difference in reality; there is only thequestion of the kind of interest he wishes to evoke, the sort of relation he wishes to establish between himself and his work, and incidentally to me, the looker-on.
I am afraid that this hazy weather is affecting the sequence of my dreaming, or what I am pleased to call my thought, so that you may not clearly understand me.
Again I wish you to remark that in all fullness of work other things are suggested than those directly represented, upon the same principle, for the same reasons, that the successful sketch, as I said before, is richer than it looks. Hence the suggestion of color when there is really but black and white; hence the suggestion of modeled light and shadow when there is really but flat color and outlines. Hence the success of all great periods in what we call decorative work, because there was no separation; there was merely art to be used to fill certain spaces, and to recall the fact that it was so used.
Many years ago I used to read Mr. Ruskin, when "my sight was bad, and I lived within the points of the compass," and also the works of other men, who laid down the exact geography and the due distances, north and south, of a certain department or land of art which they called "Decoration." Some of them are not yet dead. The light ofTaofell upon the subject from the words of a child who had been listening to a talk in which I and others wiser than myself were trying to follow out these boundaries that outlined "true" methods of decorative art, and kept to the received instructions of abstention from this and that, of refraining from such and such a reality, of stiffening the flow of outline, of flattening the fullness of modeling, of turning our backs on light and shade, of almost hating the surface of nature; and we wondered that when our European exemplars of to-day had fulfilled every condition of conventionality, had carefully avoided the use of the full methods of art, in thegreat specialties of painting and sculpture, their glorious work had less stuff to it than a Gothic floral ornament or a Japanese painted fan. "Father," said the child, "are you not all making believe? Is the Japanese richness in their very flat work so different from what you can see in this sketch by my little brother? See how his tree looks as if it had light and shadow, and yet he has used no modeling. He has used only the markings of the tree and their variation of color to do for both. He has left out nothing, and yet it is flat painting."
Nor have the Japaneseleft outthings. They have not been forced to overstudy any part, so as to lose the look of free choice, to make the work assume the appearance of task-work—the work of a workman bored, nobly bored perhaps, but still bored, a feeling that is reflected in the mind of the beholder. The Japanese artist makes his little world,—often nothing but an India-ink world,—but its occupants live within it. They are always obedient to all the laws of nature that they know of.
However piercing the observation of actual fact, its record is always a synthesis. I remember many years ago looking over some Japanese drawings of hawking with two other youngsters, one of them now a celebrated artist, the other a well-known teacher of science. What struck us then was the freedom of record, the acute vision of facts, the motions and actions of the birds, their flight, their attention, and their resting, the alertness and anxiety of their hunters, and the suggestions of the entire landscapes (made with a few brush-marks). One saw the heat, and the damp, and the dark meandering of water in the swamps; marked the dry paths which led over sounding wooden bridges, and the tangle of weeds and brush, and the stiff swaying of high trees. All was to us realism, but affected by an unknown charm.
Now this is what the artist who did this realism hassaid, as well as I can make it out: "The ancient mode must be maintained. Though a picture must be made like the natural growth of all things, yet it lacks taste and feeling if it simulates the real things."
Evidently the painter had not learned our modern distinctions of the realist and the idealist.
If you wished to know what I admire most in these forms of art, I might say to you, keeping, I hope, within the drift of what I have been writing, that it is their obedience to early rules which were once based on the first primeval needs of the artist. And if you pushed me further, and wished to make me confess what I thought that these necessities might be, and to make me give you a definition of them, and thereby force me into a definition of art itself, I should hesitatingly state that I do not like to define in matters so far down as causes. But if you would not tell, or take advantage of my having been drawn into such a position of doctrine, I might acknowledge that I have far within me a belief that art is the love of certain balanced proportions and relations which the mind likes to discover and to bring out in what it deals with, be it thought, or the actions of men, or the influences of nature, or the material things in which necessity makes it to work. I should then expand this idea until it stretched from the patterns of earliest pottery to the harmony of the lines of Homer. Then I should say that in our plastic arts the relations of lines and spaces are, in my belief, the first and earliest desires. And again I should have to say that, in my unexpressed faith, these needs are as needs of the soul, and echoes of the laws of the universe, seen and unseen, reflections of the universal mathematics, cadences of the ancient music of the spheres.
For I am forced to believe that there are laws for our eyes as well as for our ears, and that when, if ever, theseshall have been deciphered, as has been the good fortune with music, then shall we find that all best artists have carefully preserved their instinctive obedience to these, and have all cared together for this before all.
For the arrangements of line and balances of spaces which meet these underlying needs are indeed the points through which we recognize the answer to our natural love and sensitiveness for order, and through this answer we feel, clearly or obscurely, the difference between what we call great men and what we call the average, whatever the personal charm may be.
This is why we remember so easily the arrangement and composition of such a one whom we call a master—that is why the "silhouette" of a Millet against the sky, why his placing of outlines within the rectangle of his picture, makes a different, a final, and decisive result, impressed strongly upon the memory which classifies it, when you compare it with the record of the same story, say, by Jules Breton. It is not the difference of the fact in nature, it is not that the latter artist is not in love with his subject, that he has not a poetic nature, that he is not simple, that he has not dignity, that he is not exquisite; it is that he has not found in nature of his own instinct the eternal mathematics which accompany facts of sight. For indeed, to use other words, in what does one differ from the other? The arrangement of the idea or subject may be the same, the costume, the landscape, the time of day, nay, the very person represented. But the Millet, if we take this instance, is framed within a larger line, its spaces are of greater or more subtle ponderation, its building together more architectural. That is to say, all its spaces are more surely related toone another, and not only to thestory told, nor only to theaccidental occurrenceof the same. The eternal has been brought in to sustain the transient.
For fashions change as to feelings and sentiments and ways of looking at the world. The tasks of the days of Angelico, or of Rubens, or of Millet are not the same; religions live and disappear; nations come and go in and out of the pages of history: but I can see nothing from the earliest art that does not mean living in a like desire for law and order in expression. It is, therefore, because we consciously or unconsciously recognize this love of the unwritten harmonies of our arts, the power of recalling them to us, in some painter or in some architect, that we say that such a man is great. He is great because he is the same as man has been, and will be; and we recognize, without knowing them by name, our ancestral primordial predilections.
Yes, the mere direction or distance of a line by the variation of some fraction of an inch establishes this enormous superiority—a little more curve or less, a mere black or white or colored space of a certain proportion, a few darks or reds or blues. And now you will ask, Do you intend to state that decoration—? To which I should say, I do not mean to leave my main path of principles to-day, and when I return we shall have time to discuss objections. Besides, "I am not arguing; I am telling you."
This is the unity, this is the reality, which disengages itself from the art of Japan, even as we know it in common, through what we usually call "bric-à-brac." Our introduction to it is rather curious when one comes to think of it. Suddenly, owing to enormous social changes in Japan, involving vast fluctuations in fortunes, most of all that was portable was for sale, and flooded our markets. Ignorant dealers held in masses small treasures of temples, adornments of the wealthy, all the odds and ends of real art, along with the usual furniture, along with allthe poor stuff that would naturally be made for us barbarians, and had been made for us for centuries through the trade of Holland. It was as if Paris or London had suddenly been unloaded of everything portable, from works of art to household furniture. Naturally the main-spring of it all,—the works of great draftsmen, for instance,—being more debatable, more inexplicable, more useless, in a word, or detained by stronger bands, just as it would be with us, have somewhat escaped the drain. Our perceptions have been confused in all this mixture by repetitions, imitations, which in every form of art, as we know so well in literature, degrade the perception and enjoyment of what is good. I can only wonder that the world has not been tired out and disgusted with Japanese bric-à-brac. And had we not been in such bad straits of taste ourselves, such would have been the case. I have always considered that the artist needed to be forgiven for his turn toward bric-à-brac; not for his liking to have odds and ends for help and refreshment, but for having too many; because his life is to make, not to collect. To others, that can be forgiven easily; for the pieces of the past are a consolation of the present, and one would like to feel that a man's likings are his important self, and are betrayed by his choices. "Dis-moi ce que tu aimes—je te dirai ce que tu es."
If one had time and did not do, what pleasure it might be to describe forever the innumerable objects and things that might be found here, even though words are a poor rendering of sight. And what pleasure it might be to try to describe the greatest of all bric-à-brac, the greatest remains of the higher arts—sculpture and painting.
I have begun some such letter for you, but I fear that it may never be finished. Nor do I see any way of giving an account of the history of painting in Japan, which would have to stand for a still further explanation. ShouldI study it further, can I do more than to increase my own knowledge,—and all knowledge is a burden,—and to give you cursory proof, by names and a few examples, that the art of painting and the art of sculpture are very old here? I should have to begin to ask myself for you if the earliest remains do not already prove still earlier schools and accepted or debated tradition, and I should then have still one thousand years of design to account for.