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It was the period when art resolutely left the temples and the castles to overflow the street, as after the great centuries of Greece. It was the period when Matahei [Middle of the eighteenth century],a direct, sumptuous, and rare painter, turned his back on dogmatic teaching and opened the way to that ''low school" which expresses with the greatest evocative force, to Occidental eyes, the everyday soul of Japan. The genius of Korin, alone and free, the struggle of Goshin (1741-1811) against a half return to the Chinese school—favored by Okio (1732-95), the powerful portrayer of great wild birds—and above all, the appearance of prints, popularized by the severe harmonies of Moronobu (1638-1711) and of engraving in colors which was invented by Kiyonobu (1667-1729)—all this protected and helped along the activity of the school of the people. Netsukes, potteries, lacquers, inros, and surimonos were sold in every bazaar.
It was the period when art resolutely left the temples and the castles to overflow the street, as after the great centuries of Greece. It was the period when Matahei [Middle of the eighteenth century],a direct, sumptuous, and rare painter, turned his back on dogmatic teaching and opened the way to that ''low school" which expresses with the greatest evocative force, to Occidental eyes, the everyday soul of Japan. The genius of Korin, alone and free, the struggle of Goshin (1741-1811) against a half return to the Chinese school—favored by Okio (1732-95), the powerful portrayer of great wild birds—and above all, the appearance of prints, popularized by the severe harmonies of Moronobu (1638-1711) and of engraving in colors which was invented by Kiyonobu (1667-1729)—all this protected and helped along the activity of the school of the people. Netsukes, potteries, lacquers, inros, and surimonos were sold in every bazaar.
Prints
invade the houses of the middle classes and of the common people. Views of the
sea, of the mountains and the woods, the dresses of passing women, pennants,
signs, colored-paper lanterns, the whole noisy, bustling, twinkling fairyland
of the Japanese, permitted the engravers of the people's prints to expend, in
miraculous profusion, the fantasy and power of their genius as colorists,
dramatists, and storytellers. Europe came to know Japan by this popularized
art, by this infinite subdividing of the central force that Sesshiu, Motonobu,
and Korin revealed to their country for the glory of man. It is not altogether
the fault of Europe if, in unpacking its boxes of tea, its lacquer caskets, and
its bamboo furniture, it hardly saw more at first than the slightly comical
exterior of the Japanese soul. For only the externals were at first conveyed by
that rising sea of little colored papers on which stretched out parades of
screen figures in epic posture; gnarled landscapes; warriors streaked with
blood; convulsive actors; bedizened, painted, pale women; and artisans,
fishermen, reapers, and children—all a little droll—and multicolored,
gesticulating crowds, and evening festivals on the waters. In that strange
confusion the surprised senses of Europe could for some time discover nothing
but violent colors and disjointed gestures, and it was only little by little that
there came to be perceived a power of orchestration and a passion for
characterizing things that carried a flood of revealing sensations into the
Occidental mind. How should we, without Hiroshige, have witnessed the
progressive illumination and darkening of the skies over the islands of Japan,
how should we have discovered the limpidity of the great dawns that come up
over their horizon lines, the tall, bare trunks of the pines which shoot up
from the Japanese roadsides, giving glimpses between of the deep azure of the
air and the sea, the somber harmony of the snows, the mass of the waters which
are almost black and against which white sails follow one another? He has shown
us how the rainstorms drive the birds and bend the treetops, he has shown us the
poetry of the blue nights of his country when the trees are in flower, and how
its lakes are lit up by fireworks and the lanterns that dance above the wooden
bridges; we see the crowded boats and the musicians that play in them. How
should we have known Japan without the pure Utamaro who frequented the
courtesans and stopped at doorsteps to see mothers giving the breast to their
little ones; and without the trenchant Toyokuni, the boon companion of the
actors; and without Shunsho, who spread the colors on his prints like streams
of flowers; and without Kiyonaga, the reserved lover of the long feminine
forms, the bare legs, breasts, shoulders, and arms that look out from amid the
discreet harmonies of silk kimonos and half-lit houses; and without Harunobu, around
whom women, like flowering reeds, enchant the earth; and without the infinite
Hokusai, how should we have assimilated the value of the lines which, outside
the realm of all scientific perspective, solely by their expressive force,
symbolize the succession of the planes in unlimited space? How could we do
otherwise than forget that they no longer knew Sesshiu, Motonobu, and Korin as
their models when, to intoxicate our eyes, their flat tints shook out before us
the folds and lining of the robes and combined them into orchestral harmonies?
We see this clearly, even from our distance, as when one is on a height from
which hollows and projections are effaced, one discovers the design of a great
landscape garden.
With
flowers of green or blue, with flowers of flame, with red leaves and golden
leaves, the Japanese embroidered robes in which the dawn rises or the daylight
falls, and all the blood of the veins is spread out on them and all the snow of
the mountains as it glares in the sunlight; the fiery clouds that float in the
twilight are on those robes, and the fields veiled in mist—rose, mauve, or
azure—and the fruits whose downy skin turns color as they ripen, and the silent
rain of glycine petals as they fall on sleeping water, and the pink and white
haze of the flowering fruit trees. Tossed upon the robes as the wind might toss
them, the Japanese weavers and embroiderers have set frightened birds in
flight, and into the folds they have twisted convulsive monsters. In the
crinkling silk they have opened up landscapes where leaves and waters murmur,
and—as if seen through autumn foliage—the innumerable suns of the imperial
chrysanthemum appear. The blacks, those deep and absolute blacks that almost
always have a part in their designs, by the stripes or spots on cloths, or, in
their pictures, by the note of the hair as it piles up in flat coils, or by the
fat arabesque of the powerful ideograms, their blacks are the muted
accompaniment against which the violent melodies shriek their drama and then
grow calm and then re-echo and die. . . When the women pass in procession
across the prints of Nippon, we do not know surely whether the flowers, the
dead leaves, or the whirling snowflakes on their silk kimonos were scattered
there by the summer, the autumn, or the winter they have traversed—or whether
it is not just the walk of these far-away creatures which spreads about them
the summer, the autumn, or the winter. Everything sings when they come, even
violent death. The landscape responds to them, the landscape with its pink
branches from which the petals will fall like snowflakes, the landscape where
the flowers resist the frost, the landscape with its limpid skies over serene
waters, the nocturnal landscape where women—moving gardens in themselves—pass
against backgrounds uniformly black.
The sap
of Japan, in these millions of flying leaves, fell like ever-heavier raindrops,
but also it got farther and farther from its roots. The country had been closed
for two hundred years, deaf to the voices from without—and the voices from
within beat against unscalable walls. Too long deprived of the opportunity for
interchange, which is life, impotent to renew itself, its soul contracted into
itself, grew enervated, and lost itself, little by little, in detail and in
anecdote. Let us admit as much. The art of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, despite the abundance in which it spouted forth, despite its verve
and its life, seems a little frail and troubled, feverish and caricaturish
beside that of the preceding epochs. The great Hokusai himself, the protean
poet, the man with a hundred names who filled more than five hundred volumes
and twenty thousand prints with his thought, "the old man mad about
drawing," the distracted vagabond who gave its climax to the art of the people
and scattered the spirit of Japan to the four corners of the heavens, as a
great wind despoils the forests of autumn—the great Hokusai himself is an
expression of the decadence. He has for his suffering fellow-creatures the
unconcealed passion that was perhaps possessed, among us, by Rembrandt alone;
he had that powerful minuteness that one finds only in Dürer,
and that love of aerial landscapes in which Claude Lorrain and Veronese saw the
tremble of their gold and silver; his verve—cynical or terrible or bantering or
sinister or harrowing—is the same as that with which Goya tore from the world
of forms the swift symbols of the tragedies of his heart. He has the immensity
of knowledge and the skill of all the workmen of his nation. A pupil of
Shunsho, a lover of Sesshiu, of Tanyu, and of Korin, there was not a fiber of
his immeasurable spirit that did not root itself into theirs, to divide and
spread in limbs and branches through all the beings and all the plants that he
encountered during his very long life—when he roamed through the woods and
along the streams, when he breathed the mist of the cascades or crossed some
humpbacked bridge to follow the busy crowd till it dispersed in the streets,
the gardens, and the houses. He spoke the humblest and the proudest word that
has come from the lips of an artist: "When I am a hundred and ten years
old, everything that comes from my brush, a point or a line, will be
alive." He has described every kind of labor and told the tale of all the
days. He did the things that the peasants do, and the workmen, and the
fishermen, and the soldiers, and the people of the fairs, and the children.
With a tenderness that is now merry, now quite pure, he has set down the story
of their games, their trades, and their passions. He has loved all women, their
hard, pointed breasts, and their beautiful arms that flow in such swift, sure
lines. He did not have time to tell us everything, though at any moment he
would leave the people he was talking with—roofers laying their tiles, wood sawyers,
or peddlers—to follow a bee toward a flowering hedge, over which he would
discover a gardener at his work. He would lie down in the sun for his noonday
siesta, but without any intention of sleeping; he would not make the slightest
movement; he would hold his breath; at the slightest vibration he would raise
an eyelid; he would follow the buzzing spot until it had settled on his bare
arm; he would let himself be stung so as to study the monstrous eye, the
sucking proboscis, the metal corselet, and the thin elastic members that the
insect is forever rubbing together. When he had gotten wet to the bone while
looking so carefully at the rain, he was in haste for the wind to come and dry
him so that he might see the whirling flight of the dead leaves, the lanterns
of the festival, and the feathers swept from wings. If he climbed a mountain
and came out above its low-lying mists, it was to get a sudden sight of some
peak isolated in crystal space, and, as he came down again, to discover through
rifts in the fog the thatched roofs, and the rice fields, and swarms of men
under their round straw hats, and junks scattered over an opaque distance. When
he had seen the pale moon rise in the black sky over a world empty of forms, he
waited impatiently for the red sun to discolor the air so that he might seize
the appearance of the world, in the islands of gold spattered with dark touches
that sow the inner seas, and the blue or red houses that appear amid the pines,
and the wandering sails, and the conical volcano, now crowned with blood, now
with silver or opal, now with the violet, the rose, or the lilac that one sees
only in half-opened flowers. The oily oscillation of the sea, the glaciers
thrusting up above the clouds, the motionless or restless tops of the woods—the
whole universe stamped itself on his mind in deep harmonies; he seems to crush
blue, green, and blood-red jewels in an air that is filled with watery vapor
and that transmits light to things. . . He commands form like a hero, and at
will he is lyrical or philosophical—by turns or simultaneously—and an epic
poet and a satirical poet, living in the most frightful nightmares after
leaving the most peaceful realities, or while still among them, and passing at
ease from the most unhealthful invention to the noblest vision. . . And yet,
through his swift art, analytical, feverish, and hurried—too anecdotal
oftentimes—he is an expression of decadence. One is tempted to say that he
foresees the end of Old Japan, that he wants to prepare a living encyclopaedia
of it, hastening to tell everything about it in direct, immediate notes that
strike like lightning, as if to leave its image—complex, multiform, disordered,
and immense—to the future.
After
him Yosai still addresses a discreet, melancholy, and pure farewell to the
kimono-clad women who pass before the backgrounds of flowered branches —and the
end has come. The revolution that throws Japan into the path of the Occident
brutally extinguishes its art life. It is like a wheat field laid low by the
wind of cannons. And notwithstanding, Japan has yielded nothing, abandoned
nothing of her soul. She has imposed on the world her right to her life. Now
she must find, in the reserves of her silence, all her passion for
comprehending and all her power for expressing. The soul of a people cannot die
entirely while the people is still living. Already some of her artists seem to
be reviving, to be finding again the spirit of their race, broadened and
renewed by the thought of the Occident. One day, certainly a great art will be
born of that meeting. But the present attempts are premature. Japan has a more
immediate and more positive purpose to achieve now. After attaining military
strength, let her, therefore, acquire economic strength. In the rise of the
energy that leads to action she will surprise the creative spirit that will
spurt forth one day. Later, she will be rich. Then poor. And the cycle will
begin again.
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