Part 9

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 has said, 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, these shall 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 to _one another_, and not only to the _story told_, nor only to the _accidental occurrence_ of 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 all the 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. Should I 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.

I shall probably leave my letter to you unfinished. It has already become unwieldy, and I could give you only my own impressions. And then in the history of art everything is needed.

It would not be merely reproduction in words, however beautiful, of the surfaces of works that have survived time, nor of the men who made them, of their characters, the accidents of their lives, and their technical beliefs. It would be simply a history of humanity at a given place. It could not be solved by a mere account of the place and the race, according to some of our later scientific fads. I was writing to you but yesterday, and trying to make out that the work of art is often a contradiction of the period, or a step in advance; that the moods of feeling of the future are as often reflected by art as the habits of the present. But whatever personal sense of solitariness or of antagonism has inspired or oppressed the artist, he must have had partners since he has had admirers, even when he antagonizes his time. However transient certain of his forms, however much to us who come afterward they indicate the _period_, he has expressed not his time, but the needs of others who have been looking in the same ways, and yet have had no voice. And even if they have not quite sympathized, the accumulations of like tendencies have become stronger and clearer in their descendants. To reflect fully, then, in words, the face of the work of art, one would have to melt into it in some way the gaze of those who have looked at it; to keep upon it still the gentle looks of the pitiful and the loving, the rapt contemplation of the saints, the tender or mocking smile of women, the hard or contemptuous appreciation of rulers, the toleration of the wise, all of which have been in reality a part of the very work. Their negations or sympathies have fallen on the work, and these ineffable delicacies of impression are transmitted in it to successive generations, even as the shadowing of innumerable years of incense-burning has browned the gold and blackened the azure, as concealment in the shade has sometimes paled, sometimes preserved, the edges of the outlines and the modeling of the colors, or exposure and heat and damp have cracked and channeled and dusted all surfaces. You see what I should consider a true carrying out of such a task, and how unsatisfied I should be with anything that I could accomplish, unless it were to stand to you as something fragmentary and evanescent. One thing I should like to do,--should I remain long enough, and be able to get it from the few acquaintances who may know,--and that is, to save some part of the artists themselves out of that obscurity by which the lives of great workers are almost always clouded. To me Rembrandt, and Balzac, and Delacroix, each contradictory to his surroundings, have become more intelligible through the record of their every-day struggle, the exactness of measurement which one can place upon the personal circumstances in which they carried out their work, the limitations of its exact meaning and importance in their own eyes, as we follow them in the daylight of favor, or in the gloomy endings that so often close the lives of great artists.

I hear occasionally of the wanderings of Kano Motonobu, the founder of the great school and family of artists who have lasted through four centuries to the present day, and have filled Japan and the temples here with works better or poorer, until the family name becomes a burden. I hear about Okio, the charmer, the painter of everything and of animals, who began as a little child, by sketching on the earth with bamboo sticks when he followed his parents into the fields to work. One might perhaps learn about Hokusai, who is tabooed here, and about whom I dare not inquire, but whose charming last letter, as given by Mr. Morse, comes back to my memory--it is so gay and so sad, so triumphant over circumstances, so expressive of the view of the world which explains his woodcuts. I quote from memory: "King Em-mā" (he writes to a friend)--"King Em-mā" (the ruler of the under world) "has become very old, and is thinking of retiring from business; so that he has ordered a little country house to be built, and he asks of me to come to him that I may paint him a 'kakemono'; so that in a few days I must be ready to travel and to take my sketches with me. I shall take up my residence at the corner of the Street of the Under World, where it will give me much pleasure to receive thee, when thou hast the opportunity to come over there."

Or this mocking challenge to old age, at the end of one of the volumes of his pictures of Fuji:

"Since my sixth year I have felt the impulse to represent the form of things; by the age of fifty I had published numberless drawings; but I am displeased with all I have produced before the age of seventy. It is at seventy-three that I have begun to understand the form and the true nature of birds, of fishes, of plants, and so forth. Consequently, by the time I get to eighty, I shall have made much progress; at ninety, I shall get to the essence of things; at a hundred, I shall have most certainly come to a superior, undefinable position; and at the age of a hundred and ten, every point, every line, shall be alive. And I leave it to those who shall live as I have myself, to see if I have not kept my word. Written, at the age of seventy-five, by me, formerly known as Hokusai, but now known as Gakyo Rojin (The Old Man gone Mad for Painting)."

... I had been intending to add, when I interrupted myself some way back, that I enjoyed in this art of Japan--at least in this drawing which they call painting--the strange nearness I seem to be in to the feelings of the men who did the work. There is between us only a thin veil of consummate skill. The habit and the methods resulting from it, of an old obedience to an unwritten law common to all art, have asked for the directest ways of marking an intention or an observation.

This reference to a previous tradition of meaning, of ideal arrangement by rule, this wish for synopsis, this feeling for manners of expressing one's self in the thing seen, will naturally make art out of anything. And it is not wonderful that what we call handwriting may then give full play to art, in a written language of which ideography is the key. Given the Chinese characters, their original intentions, the associations, historical and literary, connected with them, is it anything strange in reality, however strange to our habits, to find writing a form of art in Japan? It may have all I have just referred to, and be full of the meaning of ideas, and be literature, and then it can be made conformable to the laws of beauty of form and spacing; and above all, to give character of style, and character of personality, to look more or less grave, or elegant, or weighty, according to circumstances, be elegiac, or lyric, or epic, and reflect on its face the intentions of the text. And again it will be the mark or _sign_ of the person; so that my Japanese friends can object to Hokusai's bad writing, as betraying something not refined, for a weighty argument against his other works done with a similar implement, the brush, which is the pen of the far East.

It will then be in what we call drawing--which is an abstraction, the synopsis of the outlines of things meeting together, of their relative intensities, of their own colors, of their relations to the place they are in, that is to say, the picture--that this art of Japan, the daughter of the art of China, will attain its highest form; so that in reality those of us who think of it as appearing at its best only in color, in external charm, have not understood it. An etching of Rembrandt could fairly be said to represent, not so much in itself, but in its essence, what a great Chinaman would have liked to do in India ink--the material of all others which, even to us, is his especially. The line, the abstract line of Rembrandt, its elegance, its beautiful patterning of the surface, is concealed to us by the extraordinary richness of some of his modeling and the extreme gradations of what we call light and shade. But it is there all the same, as a geologic foundation, in the same way that inside of the Titian's splendor of surface there is a decorative substructure as well balanced and fixed as a Venetian brocade--just as the works of other great colorists, as we call them (to designate more complex men), imply, in their constitution and the mechanism of their technic, powers of design and drawing sufficient to furnish out armies of such draftsmen as flourish, for instance, in the Paris of to-day. It is this surplus of richness that conceals the identity. Our arts have undertaken an enormous accession of truths and ambitions upon which the arts of the extreme East have never ventured. They have attained their end, the end of all art, at an earlier mental period. They are younger, perhaps even more like children, and their work cannot involve the greater complications of greater age; but it has also all that grasp of the future that belongs to youth, and that has to be accompanied by deficiencies of knowledge; that is to say, of later acquirement and the practice of good and evil. And it is impossible to look at the expression of nature, or of any intention made by the child in full sincerity, without realizing that the aim of the artist, be he even Michael Angelo, is to return to a similar directness and unity of rendering. Not that the Eastern artist, any more than the child, could be conscious of deficiencies of which he had not thought. He has been satisfied, as we have been satisfied, but for a longer time and under a greater prestige. As the fruit painted by the Greek deceived the birds, and the curtain painted by the Greek painter deceived his fellow-artist, so the horses of Kanaoka have escaped from their "kakemonos," and the tigers sculptured in the lattices of temples have been known to descend at night and rend one another in the courtyards. O---- tells me the Chinese story of the painter forced to let go his painting of the moon for a nominal sum to repay an oppressive money-lender, and how, when the banker happened to unroll it, the whole room was illumined, and he grew into a habit of spending evenings in the mild effulgence of the painted rays. But when, after an absence, he looked at it again, the moon was gone,--where old moons go,--and he was enraged at the painter, though he might well have noticed that for many days the moon had not been so bright, and indeed had seemed to be ill drawn. O---- tells me that the artist got it back for little, and waited the necessary number of days to have its crescent reappear again; and A---- says that, though the picture is lost to-day, he hopes to find it again in China in following years.

These stories serve as a way of stating to you that as long as new wants were not felt, newer accuracies did not begin to exist, and these limitations are naturally seen to be more easily put up with in a civilization of uninterrupted tradition. To acquire something when one's hands are full, something has to be dropped. In the stations of our own progress in art, the advance has at every stage involved some deficiency, or failure, or weakening on another side. This is the only explanation I can make for painting in the extreme East not having taken up portraiture--that is to say, not having triumphed in it, while sculpture has reached out toward it in a splendid way. We have seen the same thing in the transition from the Middle Ages, when sculpture outreaches painting in the direction of reality. But then sculpture is to a certain extent easier and in a certain way inferior, because it gives a sort of duplicate of the object, not a relation of it to other things.

So that the Japanese have not come to the work from the "model," which has at so many periods and so long been ours. Theirs are types of types; they are not, as with us, persons, and the pursuit of beauty in the individual has not been followed apparently by the art of the far East. The personal love and preference of the artist embodied in another person their art does not show; nor have their artists given a nameless immortality to certain human beings, so that for ages their types, their images, their moods, their characters, their most transitory variations of beauty, have been proposed to us as an example. Have you ever reflected how the nameless model reigns in the memory of man with a personal fame more intimate than that of Cheops, or Helen, or Cæsar, because the artist has been obliged to build upon this person his own dream of the world--as with the Roman girl who is the Madonna of San Sisto?

... So, again, the Eastern artists have suggested, and implied, and used light and shade, and perspective, and anatomy, and the relations of light to color, and of color to light, only so much as they could take into their previous scheme.

In many cases their success is still an astonishment to us. Certainly their records of motion, their construction of plants and flowers and birds, we have all appreciated; and their scientific, easy noting of colored light in landscape made even Rousseau dream of absorbing its teaching into his pictures, which certainly represent the full Western contradictory idea, in the most complicated acceptance of every difficulty.

The artist here, then, has not made separate analytical studies of all the points that trouble us, that have cost at times some acquirement of the past, in the anxiety for working out a new direction; as to-day, for instance, in learned France, where the very art of painting, as a mirror of the full-colored appearance of things, has for a quarter of a century been in peril, under the influence of the academy drawing-school, the model in studio light, and the vain attempt to rival the photograph. And perhaps it is needless to repeat again how we have lost the sense of natural decoration and expression of meaning by general arrangement of lines and spaces, so that again in France we are astonished at M. Puvis de Chavannes, who uses powers that have once been common to almost all our race.