The Spirit of Japanese Art/Hiroshige
HIROSHIGE
The Sumida River's blue began to calm down, like that of an old Japanese colour-print, into the blue, I should say, of silence which had not been mixed with another colour to make life; that blue, it might be said, did not exist so much in the river as in my very mind, which has lately grown, following a certain Mr. Hopper, to cry, "Hiro—Hiro—Hiroshige the Great!" The time was late afternoon of one day in last April; the little boat which carried a few souls like mine, who, greatly troubled by the modern life, were eager to gain the true sense of perspective towards Nature, glided down as it finished the regular course of the "Cherry-blossom viewing at Mukojima." And my mind entered slowly into a picture of my own creation—nay, Hiroshige's. "Look at the view from here. (I was thinking of Hiroshige's Sumidagawa Hanasakari among his Yedo pictures.) It may be too late now to agree with Wilde when he said that Nature imitates Art," I said to my friend. He saw at once my meaning, though not clearly, and expanded on how artistically the human mind has been advancing lately; and I endorsed him with the fact that I have come to see, for some long time, the Japanese scenery through Hiroshige's eye. My friend exclaimed: "Is it not the same thing, when you think Nature imitates Art, that your mind itself imitates the Art first?" It is not written in any book how much Hiroshige was appreciated in his day; but I believe I am not wrong to say that he is now reaching the height of popularity in both the East and the West, of popularity in the real sense, and you will easily understand me when I say that he is the artist of the future in the same sense that I disbelieve in the birth register of Turner and Whistler. He is, in truth, greatly in advance, even if I fancy he is an artist of the present day, your contemporary and mine; I always go to him to find where Nature is pleased to put her own emphasis. Every picture of his I see seems to be a new one always; and the last is ever so surprising as to leave my mind incapable for the time being of apprehension of his other pictures. One picture of his is enough; there is the proof of his artistic greatness.
We did not know until recently what meant the words realism and idealism (should we thank the Western critics?) except this: "The artist, whatever he be, idealist or realist or what not, is good when he is true to his art. I mean that technique or method of expression is secondary; even the seeming realistic picture of Oriental art is, when it is splendid, always subjective." I have many reasons to call Hiroshige an idealist or subjective artist, now playing an arbitrary art of criticism after the Western fashion, as I only see his artistic wisdom, but nothing else in his being true to Nature; that wisdom, I admit, helped his art to a great measure, but what I admire in him is the indefinable quality which, as I have no better word, I will call atmosphere or pictorial personality. It seems that he learned the secret from Chinese landscape art how to avoid femininity and confusion; the difference between his art and that of the Chinese artist is that where the one drew a bonseki, or tray-landscape, with sand from memory, the latter made a mirage in the sky. When Hiroshige fails he reminds me of Emerson's words of suggestion to look at Nature upside down through your legs; his success, as that of the Chinese artist, is poetry. And our Oriental poetry is no other kind but subjectivity. I have right here before me the picture called "Awa no Naruto," which is more often credited to be the work of the second Hiroshige; now let me, for once and all, settle the question that there were many Hiroshige; It is my opinion there was only one Hiroshige; I say this because in old Japan (a hundred times more artistic than present Japan) the individual personality was not recognised, and when an artist adopted the name of Hiroshige by merit and general consent, it meant that he grew at once incarnated with it; what use is there to talk about its second or third? I prefer to regard Hiroshige as the title of artistic merit since it has ceased in fact to be an individuality; indeed, where is the other artist, East or West, whose life-story is so little known as Hiroshige's? And I see so many pictures which, while bearing his signature, I cannot call his work, because I see them so much below the Hiroshige merit—for instance, the whole upright series of Tokaido and Yedo, and so many pictures of the "Noted Places in the Provinces of Japan"—because they are merely prose, and even as prose they often fail. But to return to this "Awa no Naruto," a piece of poem in picture, where the whirlpools of the strait, large and small, now rising and then falling in perfect rhythm, are drawn suggestively but none the less distinctly. I see in it not only the natural phenomenon of the Awa Strait, but also the symbolism of life's rise and fall, success and defeat; I was thinking for some time that I shall write a poem on it, although I could not realise it yet.
I have my own meaning when I call Hiroshige the Chinese poet. Upon my little desk here I see an old book of Chinese prosody; there is a popular Chinese verse, Hichigon 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 Hichigon 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 Hichigon Yekku 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 Hight 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 Tokaido. 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.
When we consider the fact he was the artist of only fifty years ago, it is strange why we cannot know more of his own life story, and how he happened to leave the words that generally pass as a farewell verse as follows:—
"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 I even doubt its origin, as it is more prosaic than poetical. It is only that he followed after a fashion of his day if he left it, as the verse is poor and at best humorous. But when it is taken by the English seriousness, the words have another effect. Indeed, Hiroshige has had quite an evolution since he was discovered in the West; he is, in truth, more an English or European artist than a Japanese in the present understanding.