The Spirit of Japanese Art/Koyetsu
THE SPIRIT OF JAPANESE ART
KOYETSU
When I left home toward a certain Doctor's who had promised to show me his collection of chirography and art, the unusual summer wind which had raged since midnight did not seem to calm down; the rain-laden clouds now gathered, and then parted for the torrent of sunlight to dash down. I was most cordially received by him, as I was expected; in coming under threat of the weather I had my own reasons. I always thought that summer was worse than spring for examining (more difficult to approve than deny) the objects of art, on account of our inability for concentrating our minds; the heat that calls all the shoji doors to open wide confuses the hearts of bronze Buddhas or Sesshu's "Daruma" or Kobo's chirography or whatever they be, whichever way they have to turn, in the rush of light from every side; I thanked the bad weather to-day which, I am sure, I should have cursed some other day. The Doctor's house had an almost winter-sad aspect with the shoji, even the rain-doors all shut, the soft darkness assembling at the very place it should, where the saints or goddesses revealed themselves; hanging after hanging was unrolled and rolled before me in quick succession. "Doctor, tell me quick whose writing is that?" I loudly shouted when I came to one little bit of Japanese writing. "That is Koyetsu's," he replied. "Why, isit? It seems it is worth more than all the others put together; Doctor, I will not ask you for any more hangings to-day," I said. And a moment later, I looked at him and exclaimed in my determined voice:
"What will you say if I take it away and keep it indefinitely?"
"I say nothing at all, but am pleased to see how you will enjoy it," the Doctor replied.
The evening had already passed when I returned home with that hanging of Koyetsu's chirography under my arm. "Put all the gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light all the candles you have!" I cried. The little hanging was properly hanged at the "tokonoma" when the candles were lighted, whose world-old soft flame (wasn't it singing the old song of world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu's age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again, Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu's writing loomed with the haunting charm of a ghost. They say:
"Where's cherry-blossom?
The trace of the garden's spring breeze is seen no more.
I will point, if I am asked,
To my fancy snow upon the ground."
"What a yearning of poetical soul!" I exclaimed.
It is your imagination to make rise out of fall, day out of darkness, and Life out of Death; not to see the fact of scattering petals is your virtue, and to create your own special sensation with the impulse of art is your poet's dignity; what a blessing if you can tell a lie to yourself; better still, not to draw a distinct line between the things our plebeian minds call truth and untruth, and live like a wreath shell with the cover shut in the air of your own creation. Praised be the touch of your newly awakened soul which can turn the fallen petals to the beauty of snow; there is nothing that will deny the yearning of your poetic soul. It is not superstition to say that the poet's life is worthier than any other life. Some time ago the word loneliness impressed me as almost divine as Rikiu pledged himself in it; I wished, through its invocation, to create a picture, as the ancient ditty has it, of a "lone cottage standing by the autumn wave, under the fading light of eve." But I am thankful for Koyetsu to-day. How to reach my own poetry seems clearly defined in my thought; it will be by the twilight road of imagination born out of reality and the senses—the road of idealism baptised by the pain of death.
What remains of Koyetsu's life is slight, as his day was not feminine and prosaic, like to-day, with love of gossip and biography-writing; he, with the friends of his day, Sambiakuin Konoye, Shokado, both of them eminent chirographers of all time of Japan, Jozan the scholar, Enshu the tea-master, and many others, realised the age of artistic heroism which is often weakened by the vulgarity of thought that aims at the Future and Fame. The utter rejection of them would be the prayer itself to strengthen the appreciation of art into a living thing. Koyetsu made his profession in his younger days the connoisseurship of swords as well as their whetting; it was for that service, I believe, that Iyeyasu, the great feudal Prince of Yedo, gave him a piece of land, then a mere waste, at Taka ga Mine of the lonely suburb of Kyoto, by the Tanba highway, where he retired, with a few writing brushes and a tea-kettle, to build his Taikyo An, or Abode of Vacancy, giving his esthetic fancy full swing to fill the "vacancy" of abode and life. He warned his son and family, when he bade them farewell, it is said, that they should never step into Yedo of the powerful lords and princes, because the worldly desire was not the way of ennobling a life which was worth living. We might call it "seihin," or proud poverty that Koyetsu most prized, as it never allures one from the chasteness of simplicity which is the real foundation of art. There is reason to believe that he must have been quite a collector of works of art, rich and rare, in his earlier life; but it is said that he most freely gave them away when he left his city home for his lonely retirement; indeed he was entering into the sanctuary of priests. What needed he there but prayer and silence? There is nothing more petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to have a too close attachment to life and physical luxuries; if our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.
Koyetsu's must have been a remarkable personality, remarkable because of its lucidity distilled and crystallised—to use a plebeian expression, by his own philosophy, whose touch breathed on the spot a real art into anything from a porcelain bowl to the design on a lacquer box; I see his transcendental mien like a cloud (that cloud is not necessarily high in the sky all the time) in his works that remain to-day, more from the reason that they carry, all of them, the solitary grace of amateurishness in the highest sense. To return to the unprofessional independence itself was his great triumph; his artistic fervour was from his priesthood. I know that he was a master in porcelain-making, picture-drawing, and also in lacquer-box designing (what a beautiful work of art is the writing box of raised lacquer called Sano Funahashi, to-day owned by the Imperial Museum of Tokyo); but it seems that he often betrayed that his first and last love was in his calligraphy. Once he was asked by Sambiakuin Konoye, a high nobleman of the Kyoto Court, the question who was the best penman of the day; it is said he replied, after a slight hesitation: "Well, then, the second best would be you, my Lord; and Shokado would be the third best." The somewhat disappointed calligraphist of high rank in the court pressed Koyetsu: "Speak out, who is the first! There is nothing of 'Well, then,' about it.” Koyetsu replied: "This humble self is that first." The remarkable part is that in his calligraphy Koyetsu never showed any streak of worldly vulgarity. Its illusive charm is that of a rivulet sliding through the autumnal flowers; when we call it impressive, that impressiveness is that of the sudden fall of the moon. To return to this hanging of his (thousand thanks to the Doctor) to which I look up to-day as a servant to his master, with all devotion. The sure proof of its being no mean art, I venture to say, is seen in its impressing me as the singular work of accident, like the blow of the wind or the sigh of the rain; it seems the writer (great Koyetsu) was never conscious, when he wrote it, of the paper on which he wrote, of the bamboo brush which he grasped. It is true that we cannot play our criticism against it; it is not our concern to ask how it was written, but only to look at and admire it. The characters are in the style called "gyosho," or current hand, to distinguish from the "kaisho," or square hand; and there is one more style under the name of "sosho," or grass hand, that is an abbreviated cursive hand. As this was written in "gyo" style, it did not depend on elaborate patience but on the first stroke of fancy. I have no hesitation to say that, when it is said that the arts of the calligrapher and the painter are closely allied, the art of the calligrapher would be by just so much related with our art of living; the question is what course among the three styles we shall choose—the square formalism of "kaisho" or the "sosho"-like romanticism? It does no justice to call "gyosho" a middle road; when you know that your idealism is always born from the conventionalism of reality of "kaisho"like materialism, it is not wrong to say that Koyetsu wisely selected a line of "gyosho"-like accentuation—not so fantastic as a "sosho" calligraph—with the tea-kettle and a few writing brushes, to make one best day before he fell into the final rest.