The Spirit of Japanese Art/Kyosai
KYOSAI
I acknowledged my friend's characterisation, after some reluctance, of our Kyosai Kawanabe as a Japanese Phil May; as the artist of Punch has often received the appellation of an English Hokusai, I do not see much harm, speaking generally, in thus falling into the feminine foible of comparison-making. Putting aside the question of the material achievement in art of those artists of the East and West, in truth so different (Kyosai surpassing the other, let me say, in variety), one will soon see that their innermost artistic characters are closely related; their seeming difference is the difference of education and circumstances from which even their original minds could hardly escape. I do not know much of the bacchanalianism of Phil May, but I know well enough that its sway is not so expansive in England as in Japan, at least old Japan, where the fantastic artists like Kyosai revelled around the ghosts they created in the sweet cup of saké. When we see Kyosai writing in front of his name the epithet Shojo, applied to the half-human red-haired bacchanals of Chinese legend, we might say he betrayed, beside his full-faced confession of the love of the cup, the fact of his natural attachment to Toba Sojo, that apostle of humour, whose pictorial wantonness may have given him many a hint; indeed he might have, like Phil May, adorned the pages of Punch, although many an admirer of his, like Josiah Conder in Paintings and Studies by Kyosai Kawanabe, a sumptuous book on the artist containing the representative work of his last eight years, sees only the serious side of his work. And when he changed the Chinese character of his name from that of "dawn" to that of "madness," I think that he was laughing, at his own expense, over the lawless excitement he most comically acted when the excess of wine deceived him away from the imaginative path of inspiration, while, like Hokusai in the well-known epithet Gwakyo Rojin or Old Man Crazy at Painting, he sanctified to himself his own craze for painting. It is an interesting psychological study to speculate on the possible relation between the Japanese wine and our artists' minds; I think it was a superstition or faith, I might say, founded on tradition, that they called the wine an invoker of inspiration, as I see the fact to-day that many of them find the divine breath in something else. However, I am thankful to the Japanese liquid with its golden flash, if it really acted as the medium through which Kyosai's many pictures came into existence, while his many other works, for instance the frontispiece woodcut of Professor Conder's Kyosai book, the elaborate picture of a Japanese beauty of the eleventh century, or the famous courtesan, Jigoku-dayu, in company with a demon, also the highly finished work owned by Mrs. William Anderson, or the other pictures I have seen more or less by accident, prove that he can be an equally splendid artist in a different direction while in perfect sobriety. He was born in the year 1831, that is about thirty years, roughly speaking, before the fall of the Tokugawa feudalism, when the age was fast decaying into loose morality and saké-drinking; and when he became a man, he found that the art's dignity under whose kind shadow he had studied as a student of Tohaku Kano, the leading artist of that famous Kano family in those days, had fallen flat, and that his ability made no satisfactory impression on people who had likely forgotten their artistic appreciation in the tumult of the Restoration; and I think it was natural enough for Kyosai to call upon the wine, as we say here, to sweep away the grievance, and to invoke, through it, a divine influence upon his art. And it is the old Japanese way to speak of wine-drinking and general revel with innocent gusto, as I find in Kyosai Gwaden, an illustrated autobiography here and there humorously exaggerated but none the less sincere, from which all the writers on Kyosai, Professor Conder included, draw the materials of his life; he is often in danger of being criticised for his self-advertising audacity, this artist of fine madness. He often reminds me of Hokusai, not so much in his artistic expression as in temperament. The books, I mean Kyosai Gwaden, cannot be said, I think, to be more interesting in text than the pictures themselves; these are a series of off-hand sketches showing the actual scenes of his arrest and imprisonment, the story of which Professor Conder's English propriety excluded, although it seems perfectly harmless as it was, on his part, merely the conduct arising out of merriment from excess of wine; beside, his sketches show us the sickening gloominess of prison life in those days when one's freedom and right were denied rather than protected. Kyosai drank most terribly at a party held at a restaurant in Uyeno Park; he made on the spot the caricatures—while overhearing the talk of a foreigner on horseback who, being asked by a tea-house maid at Oji if he came alone, replied that he came accompanied by "a pair of fools"—in which he drew the picture of two people tying the shoe-strings of one man with the longest legs, and also the picture of men of the longest arms pulling out the hairs of Daibutsu's nostrils. The authorities, though it is not clear how the matter came to their knowledge, stepped into the place and arrested him on the ground of insulting the officials; we must be thankful for the "enlightenment" of to-day when nobody would possibly get, as Kyosai got in 1870, ninety days in the cell from such pictures. The real meaning of Kyosai's impromptu in art is rather vague; but it is in my mind a satirical love to understand them as a huge laughter over Japan's slavishness to the West. And I often wonder if they are not caricatures which could be used to-day. Where is another Kyosai who could raise such a striking brush of scorn and sneer as to startle authority?
Kyosai used to absorb his spare time, while a young student at Kano's atelier, in the study of the No drama—out of natural love, I believe, combined with zeal to find an artistic secret in its heterogeneity, unlike the other students who sought their outside amusement nightly in popular halls of music and song; and it was an elderly lady of the Kano family who encouraged him by furnishing funds for teacher and costumes, being impressed, as a No admirer herself, by the young man's noble intention. It seems that Kyosai had not been able to fulfil the old lady's desire to see him in one of her favourite pieces called Sambaso, whether from his imperfect mastering of it then or from some other reason, when she suddenly fell ill and died ; doubtless, Kyosai took the matter to his heart of hearts. It was on the day of her third anniversary that he gathered all the musician accompanists of flute and drum before her lonely grave at Uyeno, and he, of course in the full costume of the character, performed the whole piece of the said Sambaso. Fancy the scene in the graveyard damp with mosses, dark with the falling foliage; and the actor is no other but fantastic Kyosai. Where could be found a more gruesome sight than that? This story among others we find in Kyosai Gwaden is most characteristic in that no other artist of the long Japanese history, perhaps with the possible exception of Hokusai, could make it fit for himself; the story reveals Kyosai's honesty almost to a fault, that sounds at once childish or madman-like, a temperament, unlike that of Southern Japan of female refinement and voluptuousness, which only the proud plebeianism of the Yedo civilisation (what an ultra-European imbecility of present Tokyo!) could create, the temperament, uncompromising, most difficult to be neutral. If we call Icho Hanabusa the most proper representative of old Yedo's Genroku Age, the time when people found spirituality through the consecration of materialism, I think we can well call Kyosai the representative of the later Tokugawa Age (although his life extended a good many years into the present Meiji era) which, again like his own art, fell with the abruptness of an oak-tree. I have some reason when I beg your attention to the above characteristic story of Kyosai.
The love of the No drama, the classic of lyrical fascination exclusively patronised by nobles and people of taste, would never be taken as strange in Kyosai who stayed sixteen long years with that master of the old Kano art, Tohaku Kano, till he parted from it in his twenty-seventh year perhaps for an art wider and truer, or, let me say, to find his own artistic soul all by his own impulse and strength; and when we see what attachment, even reverence, he had, during his whole life, toward the name of Toiku given him by the old master, the name we find in Kyosai Gwaden and other books, we can safely say that his classic passion in general must have been quite strong. The question is where his plebeianism could find room to rise and fall. That is the point where, not only in his art, also in his personality, he showed in spite of himself a tragi-comic oddity, mainly from the rupture between the two extremes of temperament. I am told by his personal friend who survives to-day that he was rather pleased to shock and frighten the most polite society which reverently congregated in the silent house of the No drama, to begin with, by his informal dress only suitable for the street shopkeeper or mechanic, then with his occasional shout of praise over the beautiful turn of the acting, in a voice touched with vulgar audacity; he exclaimed, "Umei!" Yedo slang for "splendid," which was at least unusual for a No appreciator. Nobody seemed, I am told, to criticise him when his good old heart was well recognised. So in his own art. I can point out, even from Professor Conder's collection alone, many a specimen where the aristocratic aloofness of air is often blurred by his plebeianism—for example in the pictures of "Daruma," "The Goddess Kwannon on a Dragon," "Carp swimming in a Lake," and others; the meaning I wish to impress on your mind will become clear directly when you compare them with the work of Sesshu, Motonobu, and Okyo on similar subjects. And again I have enough confidence to say that his elaborate pictures of red and green, after the Ukiyoye school, were more often weakened by the classic mist; although he did not wish to be looked upon as of that school, I think it was the main reason that he rather failed as an Ukiyoye artist. I endorse my friend to whom I praised and abused Kyosai lately only to get his true estimation, when he declared that Kyosai could not become one of the greatest artists of Japan simply from his inability to sacrifice his versatility; that versatility was the kind we can only find in Hokusai. He was the most distinguished example of one who failed, if he failed, from excess of artistic power and impulse.
Any one who sees Kyosai Gwaden will certainly be astonished by his extraordinary persistence of study displayed in the first two volumes, in which he shows encyclopedically the delicate shades of variety of nearly all Japanese artists acknowledged great, from Kanaoka down to Kuniyoshi, also specimens of Chinese masters inserted at intervals. When I say that his artistic study was thorough even in the modern sense, I mean he always went straight to Nature and reality to fulfil what the pictures of old masters failed to tell him. Kyosai Gwaden tells, as an early adventure in Nature study, how he hid in a cupboard a human head which he picked up from a swollen river and horrified the family with his attempt to sketch it in his ninth year; when fire broke out and swept away even his own house, he became an object of condemnation, as he acted as if it were the affair of somebody else, and was seen serenely sketching the sudden clamour of the fire scene. The books contain somewhere a page or two of unusually amusing sketches of his students at work on different living objects, from a frog and turtle to cocks and fishes; Kyosai's love of fun in exaggeration (indeed exaggeration is one of the traits conspicuous even in his most serious work) again is seen in the sketches, when he made a monkey play at gymnastics and pull the hair of the earnest student with the brush. I often ask myself the question of the real merit of realism in our Japanese art, and further the question how much Kyosai gained from his realistic accuracy; I wonder what artistic meaning there is, for instance, when people, even acknowledged critics, speak with much admiration of the anatomical exactness of those skeletons fantastically dancing to the ghost's music in that famous Jigoku-dayu picture. Let me ask again what the picture would lose, supposing, for instance, the most whimsical dancers around the courtesan's gorgeous robe had two or three joints of bone missing; is not Kyosai's realistic minuteness, which the artist was perhaps proud of displaying, in truth, rather a small subordinate part in his pictures? He was already in the present age, many years before his death, when many a weak artistic mind of Japan only received, from the Western art, confusion and reasoning, but not strength and passion. Now let me ask you: was it Kyosai's artistic greatness to accept the Western science of art?
He was never original in the absolute understanding as Sesshu, Korin, in a lesser degree Harunobu and Hokusai were; it might be that he was born too late in the age, or is it more true to say that his astonishing knowledge of the old Japanese art acted to hold him back from striking out an original line? Education often makes one a coward. When I say that he was himself the sum total of all Japanese art, I do not mean to undervalue him, but rather to do justice to his versatility and the swing of his power. And it was his personality, unique and undefinable, that made his borrowing such an impression as we feel it in fact in his work. After all, he has to be judged, in my opinion, as an artist of technique.
I do not know what picture of his the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum have, except a few reproductions in books, which impressed me as poor examples. It is not too much to say that Professor Conder's Kyosai book is the first and may be the last; there is no more fit man than he, who as Kyosai's student knew him personally during the last eight years of his life. The book contains some good specimens which belong to that period; but what I most wish to see, are the pictures he produced in his earlier age. He is one of the artists who will gain much from selection; who will ever publish a book of twenty or thirty best pieces of his life's production?