CHAPTER SEVEN

A Color Print Of Yeizan

With some thoughts on Japanese painting

“It is necessary to exercise the understanding in painting, or, as it were, to carry the mind at the point of the brush. To introduce too much is commonplace, and the artist must exercise his judgment in omitting everything superfluous or detrimental to the attainment of his object. It is the fault of foreign pictures that they dive too deeply into realities and preserve too many details that were better suppressed. Such works are but as groups of words. The Japanese picture should aspire to be a poem of form and color.” (From an eighteenth century Japanese essay on painting).

“Amongst pictures is a kind called naturalistic, in which it is considered proper that flowers, grasses, fishes, insects, etc., should bear exact resemblance to nature. This is a special style and must not be depreciated, but as its object is merely to show forms, neglecting the rules of art, it is commonplace and without taste. In ancient pictures the study of the art of outline and of the laws of taste were respected without attention to close imitation of form.” (Shuzan, 1777.)

This is not a masterpiece by some giant of the fifteenth century: it is signed by no Sesshu, Korin, or Motonobu: it is a cheap colored print struck from wooden blocks in the last century, but it says much, perhaps all we can ever understand, of the pictorial art of Japan.

Art is absolute beauty: without this there is no art. It is also much more, but this is the beginning, even if it is not the end. What absolute beauty is, Western philosophy does not define, but sane civilization has always recognized it, even if intellectual demonstration has been wanting. Why one line, or combination of lines, should be beautiful, another repulsive; why one musical phrase should be exalting, another debasing; why one color composition should satisfy absolutely, another repel—these are mysteries not even St. Thomas Aquinas can solve. A Bodenhausen “Madonna” and a Japanese kakimono; a march from Faust and the “question motive” from the Ring of the Niebelungen; Bouguereau, and Botticelli: antitheses, yet why?

The philosophy of the East gives a hint: absolute beauty is dual in its nature: mystical manifestation, through unconscious but inevitable selection from myriad lives (forgotten yet operative), of the failures that were partial only, and that therefore through process of selection and discrimination become visible evidences of the best thus far achieved. The best, not of one life, but of millions; higher, therefore, than the best of one. Karma, in a way, yet a karma that is always good, for it is not humans alone who weave this cord of destiny, but all nature, animate or (as we call it) inanimate: all mental and spiritual forces, art as much as you or I. Also is it, in another aspect, mystical foreknowledge of the final Absolute to which we all are tending through incarnation and reincarnation; not only the subliminal composite of the good of all the past, but a leaping on by force of achievement to heights yet unachieved; Karma and Beatific Vision in one. So beauty is something that never was in the past, nor is now, but shall be hereafter, the last residuum from the winnowing of experience illuminated by the aura even of Nirvana itself.

We may or may not accept the solution of Eastern mysticism: the fact remains that beauty, absolute, never was, and is not now, and is to be found neither in nature nor in life. If in either of these a thing is discovered which seems absolutely beautiful, the fact of discovery proves that it is not absolute, but partial only, and therefore to be accepted merely as material from which beauty by psychological or mystical processes may be evolved. In other words, what we call nature is no more perfect than man himself, but is constantly developing, and imitation or copying of nature is not the registering of beauty, but of the imperfect. Art, therefore, being at least the record of the search for absolute beauty, must, if it is good, avoid the replication of natural facts, since these are in themselves beautiful only in a transitory and ephemeral way.

Beauty, then, which we may call the Intimation of the Absolute, is the first requisite of all art. In this respect nine-tenths of all modern “art” fails completely; it is imitation, ingenuity, photography, a record of objective and sociological and psychological data—what you will—but it is not art in any true and universal sense.

In the pictorial arts beauty is of many kinds: beauty of line, form, color, light and dark, space composition. You may grow weary searching through the Luxembourg, or any Salon or Academy exhibition before you find a picture possessing all, or even one of these primary notes of true art: you cannot take up a common color-print made in Japan before 1880 that does not show them all.

Again, art is good workmanship, the perfect adaption of means to an end; no boggling with uncertainties, no prodigality of effort, everything direct, instantaneous: such workmanship as that of which Velasquez was supreme master, and Michelangelo and John Sargent. Here every Japanese painter is master. Note in the print the swift, sure lines of the scroll, the curves of the sleeves of the woman’s gown. The hand of a Japanese is trained like the hand of a clever surgeon, his eye like that of a master mariner, his brain answers as instantly and clearly as that of a great general.

Finally, art is the manifestation of the unattained, the communication of the inexpressible. Without sacrilege, we may say that it partakes of the nature of a Sacrament; it is both a symbol and a medium between the finite, the conditioned, and the infinite, the unconditioned. To again to Eastern philosophy, the mind, physical in its nature, deals with those things that fall within the span of a single life, it is built up of experience, of the happenings between the cradle and the grave, it records no more, it can express no more: it is a physical function and this only. But in the second place there is a superior mind, a sublimated consciousness, that is the concatenation of myriads of incarnations. It is an attribute of the inextinguishable karma, it is to the physical mind what man is to the mollusk. In it are fixed to all eternity the records of an infinite past, the seeds of an infinite future. To it are added, life by life, all that is precious and of moment in a sequence of existences. It is the source in man of all imagination, dreams, and visions; of aspirations and exaltations; of honor, selfsacrifice, devotion: of love, poetry, and religion. We may, if we like, call it the immortal soul.

Therefore it is the essential element in man. Art of every kind is its sole means of expression, and while art as art may exist independently of its function as a mode of super-mundane expression and inter-communication, it finds, nevertheless, its highest manifestation in this unearthly and symbolical language.

Man is a plexus of aggregated individuals, yet he has two general natures corresponding to the dual mind; the one that is the physical product of a single existence, the other that is the concentration of millions thereof. The language of the first is the ordinary spoken and written language of a people, that of the second is art.

What, it may be said, has all this tenuous theorizing to do with a color-print by Yeizan? We of the West, who in looking at a picture search for its qualities of truth to facts as we know them—facts of nature, facts of history; who are taught that correct anatomy is the first requisité in figure drawing, correct archeology in historical work, correct delineation of character in portraiture—we, on turning suddenly to a Japanese print or kakimono, find nothing of these at first, and argue, therefore, ignorance on the part of the painter. The photograph and the anatomical chart being our criteria, we find at first nothing but grotesqueness and wilful disregard of patent facts. In other words, we have Muybridged our minds until artistic perception is no longer possible.

For actually great Japanese painting possesses all the elements named above; it is in a greater or less degree, varying with the painter, an approach to absolute beauty, of line and line-composition, of color and color-composition, of design and of spacecomposition. Also, in a greater or less degree, it approaches technical perfection. The Kano did not

“splash at a ten-league canvas

With brushes of comets’ hair,”

but they did, so far as was possible to man, achieve complete directness, instantaneous certainty. They knew to a hair’s breadth what they were to do, and exactly how they were to set about doing it. The space covered is comparatively small, but in the sure spring and exact touching of the goal Michelangelo himself could not better them.

Finally, there is every reason to believe that in the highest reaches of art, in subtle reminder and re-creation of the accumulated past forbidden to earthly memory, and in the dim foreshadowing of a future equally forbidden to the physical mind, the painters of Japan far excel those of our own race whom we can know and understand—Leonardo, Giorgione, Botticelli, Dürer, Rossetti. I say there is every reason to believe this, for actually we cannot know, we of the West to whom they of the East are as of another planet.

In so far as beauty is in itself a showing forth, and an incentive to, mystical memory of accumulated experience, either of the individual or the race, Japanese art is operative in our own case. When, after long study of a picture or a print, we begin to see how every line, every space, every composition of line, notan, form, and color is in itself beautiful, then we feel that unmistakable thrill, that wistful call from the abyss of the forgotten that declares the half awakening of the mysterious power, ourselves, yet more than ourselves, that hears the cry of the universal and answers, half believing yet half afraid.

But for that other attribute of art, the prophecy of the Beatific Vision, here we are on different ground. Leonardo we can understand, and Wagner, and Browning. They speak our tongue though through different arts. But the Japanese painters speak in a language and to a consciousness whereof we have neither part nor parcel. Therefore, we can only assume and believe their art to be at least equal to our own in this respect; the tangible proof is wanting, and must ever remain so.

Yet even omitting this, we have enough left on which we may found a judgment of Japanese pictorial art. How much of the painting of our own race becomes a vehicle rather than an end in itself? Not one in a hundred painters assumes the prophetic office, not one in ten of the pictures of those that do is in any sense a revelation: yet the art is good if it is really art, and to be this it must be an expression of absolute beauty, and, if possible, a manifestation of masterly craft as well.

The pictorial art of Japan possesses these two qualities in the highest degree. Pure beauty is a prerequisite, good workmanship an almost unfailing accompaniment. For a time there was an attempt on the part of many to discriminate against Japanese painting as “decorative” and therefore not pictorial. This was necessary if we were to retain a few shreds of admiration for the vast mass of modern painting which possesses no single element of beauty and is in no sense “decorative.” It was supposed to be art, however, hence the discrimination. Now, as a matter of fact, every great picture of the past has been primarily “decorative.” If it had not been, it could never have ranked as a great picture. Tintoretto’s “Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne,” Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, Botticelli’s “Spring,” Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love,” Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” these and a hundred other masterpieces are such because they are “decorative,” in other words, are masterpieces of pure beauty, either of drawing, composition, color, or of all of these qualities. Each has many other splendid attributes, but it is not the anatomical power of Michelangelo’s bodies, the atmosphere of Titian’s golden dream, the vital character in Rembrandt’s heads, nor yet his mastery of the mysteries of light, that make the pictures great: it is simply and only that they are all manifestations of beauty in some of its noblest modes: all things else are but acts of supererogation, or at best added virtues that are cumulative in their import.

The beauty of a Kano Motonobu, a Sesshu, a Korin, is essentially the same, the beauty in this print of Yeizan is close kin to the beauty in a Filippo Lippi or a Bernardino Luini: the spacing of the lights and darks, the composition, the individual and combined lines, the sheer beauty of form in each individual part, all are infinitely studied, perfectly competent, final as far as they go. A Giovanni Bellini may appeal to us more, and it certainly should, for it is of our own race, but this is an accident of blood and has no bearing on the quality of the work in the abstract.

Again, we stand in awe before the technique of Velasquez, Tintoretto, Sargent, and well we may: they are past masters of painter-craft, but so are the Japanese; the same test that justifies them of the West vindicates them of the East: it is one impulse, one genius, one achievement.

I am not arguing that the arts of Japan, and the pictorial arts in particular, should appeal to us as does the art of our own race: the gulf between East and West is impassable. The sculptors of Greece, the painters of Italy, the builders of France and England, were men of our own race, their history is ours, their tongue our tongue. No other art can possibly be to us as this which is our own, but if we isolate ourselves in our Western insolence, denying, for example, the name of art to all pictures not painted in oil, or tempera, on panels or canvas, and framed in carved and gilded wood, then we stamp ourselves barbarians, shut ourselves away from the possibility of an aesthetic experience not to be found elsewhere. Nor is condescending patronage a whit less virtuous. “A very high type of artistic production indeed, for an Asiatic race.” “Admirable decoration, perhaps the very best, but hardly what one would call pictorial, or High Art.” “Wonderful artisans no doubt, with a marvelous sense of the decorative, but curiously limited in their knowledge of anatomy, modeling, and perspective.” Phrases such as these are worse than a frank and brutal denying of the very name of art to the work of the painters of the great Japanese schools.

Asiatic civilization was for some centuries the highest to be found on earth. There is no “High Art” that is not permanently decorative. If any quality of anatomy, modeling, or perspective has been banished from a Japanese picture, it is merely because this quality, perfectly well understood by the painter, has been deleted simply because it was not necessary to the attainment of the end in view. Those are the replies to the three strictures quoted above.

Come back again to the color-print (PLATE 41): what would it have gained had the head been modeled like a crayon drawing from the cast; had the bones declared themselves through the muscles, the muscles through the gown; had the figure been bathed in accidental lights and had it stood before us surrounded by atmosphere, a wonder of perspective? Nothing, so far as pure beauty is concerned, for this lies in its rhythm of line, in its calm, clear spaces, in its juxtaposition of lights and darks. The elements it lacks may be assembled to produce equal beauty, the point is that they are not the only Divinely ordained means whereby this may be attained. The East has found others of equal potency; the result, the manifestation of absolute beauty in visible form, is the same.

The object, then, of the Japanese painter is the attainment of pure beauty. To him, nourished as his fathers before him for unnumbered generations, on the fundamental doctrine that thought, will, desire, the universe itself, all are illusion, all visible and tangible things are no more than the emanation of rudimentary mind, therefore utterly imperfect and unworthy of perpetuation. He does not search far and wide for a fairer type of face or form, a nobler natural prospect. He does not ransack his memory or his sketch-books for notes of pose, gesture, accessories: his pictures are not built up of beautiful elements gathered from many sources and through long periods. This is the method of the West—is now at all events, in the case of such work as possesses any claim whatever to the qualities of true art. Instead he takes any subject, however outwardly commonplace, and then applies to it three processes: Selection, Emphasis, Idealization.

Almost instinctively he chooses the essential lines, elements, and qualities, throwing all else away. Of these he lays stress on those that play into his hand for beauty, minimizing the others, and then, either, as we should say, by the exercise of his infallible good taste, or, as he would say, controlled by that mystical elder memory that tests all things by the standards established through myriads of forgotten lives, he goes on to translate his chosen details into terms of the beautiful.

Here we return to the first proposition in this, I fear, incoherent chapter—that the nature of Absolute Beauty is undemonstrable outside the mazes of oriental psychology and metaphysics. Yet whatever it is, the Japanese attains it. In painting, as in architecture and in the earlier sculpture, beauty is as omnipresent as it is in the art of Greece and that of the Middle Ages in Europe. Yet it is absolutely impossible to demonstrate this fact in words. If any one can show clearly and scientifically just why St. Mark’s is beautiful, St. Peter’s hideous, he will do well; yet there is the fact, and here is the fact of consummate beauty in Japanese painting.

And it is this that is all-important. The art of Japan is the art of pure beauty. How achieved, and why, are questions beside the mark. We may by careful study discern wherein this beauty lies; in what kind of lines and what combinations of lines; in what spacing of lights and darks, in what systems of rhythm, echo, and development, in what arrangements and combinations of color. We may even discover the underlying laws, if they exist, but for my own part, I am inclined to think that these laws can never be formulated in terms comprehensible by man. Art does not exist by law, at all events by law man-made or uttered by man. It is an inevitable result: if it exists, good; if it is absent no power on earth aimed at its direct creation will avail in the smallest degree.

And here follows, as a moral, the story of the Chinese painter, Wu tao-tsz.

“Lord,” said Wu tao-tsz, prostrating himself, “my labor is at an end.”

The Emperor regarded him with scant favor. “Behold,” he said, “how the curtain that has hung before the wall of my palace, hiding all sign of your work, still insults my vision. Will you deign to remove it?”

“Even so, Lord,” and at a touch the curtain sunk to the ground.

The Emperor started, then stood silent gazing on the wonder before him. It seemed that the wall of the palace had melted away, and in its place was a wide window giving on a land such as no man in earthly life had ever seen before. A wall of pale jade, intricately wrought, lay in front, pierced by a gleaming doorway of coral lacquer and closed by gates of chiseled gold. And above, reaching off into limitless distance, lay a radiant country of trees and flowers, with cascades of silver water, mountains of marvelous shapes, and clouds like visible dreams.

Temples of ivory, amethyst, and gold flamed in the amber air, and for a moment the Emperor believed he could hear faint chanting and mystical music, scent the perfumes of unknown incense mingling with the odor of rose gardens and jasmine. Finally he spoke.

“You have done well, Wu tao-tsz, for you have painted, not this earth, but the very heaven of heavens that is the emanation of the Lord Buddha.”

“Not so, Lord,” and the painter prostrated himself once more. “This that you see, you have seen before, but only as you have seen the single dew-drops which, gathered together, become the immeasurable sea. This is but the veil of what shall be, a poor symbol of the smile of the Ineffable One. Beyond…”

He knelt, prostrating himself now before the gates. Then in a breath they swung open. Wall, gates, portal dissolved and faded away and for one instant of time lay revealed a land of such wonder and majesty that the vision Wu tao-tsz had wrought seemed but a mean and sordid desolation. The Emperor fell to the ground covering his face with his sleeve, but before his eyeballs were seared by the glory of the Utterly Forbidden, he saw Wu tao-tsz rise and pass into the Vision of the Absolute, saw him melt into the unspeakable radiance of the smile of the Blessed One.

When, after long abasement, he ventured to raise his eyes, the gates were closed, nor when he touched them were they other than painted silk.

And Wu tao-tsz no man saw ever again on earth.