CHAPTER EIGHT

A Note On Japanese Sculpture

OF ALL FORMS OF ARTISTIC ACTIVITY in this most artistic and active of lands, I suppose sculpture is really the least known, the least considered, except in so far as the term might be applied to the work of the industrial artists, the many and nameless masters of the minor arts. Yet in actuality the sculpture of Japan, the plastic or chiseled work, that is, which possesses the universal elements of monumental art, is at least as noble and admirable and as worthy of high place beside the achievements of Western art, as are the painting and the industrial arts whose position is now so nearly assured. We admit at last that the Japanese schools of painting are worthy of equal honor with those of the Early Renaissance in Europe: the racial impulse and the religion were different and the results are widely sundered in their superficial aspects, nevertheless we know now that the supreme tests of great painting may be applied as safely to the pictures of Cho-densu, Shubun, and Kano Motonobu as to those of Leonardo, Botticelli, and the Bellini. We are beginning to appreciate the fact that Japanese architecture is not a sport of Asiatic barbarism, but a style as logical, articulate, and highly developed as those of Greece and France and England. Of the major arts sculpture alone is left out of the reckoning. Mention the word and nine out of ten men will think at once of the Daibutsu of Kamakura and the Ni-o that scowl at one from the main gates of the Buddhist temples—nothing more. Everyone is impressed by the sacred solemnity of the gray-green Presence in the Kamakura valley, everyone is delighted by the grotesque violence and the savage exaggeration of the Deva Kings, but few stop to analyze the artistic elements of the great Buddha, and still fewer realize that back of the threatening wardens of the gates stretches a line of sculptured masterpieces reaching even to the sixth century of the Christian era.

Nevertheless this is the case; some day a man will come who will penetrate the dusty gloom of Horiuji, Horinji, Todaiji, Kofukuji, Kofkuji and all the other treasure houses of central Japan, dragging into the light the wonderful examples of sculpture hidden there, search these lines and masses, point out their qualities of everlasting nobility, and add to human knowledge another—indeed several other—immortal schools of sculpture.

For my own part, I have only peered for a moment into these forgotten shrines, brushed a little dust from odd statues here and there, gathered—I fear by stealth and the doubtfully justifiable generosity of some good Japanese friends—a few poor and faded photographs of two or three out of scores of works of art utterly unknown except to Japanese students.

The impression is lasting, however, and prompts a few random notes, not as a contribution to the sum of knowledge of this so little known field of Japanese art, but only, if it may be, to pique the curiosity of others and so lead them to search still further into a field that promises much.

Earliest in point of time is a bronze figure formerly in Horiuji but now in the Nara Museum (PLATE 42). It is of the sixth century: pure Korean, or, if not that, then the earliest of all Japanese work and executed under Korean orders. In any case, it is Korean in style, and absolutely priceless to any student of the historical development of art. It is a strange, sexless figure, tall and slim, mysterious and baffling to a degree. The drapery is formalized and decorative, conventionalism raised to the nth power, but the type and the modeling of the head and hands are almost classical. The pose too, while reserved and formal, has yet a certain suave grace that is most appealing. There are a hundred reasons why this Korean figure is absolutely invaluable. Not only is it a fine type of pure and law-abiding sculpture, full of beauty and spiritual calm, but it is a priceless example of that amazing Asiatic modification of an Hellenic norm which proves a ramification of classic influence, a persistent survival of the Greek idea, in lands and among people severed from the primal source by almost the whole diameter of being.

The influence of Athens on the art of Asia was as great as in the case of Medieval Europe, and the man who will undertake to trace the devious course of this influence from Hellas across the whole width of Asia will have a new field full of great possibilities. He will also have the certainty of a tedious task, for of the myriad connecting links between Phidias and Tori Busshi nearly all have perished. Persia, India, China, and Korea have been swept clean of artistic records, and if we may judge from this single statue in Nara the loss is irreparable. What must have been the art of China, for example, during the first centuries of the Christian era, if a thing like this came to a mission station in a comparatively barbarous land from a country that was not the source of civilization, but only a recent triumph of missionary enterprise on the part of China herself, the great mother of civilizations?

Again in this work we see the models on which Japan was to build her art of national scuplture, as in the monastery of Horiuji we see the prototype of her architecture. This sixth-century work in and around Nara is the beginning of the art of Japan, and its value is correspondingly great.

A century later Tori Busshi begins the great line of Japanese sculptors, though himself of Chinese descent and Chinese or Korean training. In his work and that of his seventh-century school, we find exactly what we should have expected: conventionalism, or rather formalism, carried into every part of the work, into the body as well as into the vesture; at the same time an access of decorative quality in line and mass. Except in the exquisite formalism of the drapery little classical feeling remains, and even its vestiges have taken on a cast as Oriental as the faces and figures. As studies of line, pure and consummate, I know few things in sculpture more nearly ultimate than these seventhcentury statues of Horiuji and Yakushiji. (PLATES 43 and 44).

With the eighth century we come at a bound into an era of Japanese sculpture, national, ethnic, perfectly developed. The first formalism has worked itself out, traditions have been discounted so far as their accidents are concerned. Japan has found herself and announces that fact in perfectly audible phrases. In religious sculpture these traditions still persist, the composition and the lines of the drapery hark back to the early Korean or rather Asiatic mode, the faces have stupefied into conventional expressionlessness: dogma is steadily conservative. On the other hand, even in official sculpture, here and there the bonds are breaking, a certain realism is creeping into the poses and the details, while now and again in the faces, character, typical and unmistakable, begins to show itself. More or less portrait statues begin to appear in the shape of apotheosized warriors and incarnations of heroism and force, and here we come at once into a full-fledged school of vital sculpture. Figures such as those in PLATE 45 are the very embodiment of force, with power and ability in every line. Consider the poise and dash of such a splendid, sinewy thing as the Incarnation of War, the spring and sweep of the body, the tensity of nerve, the howling savagery of the distorted face conventionalized like a Greek mask; or again, the rigid alertness, the power, concentrated and controlled, in PLATE 46. In all of these the bodies are fully articulated, the faces, particularly the last, unmistakably portraits, yet portraits that are more than the effigies of individuals, they are amalgamations of a race, manifestations of national character. Note also the superb armor, almost classical in its lines, without fantasticism or exaggeration, cleancut, splendid in line, noble in its surface. These are great statues, all of them, works of the highest art: nothing better was ever produced in Europe after the fall of Rome. PLATE 47A, also, is a wonder of portraiture, indeed I doubt if anything more full of individuality and character has ever been wrought than these last two heads of the eighth century in Japan.

All the work thus far considered has been of the Nara period; of the Kyoto period, which covered the next four centuries until 1192, I have been able to obtain no photographs of the work of the earlier years, but of the tenth century we have such keenly characteristic work as the two portrait studies in PLATES 47B and 48A; one of a Buddhist priest, the other of a young daimyo. In these we find the same intensity of personality, together with a progressive development of Japanese qualities, both racial and artistic. The little noble in particular is a perfect masterpiece of sculpture, intimate in character, real to a degree, both in type and detail, decorative in its arrangement of line and the minutiæ of its modeling. The old priest, also (PLATE 49A,) which is of the eleventh century, is inimitable. Realism is rampant, both in the closely modeled head and hands, and in the minutely studied drapery, but note that this realism, unlike that of the present day, sacrificed nothing of the general to the particular; the statue is an eternal type, not an evanescent photograph, yet a portrait withal, intimate and intense.

In the Kamakura period, that is, the thirteenth century, all schools seem to meet and yet preserve their identity. We have the hieratic type represented in PLATE 48B and in the supreme wonder of the Daibutsu; the school of force and action shown in the two Ni-o from Kofukuji (PLATE 50); finally the school of portraiture, an example of which may be seen in the study of a priest by Unkei (PLATE 49B).

This last is just as notable in its closeness to nature as the work of the Kyoto period, and higher praise cannot be given. I think the two Ni-o are simply the most marvelous examples of power, action, and life manifested without the smallest sacrifice of sculpturesque quality I have ever seen. Anatomically they are marvels and show a closeness of observation and a power of selection of significant details that are amazing. And what could be better than the sweep and rush of the drapery, what more perfectly rhythmic and decorative than the composition and drawing of the component folds: this is art, and art of the highest.

In a way, however, it is in the hieratic manifestations of religious faith, in such consummate triumphs as the great Buddha of Kamakura, that this period, if not all Japanese sculpture, reaches its culmination. Vast as the statue is, no less than fiftytwo feet high, every detail except such as are absolutely necessary is eliminated, and the result is the triumphant apotheosis of the abstract and the universal. As one comes suddenly before this vision of brooding calm, shrined in the green calyx of the everlasting hills, the impression is almost overpowering. It is a lesson in the perfect adequacy of simple means to the greatest of all ends, a final proof that Japanese sculpture is a component part of the greatest sculpture of the world, a vindication of the claim that may be made for the nameless statuaries of Nippon to stand with those others, who in Europe wrought such masterpieces as the Victory of Samothrace, the King Arthur of Insbruck, the St. Mary of Notre Dame.

Long before the Pisani began chiseling out the restoration of sculpture in Italy, back farther before the unknown artist wrought his wonder of Our Lady of Paris, farther still, even before, and centuries before, the Englishman, the first of all the waybreakers of sculpture in Europe, drew from his innermost consciousness the beautiful beginnings of art so long forgotten it was really new, the Japanese, trained by their Korean leaders and driven by the vitalizing spirit of Buddhism enlivening the embers of an immemorial ethnic religion, were building of themselves a school of sculpture from which no element of greatness was lacking. Enough remains to make possible a reconstruction of the whole wonderful period from the founding of Horiuji, to the fall of Kamakura, eight centuries of progressive greatness. A virgin field, clamorous for the student and the constructive critic. May his advent be no longer delayed.