Arthur Davison Ficke

Name: Chats on Japanese Prints
Author: Arthur Davison Ficke

Biographical details

Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945) was an American poet, playwright, and scholar of Japanese art, celebrated as a "poet's poet" and a master of the sonnet. His career spanned classical verse and modernist innovation, epitomized by his 1916 satirical collection Spectra, co-authored under the pseudonym Anne Knish.

Deeply influenced by Japanese aesthetics, his essays like Chats on Japanese Prints (1915) reflect his lifelong engagement with Eastern art. Plays such as Mr. Faust (1913) and his evolving poetic style—from strict meter to more liberated forms—position him as a pivotal figure bridging traditional and modernist traditions.

Quotes by Arthur Davison Ficke

Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust

“ A hair's breadth only held you from the gates
That Oldham entered. Almost they sufficed
Your spirit; yes, a moth's wing could have blown
You toward them! 'Twas so nearly I fulfilled
All that I promised. Therefore when I speak,
You will, for justice's sake, concede I am
No absolute bungler, no coarse-palated
Plebeian, as to paradises.
FAUST
No.
I will admit that.
SATAN
Good! Now, I would make
One final offer to you.
Faust, I know
In other regions, beneath other skies,
One haven more, the only one of earth
That can be judged in glory to surpass
This paradise you entered not. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints

“ The elaborate fashions of the brocades worn in this day lent themselves to the decorative needs of the larger prints; and frequently we find the figures clothed in a riot of striking textiles—flowers, trees, birds, ships, geometrical shapes—all mingled in the weave of the cloth, and arranged by the print-designer into a combination that is tumultuous without confusion and glowing without garishness. Masanobu's pictures seem the overflow of his spirit's wealth; they never have the ascetic and rarefied quality that sometimes appears in the work of even great artists. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust

“ BRANDER
No words can teach
These marvels to a heart that has not known
God's glories.
FAUST
Then this mystery of the heart
Is what men mean when of the faith of God
They speak? I thought 'twas dogma, service, prayer;
But this is life, is vision.
BRANDER
Aye, and more!
Now do I walk in meadows of calm light;
The love of God is over me; I faint
Almost beneath its sweetness and wild joy.
My whole heart's toil is how to merit it
Even a little.
SATAN (raising his hand to bless)
By the grace of God
You shall be worthy servant, O my son. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints

“ The designs of the Second Period, though hardly more realistic than those of the First, were nevertheless nearer life. The delights and passions of real men, even though fancifully regarded, coloured the conception of the artist as he approached his work; so that we find in Harunobu the exquisite joys, in Shunsho the terrific revolts, and in Buncho the super-sensible longings of the heart. Yet it is all symbolistic, all fictional, and nothing real is portrayed; the sharply limited world of these prints is a world of imagination from which no paths of communication open to regions of everyday. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust

“ BRANDER
Has no breath
Of heavenly love touched this corrosive core
Of hell-fire in you?
FAUST
There is none whose power
Is half so mighty.
BRANDER
Through last night's long hours,
Poor Midge, alone and comfortless, wept out
Her heart, believing all that you had said.
And when I spoke to her, she cried: "Go, go!
I am lost where none can help me; all my dreams
Shudder and perish, even as he has perished;
Yet they shall live again—but he will die!" ...
Thus darkness falls from you upon men's hearts. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints

“ The Japanese artist will draw a woman as if she were a lily, a man as if he were a tempest, a tree as if it were a writhing snake, a mountain as if it were a towering giant. This is the very essence of poetical imagination; and the result of it is to endow a picture with obscure suggestions and overtones of infinite power. Symbols of existence beyond themselves, these designs are charged with an almost mystical command upon the emotions of the spectator. Western art has employed such a method comparatively little in painting. In poetry it appears frequently. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust

“ FAUST
Gratitude is a graceful gift.
OLDHAM
Come, come!
What snake has bitten you, that to your lips
A poisoned irony so bitter springs
To-night?
FAUST
I am revolving in my brain
This serious question: whether 'tis not best
That one turn humorist. The mind that seeks
Holiness, finds it seldom; who pursues
Beauty perhaps shall in a lengthened life
Find it perfected only once or twice.
But if one's quest were humor—what rich stores, [10]
What tropic jungles of it, lie to hand
At every moment, everywhere one turns—
What luscious meadows for the humorist!
OLDHAM
No—for the satirist! ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints

“ To call Sharaku a realist is a silly, untruthful attempt to muffle in words forces that one does not understand. He was hardly more a realist than Kiyonaga. He saw in the spectacle before him certain elements of beauty and terror; he selected and moulded them into his cunningly devised designs; and the result was as much a creation of the visionary mind—a true idealism—as the pictures of the fairy-tale-telling Harunobu. It is no mere realism, but an insidious dissection and a mordant reconstruction, that is so striking in these works. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust

“ FAUST
Dear Brander! Is it true
I am as bad as that? Well, though I were,
Why should it trouble you? If you find sport
In this strange game, this fevered interplay,
This hodge-podge crazy-quilt which we are pleased
To call our life—why, like it! And say: Damned
Be all who are not with me!
BRANDER
Are not you?
FAUST
I claim the criminal's privilege, and decline
To answer.
OLDHAM
Faust, might I presume so far
As to suggest that I should like a drink
Before you two start breaking furniture
Over this matter?
FAUST
Certainly; I beg
Your pardon; I neglected you. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints

“ The hoso-ye prints have, upon the whole, more poise and serenity than the busts; and they will perhaps be judged—in a hundred years, when the excitement of the discovery of Sharaku is over—to be among his greatest works. When they occur in triptychs, as probably all were originally designed to do, they constitute more harmonious and dramatic units than any of Shunsho's actor-triptychs. The finest, and latest in order of production, are generally those without background; in these, isolated and sublime against an empty universe of yellow tint, rise the supreme evocations of Sharaku's genius. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust

“ Despise life's being; but not yet will I
So utterly despise it. Though in gulfs
Of yet unsounded ruin I should die
At the end miserably, I still shall seek
In life itself my refuge: not in God
That stands apart from life, on heights of peace.
All my desires, my visions, my dreams, my unrest,
My loathing and my longing will I clutch
And cry: "With all its bitterness on my head,
My Will be done, not Thy Will!"
BRANDER
Blasphemy!
Ah, Faust, what madness!... [78]
FAUST
With calm sight, I speak
No blasphemy, but truth. Shall I buy peace
So easily? ”

Arthur Davison Ficke

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