Yone Noguchi

“ I amused myself thinking that it was Oscar Wilde who said that Nature imitates art; is not the nature of Japan imitating the poor work of the Western method? Art is, indeed, a most serious thing. It is the time now when we must jealously guard our spiritual insularity, and carefully sift the good and the bad, and protect ourselves from the Western influence which has affected us too much in spite of ourselves. Speaking of the Western art in Japan, I think I have spoken quite unconsciously of the general pain, not only in art, but in many other things, from which we wish we could escape. ”

“ It is your admiration that makes you bold; again your admiration of Utamaro's pictures that makes them a real part of yourself, therefore your vital question of body and soul; and you shall never be able to think of them separately from your personal love. When I say that we have our own life and art in his work, I mean that all Japanese woman-beauty, love, passion, sorrow and joy, in one word, all dreams now appear, then disappear, by the most wonderful lines of his art. ”

“ While I admit the art of some artist which has the detail of beauty, I must tell him that reality, even when true, is not the whole thing; he should learn the art of escaping from it. That art is, in my opinion, the greatest of all arts; without it, art will never bring us the eternal and the mysterious. ”

“ I am sure that to associate Buddhism with something of grief and tears is not a proper understanding at all. (See Gaho's pictures of the Buddha and Rakans, the Buddha disciples. They do not inspire any awfulness.) Tenderness and joy, with a touch of sorrow, which is poetry, are the road toward the Nirvana. For Gaho, silence meant the highest state of peacefulness. The sad joy, which is the highest joy, is an evolution which never breaks the euphony of life, while tears and grief are rebellious. His art inspires in us a great reverence, which is religious, and it is always justified. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Two peasants under a half-opened paper umbrella, and the Kago-bearers naked and hasty, are the "third line" of the picture; the drenched bamboo dipping all one way and the cottage roofs shivering under the threat of Nature would be the first and second lines, while this picture-poem concludes itself with the sound of the harsh oblique fall of rain upon the ground. You will see that Hiroshige's good pictures have always such a theory of composition; and he gained it, I think, from the Chinese prosody. In the East, more than in the West, art is allied to verse-making. ”

“ Let me repeat again that he was sad with his brush only to make his art still sadder; when he was most happy, it was the time when he left his own studio to forget his unwilling brush and send his love imaginations under the new foliage of spring trees and make them ride on the freedom of the summer air. How he planned for future work while contemplating great Nature; he was a dreamer in the true sense. And dream was to him more real as he thought it almost practicable. I do not mix any sarcasm in my words when I say that he was a greater artist when he did not paint ”

“ It gives you a strong but never abrupt thrill of the delight which is nobly touched by the hands of sadness, and lets you lose yourself in it, and slowly grasp something you may be glad to call ideal. And the same sensation you can entertain from Gaho's art, which you might think to be reminiscent of a certain artistic paradise or Horai, the blest—one of his favourite subjects—enwrapped in silent air. ”

“ At such a moment I feel as if all Nature belonged to me alone in the whole world, and I alone held her secrets and her beauty; I am thankful for my illness, as it has made me thus restful in mind and allowed me to carefully observe Nature, and build my many future plans. I can promise you that I will whistle my adieu to the commissioned work, all of it, when I grow stronger again, and become a real artist, the real artist even to satisfy you. ”

“ He never jars you. His art is a grey ghost of melody born from the bosom of depth and distance, like a far-off mountain. And it gives you a thrill of large space that binds you with eternity, and you will understand that what you call reality is nothing but a shiver of impulse of great Nature. ”

“ He was an artist, not merely either an illustrator or a designer. He was a true artist, therefore his work is ever so new like the moon and flowers; and again old, like the flowers and moon."
"If the so-called post-impressionists could see Kenzan's work!" my friend-artist suddenly ventured to exclaim, "I am sure that Vincent Van Gogh would be glad to have this six-leafed screen of poppy-flowers."
"Really the picture is the soul of the flowers," I said, "but not the external flowers. It is mystic as the flowers are mystic. And imagine Kenzan's attitude when he drew that screen! ”

“ 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 have ceased for some time to expect anything great or astonishing from Wada or Okada or even Kuroda; we most eagerly look forward to the sudden appearance of some genius at once to frighten and hypnotise and charm us and make the Western art more intimate with our minds. ”

“ The saddest part is that they are so alien to our Japanese feeling in general; consequently they have little sympathy with the masses. It is far away yet for their work to become an art of general possession; it can be said it is not good art when it cannot at once enter into the heart. It is not right at all to condemn only the Western art in Japan, as any other thing of foreign origin is equally in the stage of mere trial. I often wonder about the real meaning of the modern civilisation of Japan. Imitation is imitation, not the real thing at all. ”

“ Although I can enjoy and even criticise Hiroshige or Hokusai at any time and in any place, let me tell you that I cannot do so with Utamaro, because I must be first in the rightest mood (who says bodies have no mood?) as when I see the living woman; to properly appreciate his work of art I must have the fullness of my physical strength so that my criticism is disarmed. (Criticism ? Why, that is the art for people imperfect in health, thin and tired.) ”

“ We did not approach the grave, but went straight into the exhibition rooms, because we knew that the best prayer we could offer to Kenzan was to see and rightly appreciate his works of art. We all of us were unable to speak a word at the beginning, as our tongues (our heads too) lost their powers against his peculiarly distinguished art, which is the oldest and again the newest. When our minds became better composed, we sat in a corner of the room where the hangings of his flowers or trees, and the tea-bowls or incense-cases with his favourite designs, had been well arranged ”

“ And their artistic work was a sort of prayer-making, to satisfy their own imagination, not a thing to show to a critic whose attempt at arguing and denying is only a nuisance in the world of higher art; they drew pictures to create absolute beauty and grandeur, that made their own human world look almost trifling, and directly joined themselves with eternity. Art for them was not a question of mere reality in expression, but the question of Faith. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I have thought more than once that our importation of foreign art is a flat failure. It may be that we must wait some one hundred years at least before we can make it perfectly Japanised, just as we spent many years before thoroughly digesting Chinese art; but we have not a few pessimists who can prove that it is not altogether the same case. Although I have said that the foreign pedantry greatly troubles the Japanese work of Western art, I do not mean that it will create the same effect as upon Western artists. ”

“ There are many drawbacks, as I look upon the material side, to the Western art becoming popular; for instance, our Japanese house—frail, wooden, with the light which rushes in from all sides—never gives it an appropriate place to look its best. And the heaviness of its general atmosphere does not harmonise with the simplicity that pervades the Japanese household; it always appears out of place, like a chair before the tokonoma, a holy dais. Besides, the artists cannot afford to sell their pictures cheap, not because they are good work, but because there are only a few orders for them. ”

“ 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 ”

“ When I wish to think of his art alone, and even to measure it, if possible, through the most dangerous, always foolish way of comparison with others, I find always, in spite of myself, that my mind, even before it has fairly started on his art, is already carried away by the dear, sweet, precious memory of his rare personality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our imagination grows deeper and clearer through the virtue or magic of his work; and again his work appears thrice simplified and therefore more vital. The art really simple and vital is never to be troubled with any rhetoric or accessories of unessentials; before you make such a picture, you must have, to begin with, your own soul simplified and vital in the true sense. Kenzan had that indeed. ”

“ To be sure, none of the things exhibited there, small or large, good or poor, are so-called exhibition pictures, which are often a game of artistic charlatans. In real Japanese art you should not look for variety of subjects; but when you find an astonishing richness of execution, certainly it is the time when your eyes begin to open toward another sort of asceticism in art. How glad I am that our Japanese art, at least in the olden time, never degenerated into a mechanical art! ”

“ It was the age when realism, of course, in more vague, doubtful meaning than the present usage, had completely conquered the stage, the old idealistic stage art having fallen off the pedestal. Certainly Danjuro, the first of all to be absorbed in that realism which prevailed here twenty or twenty-five years ago, did never serve the stage art for advancement, but, on the contrary, it was the realism, if anything, that cheapened, trivialised, and vulgarised the time-honoured Japanese art ”

“ Art is indeed my only world and life. Again look at the pictures. How tender, how soft, and how warm in tone and atmosphere! And how deep is the shadow of the pictures! And that deep shadow is never dirty. ”

“ We did not know until recently what meant the words realism and idealism (should we thank the Western critics?) except this: "The artist, whatever he be, idealist or realist or what not, is good when he is true to his art. I mean that technique or method of expression is secondary; even the seeming realistic picture of Oriental art is, when it is splendid, always subjective." I have many reasons to call Hiroshige an idealist or subjective artist, now playing an arbitrary art of criticism after the Western fashion, as I only see his artistic wisdom, but nothing else in his being true to Nature ”

“ When I say that Moronobu was the founder of Ukiyoye art, I mean more to call attention to the fact that the Japanese block print was well started in its development from his day, into which process the artists put all sorts of spontaneity, at once cursing creed and tradition. As for the Ukiyoye artists, I dare say their weakness in culture and imagination often turned to force; they gained artistic confidence in their own power from their complete withdrawal from polite society. ”

“ How can you place together in the same room Utamaro's women, for instance, with Millet's pictures or Carpenter's "Towards Democracy"? The atmosphere I want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain, or joy of life, that may come any moment or may not come at all. ”