ART.
THE JAPANESE EXHIBITION.
A GOOD many years ago, one of the De Goncourts solemnly recounted to the other De Goncourt their three most
memorable feats. The first was the invention of the " Human Document." The second was the appreciation either of French eighteenth-century painting, or of the exact nuance of Pommer proper to that same period. The third was the dis- covery of Japan. Since that time, British enterprise has stepped in with its usual thoroughness to work the Japanese claim of the Frenchmen. We have given the Japanese tall hats and a constitutional government, and other Western luxuries. We have had in exchange kakemonos and makintonos, The Mikado, and the Japanese Village. And, last of all, the Fine Art Society has sent out Mr. Alfred East to see what the place is really like. The result of his six months' work is the collection of one hundred and six oil and water-colour sketches now on view in Bond Street. And a charming collection they are.
Just at first the visitor may be a little put out. The whole project, indeed, savours of the underhand. It is like sending a reporter to inquire into the facts of a good story, or to describe Cloudcuckootown day by day. Your head is full of Hokusai,—or, if that is putting it too strongly, of Harry Furniss. And the pages of Punch or of the Mangwa have led you to expect an art that brings the actors up to the footlights, seizes on their gesture and expression to an extent uncommon in our still-life Western art, troubled as it is by much service to anatomy and perspective, and the rest of it. All that to the Japanese is the playful province of the writing-master, for drawing is one of the six branches of calligraphy. So again, if landscape be the subject, the author of the "Hundred Views of Fusiyama" has none of that complex habit of ours, that is partly art and partly science, that attempts to render all the scene with the indifference of Nature to this and that in it. His is an art more of human nature that is struck by one or two things, and particularises only these. Hence a landscape that is partly sense-impression, partly writing-master symbols,—as you might say in words : Here there were trees, there there were rocks, but I only wanted to carry away that flush on the The rest, as in. one's memory of a scene, is cloud, represented frankly in the Japanese drawing by intrusions of arbitrary cloud and mist. For instance, there is a splendid drawing by Hokusai of the sacred mountain Fusiyama. It expresses simply the fact that the mass of the mountain was lit for the moment blood-red at sunset, instead of being, as usual, snow-white. This colour shades offiinto the cold green of the lower belt of the hill in shadow, and some flourishes on this green convey the fact that it is the green of trees.
Now, Mr. East of course treats Japan very much as he would England. His people fall back into the scene, as people do in the street when we do not know them or follow their story. His Fusiyama keeps its relations with other objects unperturbed. Nothing jumps out at you because you have seen it with a thrill that blurred everything else. But there is this to be said : that the Japanese may go to much greater lengths in his peculiar shorthand representation of things, because, for one thing, his subjects—the hill Fusiyama, the lake Biwa, and so forth—are so well known to his own circle ; and for another, his notation itself is familiar. Mr. East gives us in many cases the filling-out, the addition of what is a gap between the: emphatic points in the Japanese drawing, and therefore supplies a most useful commentary.
But the sketches have many positive merits as well. In some cases they come curiously near the virtues of Japanese landscape, both in simplicity of means and in character of design. " It is the fault of foreign pictures," says a Japanese critic, "that they dive too deeply into realities, and preserve 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 colour." But the foreigner is learning that lesson. Of the virtues of simplicity and selection, No. 14, a burnished surface of lake, with rushes in the foreground and hills on the horizon, or No. 59, a lemon-yellow and grey sea- piece. with a few sails in view, are good examples. In the matter of design, No. 60, a sketch of trees with an angry red break of sky behind, might come straight from a fan. Others dive more deeply into reality,"—e.g., the " Rainy Day in Tokio " (No. 36). Others, once more, are valuable because they depict tea-houses and temples and feasts (the fox-shrine in No. 30 ought to excite the folk-lorist). But Mr. East's time in the country was all too short to let him go very deeply into the life of the people.
There is one feature of Mr. East's work which has almost Japanese emphasis,—the blossoms. They burst and fall in his sketches almost as thickly as in Japanese painting and poetry. And these are as full of them as 0-Plum-Blossom's garden was :—
" When for another will the blossoms blow
As once upon the trees she tended so 1' For never blossom broke on one of them But had a sonnet tied about its stem."
Other objects one misses a little that come to the front so much when the eye of the Japanese is there to see. To quote only one or two from the pages of the "Forty-nine Inspiring
Sights:—
My Lord the Crane that will outlive us all, The patient Carp that climbs the waterfall, The wondrous Ho-ho Bird that carries luck, And Happy Marriage figured by the Duck, The Dragon, emblem of the great Perhaps, The Tortoise, Slow-comes-Death-to-honest-Japs."
It is clear from Mr. East's work, as it was from Mr. Whistler's before, that the Japanese is laying a hand upon our landscape art. Perhaps in time he will teach us the delightfulness of all queer living creatures, poets of a different strain from ours. For, as Tsurayaki puts it :—" When we give expression to the sensations evoked in us by external per- caption, poetry is the result. The nightingale which sings on the bough, the frog that croaks by the pond, express each Their sentiments—and that may be counted as poetry. Thus, there is not a living thing that may not be a poet,"—except, perhaps, here and there a man.
The Fine Art Society has done us a service in showing us how Japan looks to a Londoner. Will they now do us a greater, by showing us how London looks to a Japanese ?
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