SINICO-JAPANESE ART.* IN our review (March 27th, 1886) of the
first instalment of the exhaustive account of Sinico-Japanese art which Mr. Anderson has now brought to completion, we sufficiently described its scope and object, and the praise we accorded to the portion then published is more than merited by the remainder of the work. The author has executed the great and difficult task he set him- self, with a conscientious faithfulness and minute accuracy that give a special value to this magnificently illustrated treatise, not merely as an exposition of Far-Eastern art, but as the record of a singularly interesting series of evolutional phases in the history of Oriental humanity, now for the first time with abundant learning and adequate literary skill pre- sented to the consideration of a European public. The art of Japan has suffered much during recent years from sectarian criticism, often ludicrous in its ignorance, and the great tribe of aesthetic jargon-mongers have done their best to bring it into contempt by their hyperbolical admiration of its less worthy aspects. Mr. Anderson, it need scarcely be said, is utterly free from all nonsense of this kind, and though it is difficult altogether to accept his estimate of Sinico-Japanese art as the true one, his language is never extravagant, and he neither hides nor glosses over the shortcomings and imperfec- tions of the art he deals with. It is not quite easy, indeed, to
• The Pictorial Arts of Japan. With numerous Plates. Chromodithograpbs, and Woodside, and General and Desoriptive Text. By Wm. Anderson, P.55.0.8., late Medical Officer to the British Legation, Tokio. London Bampeon Low. 1888.—Descriptins and Histmical Catahmws of a Collection of Japanese and China's Paintings in ths British Museum. By Win. Anderson, LB.0.8. Printed by order of the Trustees. London: Lougmans. 1E8a.
reconcile some of his criticisms upon the manifest failings of Far. Eastern painters with the general verdict he pronounces upon their work.
The pictorial art of China and Japan cannot be truthfully described as high, or great, or noble, in the sense in which such expressions are used in speaking of European, or even of Semitic ark The Sinico-Japanese artist has stopped at the threshold of the temple ; diffident, or faint.hearted, or blinded by tradition, he has not dared to face, or he has not seen, the radiance within, though there is much in his work that shows him to have possessed no small share of the faculty that gave their glory to the inner- most dwellers in the shrine. He knows nothing of chiaroscuro, nothing of the gradation of tones in colour, nothing of the beauty of humanity. He is never majestic, or solemn, or pathetic ; his works are without soul, and breathe neither faith nor hope. So unobservant is he, that all the beauty of the clouds has escaped him ; the strength and symmetry of mam- malian forms he has but in rare instances rendered with any approach to truth ; the manifold lights and shadows of the magnificent foliages that met him at every turn he does not even attempt to reproduce. But within certain limits, he shows an inimitable decorative faculty; in composition, he is almost always successful ; in dramatic power, so far as that depends upon the choice, pose, and position of the elements of a picture, he not seldom attains a high level of excellence ; he uses accessories to tell his story, often as skilfully as Hogarth ; and he is always graceful and fluent. A flowerful spray, a bird on the wing, a gliding reptile, or a darting fish,—these the Sinico-Japanese artist draws, or rather writes—the painter's art was known among its practitioners in the Middle Kingdom as one of the" six branches of calligraphy "—with an ease and truthfulness and sense of beauty altogether marvellous when we consider how utterly these qualities are wanting in his delineations of other natural forms, and of the human face and figure. The explanation of this apparent arrestment of power lies, in part, in the lack of courage which forbade his grappling with difficulties. He never gets beyond a sketch. He saw lights and shadows and tones ; but he was too lazy to lend his mind to the task of discovering the means of representing these effects, and was content with producing a pretty picture of monochrome harmonies and con- cordant lines. Thus the Sinico-Japauese landscape, the moment an endeavour is made to advance beyond such outline sketches as we find in the Meisho (illustrated descriptions of the pro- vinces) becomes either an indistinct " blottesque," or a com- position of shadowless valleys and lightless mountain-tops and hill.slopes, conventionalised upon Chinese models. Not that even these are without a certain beauty of their own ; but to see it we must learn the artist's language, and this is not the language of Nature. Even in its treatment of colour, the art of Japan excelled only within narrow limits, and century after century was content with dull blues, staring greens, and scarcely less repulsive purples, to do what it could to spoil the magnifi- cent combinations of yellows, browns, and reds in which it revelled.
Mr. Anderson ranks the Buddhist school as the noblest, the Chinese as displaying the most consummate calligraphic power, and the natural school as the most natural, graceful, and versatile, but showing the least culture. Motoori, on the con- trary, in a striking passage translated by Mr. Basil Chamberlain, who justly terms him "the greatest mind of modern Japan," and quoted at length by Mr. Anderson, condemns the Buddhist and Chinese painters as dishonest, pretentious, sketchy, con- ventional, and insensible to beauty,—a criticism which, severe as it is, Mr. Anderson admits to be "little open to exception." Of the natural school, including the ulciyoye, or so-called popular branch, of which Hokuni is the best-known representative. Motoori, who was the most patriotic of Japanese, and the chief of the Shinto revivalist movement that was contemporaneous with the French Revolution, speaks much more respectfully :— "Of recent years," he says, " we have witnessed the rise of a large class of artists who neither hold to the traditions of the schools, nor derive their inspiration from China, but are freely eclectic as their own taste may dictate. Thus, culling the good and rejecting the bad, they seem to be preserved from any glaring defects."
We agree on the whole with the Shintoist, except that he fails to recognise the calligraphic dexterity—but, after all, it is merely dexterity—of the Chinese school, and the peculiar but not very exalted beauty of some of the Buddhist pictures, which in aim and method resemble the works of Byzantine
and pre-Gothic Italian painters. In the treatment of drapery, and in the drawing of the human face, however, it does
not seem to ne that the best efforts of the East are com- parable with the works of Gaddi and Lorenzetti, to say nothing of Giotto and Fra Angelico. On the other hand, the peculiar fluency of the Oriental line is always present, and shows a manipulative power that is rare in the extant work of the pre-Gothic ages of Christianity. Yet, here again, what more lovely and fluent forms are to be found anywhere in the world than in the pictorial decoration of many of the archivolts of St. Mark ? And while a certain sweet benevolence characterises the repose of many a Buddhist saint-face, it is not the repose of strength but of abandonment, nor is the rapture of faith there, nor do the eyes look heavenward ; there is peace, but no solemnness. Of the Chinese school the main defect is its lack of observation, and the amount of conventional " padding " by means of whioh the artist saved himself the trouble of working out his coneeptions,—conventional trees and rocks and temples, and even great masses of "arbitrary clouds," often mere empty, tinted, rounded rectangles, with perhaps slightly crenelated borders, filling up a third or more of the picture-space, and at best giving it some decorative quality of colour. Lastly, both the Buddhist and Chinese schools are disfigured by a frequent resort to a mean grotesque, a grotesque far more ludicrous than terrible, and yet devoid of anything like humour.
No doubt, as Mr. Anderson says, the language of MM. Gonse and Daret in relation to Hokusai is exaggerated, and the painters of the popular school were less cultured than their foregoers. But the culture of the latter was merely traditional, involving no appeal to or observation of Nature; and we are not sure that the Realists were not the better for their lack of it. In the sketches of Hokusai, we see many proofs of his fidelity to his surroundings ; he expressed his age, imperfectly, it is trim, but through want of science, not through want of power. And this the other schools failed to do; they were antiquarian and lifeless, regarding men after the impersonal Turanian fashion as mere things. Holcusai, Yosai, and others, on the contrary, regarded men as human beings, possessed of desires and passions, hopes and fears, and sought so to learn them. The Realists are true "impressionists," which the Chinese painters never became ; and if less fluent than their predecessors, did not yield to them —nay, rather surpassed them—in the treatment of colour, while they were infinitely more earnest in work and purpose. In a word, they aimed at representation without neglecting decoration; the Buddhist and Chinese painters rather subordi- nated representation to decoration.
Up to the present time, the art of Japan has Buffeted rather than benefited by contact with the imported civilisation of the West. Its methods and aims are so utterly diverse from those of European art, that its ability to subsist by the side of the latter is open to doubt. That the Japanese as a race have a keen artistic faculty, is certain; whether this will enable them to excel in a kind of art differing tots ado from their own in history, antecedents, and surroundings, and having a totally different public to please and satisfy, is much less so. In artistic small wares, their craftsmanship will probably permit of their maintaining a sort of supremacy. But the present writer cannot but believe that with the death of Kikuchi Yosai in 1878, the art of the Far East practically, in its pure form at all events, came to an end. It may be added that Japanese art has exercised a bad influence in Europe, for reasons analogous to those which have led to its degeneration in Japan.
We wish we had space to follow Mr. Anderson into his short but interesting summary of Chinese art. He shows clearly, and he has been the first to show it, somewhat to the surprise, and perhaps disgust, of the Japanese, that the art of the Buddhist and Chinese schools is nothing bat the art of China repeated in Japan ; and even that that of the Realists is so, in method almost wholly, and in aim to a certain but much less extent. In fact, the whole civilisation of old Japan, its literature, science, philosophy, its very myths, are Chinese ; even the vocabulary of its language is so, and the Chinese element tends to increase rather than diminish. To this day, a clothier's shop is known in Japan as a " Go-fnku-ya," that is, a shop for Wu (Go), or Chinese clothing.
The Catalogue repeats, in somewhat terser form, the sub- stance of the Pictorial Arts, but contains in addition a most interesting account of the principal motives of the pictures acquired by the British Museum. It is furnished with an index
of the names of some three thousand artists, the immense majority of whom pursued art mainly as a handicraft, practised. very much after a sort of hereditary fashion, or in a kind of scholastic succession, which perhaps explains the lack of obser- vation and of progress that has characterised Sinico-japanese art up to late in the last century.
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