The Spirit of Japanese Art/Utamaro
UTAMARO
I feel I scent, in facing Utamaro's ladies, whether with no soul or myriad souls (certainly ladies, be they courtesans or geishas, who never bartered their own beauty and songs away), the rich-soft passionate odour of rare old roses; when I say I hear the silken-delicate summer breezes winging in the picture, I mean that the Japanese sensuousness (is it the scent or pang of a lilac or thorn?) makes my senses shiver at the last moment when it finally turns to spirituality. It was our Japanese civilisation of soul, at least in olden time under Tokugawa's regime, not to distinguish between sensuousness and spirituality, or to see at once the spiritual in the sensuous; I once wrote down as follows, upon the woman drawn by lines, or, more true to say, by the absence of lines, in snake-like litheness of attitude, I might say more subtle than Rossetti's Lillith, with such eyes only opened to see love:
"Too common to say she is the beauty of line,
However, the line old, spiritualised into odour,
(The odour soared into an everlasting ghost from life and death),
As a gossamer, the handiwork of a dream,
Tis left free as it flaps:
The lady of Utamaro's art is the beauty of zephyr flow.
I say again, the line with the breath of love,
Enwrapping my heart to be a happy prey:
Sensuous? To some so she may appear,
But her sensuousness divinised into the word of love."
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.) I feel, let me confess, almost physical pain—is it rather a joy?—through all my adoration in seeing Utamaro's women, just as when with the most beautiful women whose beauty first wounds us; I do not think it vulgarity to say that I feel blushing with them, because the true spiritualism would please to be parenthesised by bodily emphasis. 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.
I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire Utamaro and spend half an hour with his lady ("To-day I am with her in silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into the mist"), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or picture of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from Rossetti or Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere altogether) should be put aside. 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. I always think that the impersonality or the personality born out of the depth of impersonality was regarded in older Japan as the highest, most virtuous art and life; now not talking about life, but the art—Utamaro's art, the chronicle or history of the idealised harem or divan. How charming to talk with Utamaro on love and beauty in the grey soft atmosphere particularly fitting to receive him in, or to be received by him in. I would surely venture to say to him on such a rare occasion: "You had no academy or any hall of mediocrity in your own days to send your pictures to; that was fortunate, as you appealed directly to the people eventually more artistic and always just. I know that you too were once imprisoned under the accusation of obscenity; there was the criticism also in your day which saw the moral and the lesson, but not the beauty and the picture. When you say how sorry you were to part with your picture when it was done, I fully understand your artistic heart, because the picture was too much of yourself; perhaps you confessed your own love and passion too nakedly. I know that you must have been feeling uneasy or even afraid to be observed or criticised too closely."
As a certain critic remarked, the real beauty flies away like an angel whenever an intellect rushes in and begins to speak itself; the intellect, if it has anything to do, certainly likes to show up itself too much, with no consideration for the general harmony that would soon be wounded by it. Utamaro's art, let me dare say, is as I once wrote: "She is an art (let me call her so)
Hung, as a web, in the air of perfume,
Soft yet vivid, she sways in music;
(But what sadness in her saturation of life!)
Her music lives in intensity of a moment and then dies;
To her, suggestion is her life.
She is the moth-light playing on reality's dusk,
Soon to die as a savage prey of the moment;
She is a creation of surprise (let me say so),
Dancing gold on the wire of impulse."
Some one might say that Utamaro's ladies are brainless, but is it not, as I said before, that the sacrifice of individuality or personality makes them join at once with the great ghosts of universal beauty and love? "They are beautiful, because all the ghosts and spirits of all the ages and humanity of Japan speak themselves through them; it is perfectly right of him not to give any particular name to the pictures, because they are not the reflection of only one woman, but of a hundred and thousand women; besides, Utamaro must have been loving a little secrecy and mystification to play with the public's curiosity.
We have his art; that is quite enough. What do I care about his life, what he used to wear and eat, how long he slept and how many hours he worked every day; in fact, what is known as his life is extremely slight. It is said that he was a sort of hanger-on to Juzaburo Tsutaya, the well-known publisher of his day, at the house within a stone's throw of Daimon or Great Gate of Yoshiwara, the Nightless City of hired beauties and lanterns, where, the story says, Utamaro had his nightly revel of youthful days as a fatal slave to female enchantment; while we do not know whether he revelled there or not, we know that as Yoshiwara of those times was the rendezvous of beauty, good looks, and song, not all physical, but quite spiritual, we can believe that he must have wandered there for his artistic development. Indeed there was his great art beautifully achieved when he suddenly entered into idealism or dream where sensuousness and spirituality find themselves to be blood brothers or sisters. In the long history of Japanese art we see the most interesting turn in the appearance of a new personality, that is the Ukiyoye woman; and who was the artist who perfected them to the art of arts? He was Utamaro. You may abuse and criticise, if you will, their unnaturally narrow squint eyes and egg-shaped smooth face; but from the mask his woman wears I am deliciously impressed with the strange yet familiar, old but new, artistic personality. The times change, and we are becoming more intellectual, as a consequence, physically ugly; is it too sweeping or one-sided to say that? I have, however, many reasons for my wishing to see more influence of Utamaro's art.