HE Nen-go of Genroku, from 1688 to 1703, was that period of incomparable glory which the Japanese revere as the French do the time of Louis the Fourteenth. Peace had long reigned and art flourished under the fostering care of the Tokugawa Shoguns.

Then lived the great worker in lacquer, Korin, pupil of Sotatsu, the flower painter, unrivalled artists who had absorbed the secrets of both Kano and Tosa. Itcho, the grand colourist, flourished, and Kenzan, brother of Korin, the “Exponent in pottery decoration of the Korin School.”

Yedo, the new capital of the usurping Tokugawas, now became the Mecca of genius, rivalling the ancient metropolis Kyoto, for the great Shoguns encouraged art in all forms, not disdaining to enroll themselves as pupils to the masters in painting and lacquer. The greatest ruler became one of the greatest artists, even assuming the art title of Sendai Shogun. In this age the height of perfection was reached in metal work, both chased and cast.

“The sword is the soul of the Samurai,” says the old Japanese motto, therefore its decoration and adornment was a sacred service to which genius delighted to dedicate itself. In Japan the greatest artists were sometimes carvers and painters and workers in metals in one, and suggest comparison with the European masters of two centuries earlier. Did not Botticelli take his name from the goldsmith for whom he worked, and Leonardo da Vinci began his art life by “twisting metal screens for the tombs of the Medici”? Later we see him playing before his patron, Francesco, in Milan, upon that weird silver harp he had himself constructed, till at last, perfected in art, he projected upon canvas the Mona Lisa, that “realization of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”

Also in Japan, as in Europe, the genius of the nation was consecrated to the dead. More than half of Michelangelo’s life was devoted to the decoration of tombs, and the shrines of the Shoguns are the greatest art monuments in Japan. Preoccupation with graves perhaps enabled the Japanese to face death so readily, even embracing it upon the slightest pretext.

Genroku was the acme of the age of chivalry. Its tales of deadly duels and fierce vendettas are the delight of the nation. The history of the Forty-seven Ronin equals any mediæval tale of bloodthirsty vengeance and feudal devotion. This Japanese vendetta of the seventeenth century is still re-enacted upon the stage, and remains the most popular drama of the day, and the actor designers of Torii ever delighted in it as a subject for illustration. A brief outline of the story may be of interest and serve to recall its charming interpretation by Mitford.

The cause of this famous drama of vendetta was the avarice of Kotsuki-no-Suke, a courtier of the Shogun at Yedo who might have served as prototype for “Pooh Bah,” in Gilbert’s clever burlesque. This pompous official was detailed to receive at his castle and instruct in court etiquette two provincial noblemen, to whom had been assigned the onerous task of entertaining the Mikado’s envoy from Kyoto. In return for this tutelage they duly sent many gifts to Kotsuki-no-Suke, but not costly enough to gratify the rapacity of the Gilbertian minister, who day by day became more insufferably arrogant, not having been “sufficiently insulted.”

Then a counsellor of one of these great lords, being wise in his generation, and fearing for his master’s safety, rode at midnight to the castle of the greedy official, leaving a present or bribe of a thousand pieces of silver. This generous donation had the desired effect.

“You have come early to court, my lord,” was the suave welcome the unconscious nobleman received the next morning. “I shall have the honour of calling your attention to several points of etiquette today.” The next moment the countenance of Kotsuki-no-Suke clouded, and, turning haughtily toward his other pupil from whom no largesse had been received, he cried, “Here, my lord of Takumi, be so good as to tie for me the ribbon of my sock,” adding under his breath, “boor of the provinces.”

“Stop, my lord!” cried Takumi-no-Kami, and, drawing his dirk, he flung it at the insolent nobleman’s head. Then a great tumult arose. His court cap had saved from death Kotsuki-no-Suke, and he fled from the spot, whilst Takumi-no-Kami was arrested, and to divert the disgrace of being beheaded, hastily performed hari-kiri; his goods and castle were confiscated and his retainers became Ronin (literally “Wave Men”), cast adrift to follow their fortunes, roving at will.

The vendetta, sworn to and carried out by these forty-seven faithful servants, is the sequel of the story. Oishi Kuranosuki, the chief of the Ronin, planned the scheme of revenge. To put Kotsuki-no-Suke off his guard, the band dispersed, many of them under the disguise of workmen taking service in the yashiki of their enemy in order to become familiar with the interior of the fortification.

Meanwhile Kuranosuki, to further mislead his enemies, plunged into a life of wild dissipation, until Kotsuki-no-Suke, hearing of his excesses, relaxed his own vigilance, only keeping half the guard he had at first appointed. The wife and friends of Kuranosuki were greatly grieved at his loose conduct, for he took nobody into his confidence. Even a man from Satsuma, seeing him lying drunk in the open street, dared to kick his body, muttering, “Faithless beast, thou givest thyself up to women and wine, thou art unworthy of the name of a Samurai.”

But Kuranosuki endured the contumely, biding his time, and at last, in the winter of the following year, when the ground was white with snow, the carefully planned assault was successfully attempted. The castle of Kotsuki-no-Suke was taken, but what was the consternation of the brave Ronin, when, after a prolonged search, they failed to discover their victim! In despair, they were about to despatch themselves, in accordance with their severe code of honour, when Kuranosuki, pushing aside a hanging picture, discovered a secret courtyard. There, hidden behind some sacks of charcoal, they found their enemy, and dragged him out, trembling with cold and terror, clad in his costly nightrobe of embroidered white satin. Then humbly kneeling, Oishi Kuranosuki thus addressed him: “My lord, we beseech you to perform Seppuku (happy despatch). I shall have the honour to act as your lordship’s second, and when, with all humility, I shall have received your lordship’s head, it is my intention to lay it as an offering upon the grave of our master, Asano-Takumi-no-Kami.” Unfortunately, the carefully planned programme of the Ronin failed to recommend itself to Kotsuki-no-Suke, and he declined their polite invitation to disembowel himself, whereupon Kuranosuki at one stroke cut off the craven head, with the blade used by his master in taking his own life.

So in solemn procession the Forty-seven Ronin, bearing their enemy’s head, approached the Temple of Sengakuji, where they were met by the abbot of the monastery, who led them to their master’s tomb. There, after washing in water, they laid it, thus accomplishing the vendetta; then praying for decent burial and for masses, they took their own lives.

Thus ended the tragic story, and visitors to the temple are still shown the receipt given by the retainers of the son of Kotsuki-no-Suke for the head of their lord’s father, returned to them by the priest of Sengakuji. Surely it is one of the weirdest relics to take in one’s hand, this memorandum, the simple wording of which but adds to its horror:

Item—One head.

Item—One paper parcel, and then the signatures of the two retainers beneath.

Another manuscript is also shown, in which the Ronin addressed their departed lord, laying it upon his tomb. It is translated thus by Mitford:

“The fifteenth year of Genroku, the twelfth month, and fifteenth day. We have come this day to do homage here, forty-seven men in all, from Oishi Kuranosuki, down to the foot soldier, Terasaka Kichiyemon, all cheerfully about to lay down our lives on your behalf. We reverently announce this to the honoured spirit of our dead master. On the fourteenth day of the third month of last year our honoured master was pleased to attack Kira-Kotsuki-no-Suke, for what reason we know not. Our honoured master put an end to his own life, but Kotsuki-no-Suke lived. Although we fear that after the decree issued by the Government, this plot of ours will be displeasing to our master, still we who have eaten of your food could not without blushing repeat the verse, ‘Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth with the enemy of thy father or lord,’ nor could we have dared to leave hell and present ourselves before you in paradise, unless we had carried out the vengeance which you began. Every day that we waited seemed as three autumns to us. Verily we have trodden the snow for one day, nay for two days, and have tasted food but once. The old and decrepit, the sick and ailing, have come forth gladly to lay down their lives. Having taken counsel together last night, we have escorted my lord, Kotsuki-no-Suke, hither to your tomb. This dirk by which our honoured lord set great store last year, and entrusted to our care, we now bring back. If your noble spirit be now present before this tomb, we pray you as a sign to take the dirk, and striking the head of your enemy with it a second time to dispel your hatred forever. This is the respectful statement of forty-seven men.”

There were forty-seven Ronin. Why, then, do forty-eight tomb-stones stand beneath the cedars at Sengakuji? Truly the answer has caused tears to fall from the eyes of many a visiting pilgrim, for the forty-eighth tomb holds the body of the Satsuma man, who in an agony of grief and remorse ended his life, and was buried beside the hero, whose body he had scornfully trampled upon in the streets of sacred Kyoto.

This history of the Forty-seven Ronin is an epitome of Japanese ethics, for in it is exemplified their feudal devotion, their severe code of honour, their distorted vision of duty and fealty to a superior, justifying the most lawless acts. Thus the conduct of Kuranosuki during his wild year of reckless abandonment, in which he threw off all moral restraint in order to deceive his enemy, breaking the heart of his faithful and devoted wife, was considered by his countrymen meritorious and a proof of his devotion. The Ukiyo-ye artists, who loved to take for models the beautiful denizens of the “Under World,” chose this obsession of Kuranosuki as the subject for many of their illustrations, so that at a first glance the series might almost be mistaken for scenes from the life of the Yoshiwara.

Here and there, however, we come across the Ronin engaged in terrific conflict with Kotsuki-no-Suke’s retainers. Cruel and bloodthirsty are the blades of their relentless katanas, which once unsheathed must be slaked in human blood, and their garments, slashed into stiletto-like points of inky blackness, forming a chevaux de frise round their fierce faces, seem scintillant with the spirit of vendetta.

In examining the sets of impressions, illustrating the popular story, it is hard to give preference to any special artist: to choose between the Utamaro-like violets and greens of Yeisen; the rich dark tints and fine backgrounds of Kunisada; the delicately massed detail of Toyokuni, unlike the usual boldness of his style, and the varied sword-play of the versatile Hiroshige, set in a frosted, snowy landscape. Hokusai, who abjured theatrical subjects after breaking away from the tutelage of Shunsho, published a series of prints illustrating the famous vendetta, but as his great-grandfather had been a retainer of Kotsuki-no-Suke, losing his life during the midnight attack, the story formed part of his ancestral history. The series is signed Kako, and the sweeping lines and contours of the female figures show the Kiyonaga influence. Yellow preponderates, outlining the buildings and long interior vistas, and the impressions are framed with a singular convention of Hokusai at that period, drifting cloud effects in delicate pink. Utamaro also illustrated the story, substituting for the Ronin the forms of women, a favourite conceit of the artist of beauty.

This digression in favour of the masters of the Popular School has carried us over a hundred years, and we must return to the close of the seventeenth century. Moronobu illustrated the carnival of Genroku, but toward the end of the century, under the domination of a Shogun who combined the qualities of extravagance and profligacy with the delirious superstition of a Louis the Eleventh, a period of unbridled license set in. The military men, who were the nation’s models, forgot their fine traditions and fell from their estate, so that the latter manners and customs of Genroku became a by-word. Then followed a puritanical reaction. Under the eighth Shogun, the knights were restricted from attending the theatre, just coming into favour, and the looser haunts of pleasure were strictly under ban. The Ukiyo-ye print, being the medium for illustrating these joys and pleasures, forbidden to the great, but still indulged in by the people, was strictly condemned, and to this day the aristocracy of Japan accord but grudging and unwilling recognition to the merits of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, the old caste prejudice still blinding their artistic sense.

At this stage Ukiyo-ye broke into rival schools, the founders of both belonging to the academy of Hishigawa Moronobu. The leader of the first, the school of painting, was Miyagawa Choshun, who in order to preserve aristocratic patronage and praise, eschewed the use of the printing-block, still taking his subjects from the “floating world,” and so being in one sense at unity with the other branch, that of printing founded by Kiyonobu, the first master of the great Torii School. As the Print artists are our subject matter we cannot follow the other branch of Ukiyo-ye, founded by Miyagawa Choshun, but leaving the atelier of the painters, we must devote ourselves to the fortunes of the Torii School, the laboratory of the Ukiyo-ye print, working parallel with the pictorial school for the first half of the eighteenth century.

The first sheets of Kiyonobu (about 1710), the founder of the Torii School, were printed in ink from a single block. Part of the edition would be issued in this uncoloured form, the rest being coloured by hand. The colours most used were olive and orange, these prints being called Tan-ye, whilst those in ink were named Sumi-ye. Urishi-ye (lacquer pictures), was the generic term for hand-painted prints. Beni-ye (literally red pictures), followed the Urishi-ye. They were printed in two tones, rose and pale green, enforced by black, a harmony exquisite in delicacy. The use of the multiple colour blocks gave rise to the title Nishiki-ye, or brocade paintings. The national mania for the stage induced Kiyonobu and his followers to take for their subjects popular actors, and the theatrical poster may be said to date from the decade following Genroku.

Later in the century the process of colour-printing by the substitution of blocks for flat colours was gradually evolved, and to no special artist or engraver can the credit be given, for all contributed to its development, though the genius of Suzuki Harunobu drew to a focus in 1765 the achievements of his brother artists, and it was he who solved the problem of uniting the skill of the engraver with the full palette of Miyagawa Choshun and his follower Shunsui, thus uniting the two branches of Ukiyo-ye art.

The Popular School, however, is bound up with print development. Japanese book illustration and single-sheet printing revolutionized the world’s art. The great connoisseurs of colour tell us that nowhere else is anything like it, so rich and so full, that a print comes to have every quality of a complete painting.

The other leaders of the Torii School were Torii Kiyomasu and Okumura Masanobu, namesake of the great founder of Kano, who must not be confounded with the later artist of the same name, belonging to the school of Kitao. Masanobu deserves special mention, for his style being chiefly pictorial, and his subjects not confined to the stage, he formed a link between the painter’s atelier and his own.

He realized that book prints rather than actor prints ought to be the most potent force of Ukiyo-ye.

Shigenaga followed in the footsteps of Masanobu, but his fame is eclipsed by that of his great pupil Harunobu, whose genius was displayed not only by the introduction of new colours upon the printing-block, but by his schemes of arrangement, juxtaposition of shades, and marvellous handling of the areas between the printed outlines. This restriction of measured spaces does not cramp the painter’s individuality and sweep of brush; rather, they set him free to concentrate his genius upon blended harmonies, and interwoven schemes of colour, and to surrender himself to the intoxication of the palette.

Suzuki Harunobu revolutionized the status of the Popular School, pronouncing this dictum, “Though I am a worker in prints I shall hereafter style myself ‘Yamato Yeishi,’” the title assumed by the ancient court painters. A national painter he declared himself, let him deny who dare, working through the new medium of the despised and ostracized Ukiyo-ye print from which he determined to remove the stigma of vulgarity.

Now we see a strange transposition in the aims of the popular artists. Harunobu, though a pupil of Shigenaga, the printer, took for his models the subjects of the painter Shunsui, successor to Miyagawa Choshun, and by rejecting stage motives discarded the Torii tradition. From Shunsui, Harunobu borrowed the ineffable grace and refinement which breathe from the forms of his women, from the painter he stole colour harmonies and designs with landscape backgrounds, which the Torii School had hitherto ignored. The introduction of genre painting, though attributed by Walter Pater to Giorgione, applies equally to the work of Harunobu and his follower Koriusai. “He is the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion nor of allegorical or historical teaching: little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape, morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon and idealized till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. People may move those spaces of cunningly blent colour readily and take them with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be used at will as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence into one’s cabinet, and like persons live with us for a day or a lifetime.” Must not such an influence have descended upon Whistler when, saturated with the atmosphere of Hiroshige, he imagined that most beautiful of his “Nocturnes” described by Theodore Child as “a vision in form and colour, in luminous air, a Japanese fancy realized on the banks of the gray Thames”?