HE above title is quoted from the work of M. Edmond de Goncourt, “as one having authority,” there being many claimants to the leadership of Ukiyo-ye (the floating world), the Popular School of Japanese Art. In the life of Utamaro, M. de Goncourt, in exquisite language and with analytical skill, has interpreted for us the meaning of that form of Japanese art which found its chief expression in the use of the wooden block for colour-printing, and to glance appreciatively at the work of both artist and author is the motive of this sketch.
The Ukiyo-ye print, despised by the haughty Japanese aristocracy, became the vehicle of art for the common people of Japan, and the names of the artists who aided in its development are familiarly quoted in every studio, whilst the classic painters of “Tosa” and “Kano” are comparatively rarely mentioned. The consensus of opinion in Japan during the lifetime of Utamaro agrees with the verdict of M. de Goncourt. No artist was more popular. His atelier was besieged by editors giving orders, and in the country his works were eagerly sought after, when those of his famous contemporary, Toyokuni, were but little known. In the “Barque of Utamaro,” a famous surimono, the title of which forms a pretty play upon words, maro being the Japanese for vessel, the seal of supremacy is set upon the artist. Here he is represented as holding court in a gaily decorated barge, surrounded by a bevy of beauty paying homage to his genius. He was essentially the painter of women, and though M. de Goncourt sets forth his astonishing versatility, he yet entitles his work, “Outamaro, le Peintre des Maisons Vertes.”
The beautiful inhabitants of these celebrated houses of the Yoshiwara (the flower quarter) of Yedo had ever been sought as models by the artists of Ukiyo-ye. But, alas! the sensuous poetic-artistic temperament of Utamaro, undisciplined and uncontrolled, led to his undoing. The pleasure-loving artist, recognizing no creed but the worship of beauty, refusing to be bound by any fetters but those of fancy, fell at last into the lowest depths of degradation, physical and moral. And this debasement of their leader, tainting his art, was reflected in the work of his brother artists and hastened the decadence of the Popular School.
To understand the influences which sapped the self-control of the gay and beauty-loving Utamaro, we have only to glance at the text by Jipensha Ikkou of “The Annuary of the Green Houses,” two volumes of prints in colour, so marvellously beautiful that they caused the artist to be recognized as, in a sense, the official painter of the Yoshiwara. The writer thus sums up the fatal fascination of the inmates, the courtesans of highest rank, who alone were depicted by Utamaro. “The daughters of the Yoshiwara are brought up like princesses. From infancy they are given the most finished education” (from the Japanese standpoint, be it observed). “They are taught reading, writing, art, music, le thé, le parfum” (in the game of scents, the art is to guess by inhaling the odour of burning perfumes the secret of their composition). “Their entourage is that of princesses, brought up in the seclusion of the palace. Coming from all parts of the ‘Land of the Rising Sun,’ they must discard their individual patois and learn to speak the archaic tongue, slightly modified, the poetical, the noble language of the court from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.”
In the home of the celebrated Tsutaya Juzabro, who edited the most beautiful books of the time, in his early impressionable youth lived Utamaro, within a stone’s throw of the great gate leading to the Yoshiwara. By day he devoted himself to his art, by night he surrendered himself to the fatal enchantment of that brilliant “Underworld,” until, like Merlin, ensnared by Vivian, with the charm of “woven paces and waving hands,” his art sapped by excesses, he became “lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.”
Let us, forgetting this sad sequel, glance at the works which testify to the life of high artistic endeavour led by Utamaro in the early part of his career. In the preface to the “Yehon Moushi Yerabi” (Chosen Insects), the master of Utamaro, Toriyama Sekiyen, throws so charming a sidelight upon the youth of the artist, that the temptation to quote is irresistible. The value of these Japanese prefaces to the world, to workers in every field, is incalculable. At the outset of his work, M. de Goncourt alludes to the well-known preface of Hokusai in the “Fugaku Hiak’kei,” and doubtless fortified himself by the stimulating example of the old master, when undertaking at the age of seventy the great task of presenting to the Western world, under the title of “L’Art Japonais,” a history of five noted painters, besides that of other artists in bronze and lacquer, pottery and iron—artists in a land where the terms artist and artisan are interchangeable, the only country where art industrial almost always touches grand art.
The translator of the preface of Sekiyen is gratefully referred to by M. de Goncourt as “l’intelligent, le savant, l’aimable M. Hyashi.” It may be considered a revolutionary manifesto of the Profane School, the school of real life, in opposition to the hierarchical Buddhist academies of Kano and Tosa, which had become stultified by tradition and stifled by conventional observances.
“Préface écrite par Toriyama Sekiyen, le maître d’Outamaro, célébrant le naturisme (sorti du cœur) de son petit, de son cher élève Outa.” “Reproduire la vie par le cœur, et en dessiner la structure au pinceau, est la loi de la peinture. L’étude que vient de publier maintenant, mon élève Outamaro, reproduit la vie même du monde des insectes. C’est la vraie peinture du cœur. Et quand je me souviens d’autrefois, je me rappelle que dès l’enfance, le petit Outa, observait le plus infini détail des choses. Ainsi à l’automne, quand il était dans le jardin, il se mettait en chasse des insectes, et que ce soit un criquet où une sauterelle, avait-il fait une prise, il gardait la bestiole dans sa main et s’amusait à l’étudier. Et combien de fois je l’ai grondé dans l’appréhension qu’il ne prenne l’habitude, de donner la mort à des êtres vivants. Maintenant qu’il a acquis son grand talent du pinceau, il fait de ces études d’insectes, la gloire de sa profession.”
The enthusiastic master of le petit Outa proceeds to rhapsodize upon his pupil’s genius and intimate knowledge of the structure of insects. “He makes us hear,” he says, “the shrilling of the tamamoushi,” the cicada of Japan, whose endless peevish twanging upon one string forms an underlying accompaniment to the harmonies of long summer days. “He borrows the light weapons of the grasshopper for making war; he exhibits the dexterity of the earthworm, boring the soil under the foundations of old buildings; he penetrates the mysteries of nature in the groping of the larvæ, in the lighting of his path by the glow-worm, and he ends by disentangling the end of the thread of the spider’s web.”
The colour-printing of these insects is a miracle of art, says M. de Goncourt, and there is nothing comparable to it in Europe. Of the methods by which these colour prints are brought to such a height of perfection, it is almost impossible to speak authoritatively. They are the result of a threefold combination: of a paper marvellously prepared from the bark of the shrub, Kozo, diluted with the milk of rice flour and a gummy decoction extracted from the roots of the hydrangea and hibiscus; of dyes, into the secret of whose alchemy no modern artist can penetrate, it being safe to say the early “Tan-ye” and “Beni-ye” prints can never be reproduced; of the application of those colours by the master engraver’s fingers—that wizard hand of the Orient into whose finger-tips are distilled the mysteries of bygone centuries. A portion of the colour by means of this calculated pressure is drunk, absorbed into the paper, and only the transparency is left vibrating upon the fibres, like colour beneath the glaze.
The “Catalogue Raisonné” of M. de Goncourt is a prose masterpiece. His descriptive touches, like pastels set in jewels, captivate the imagination. Through him we see the albums, the fans, the kakemonos, the surimonos. Oh, the prints, with their wondrous backgrounds, the delight of Utamaro! Sometimes straw-yellow, the uniformity broken with clouds of ground mica; sometimes gray in tint, like the traces of receding waves upon the beach. Some silvered backgrounds throw moonlight reflections upon the figures; some are sombre, bizarre—all are marvellous beyond words. And the colours! we cannot define them in English. The “bleus” (malades des mauves), the “rose” (beni) “si peu de rose, qu’ils semblent s’apercevoir à travers un tulle; l’azur—délavé, et comme noyé dans l’eau,”—not colours, but nuances, which recall the colours. And the “Gauffrage,” so effective with the print artists, with us a mere confectioner’s touch!
It is said that “the æsthetic temperament of a nation is most subtly felt in the use of colour. Purity, coldness, sensuality, brightness, dullness of tints, are significant terms correlated to mental and physical human phenomena.” The assertion of Ruskin, that “the bodily system is in a healthy state when we can see hues clearly in their most delicate tints, and enjoy them, fully and simply, with the kind of enjoyment children have in eating sweet things,” is brought to mind in viewing the Japanese people upon the occasion of one of their great flower fêtes, feasting their eyes upon cherry blooms or trailing clusters of the wistaria.
Utamaro planned schemes of colour and devised harmonies—themes which, improvised upon and endlessly imitated by his artist confrères, filled his own countrymen with delight and ravished the hearts of Parisian painters. The influence of Utamaro, Hiroshige and the other masters of Ukiyo-ye revolutionized the colour-sense of the art world, so that Theodore Child, writing in 1892, remarks of the Japanese influence: “The Paris Salon of today as compared with the salon of ten years ago is like a May morning compared with a dark November day.”
The same keen observation and technical skill which would have made Utamaro a famous naturalist is shown in his marvellous studies of women. He was the first Japanese artist who deviated from the traditional manner of treating the face. The academic style demanded the nose to be suggested by one calligraphic, aquiline stroke, the eyes to be mere slits, the mouth the curled up petal of a flower. Utamaro blent with this convention, so little human, a mutinous grace, a spiritual comprehension; he kept the consecrated lines, but made them approach the human. These “effigies of women” became individuals; in one word, he is an idealist, he “makes a goddess out of a courtesan.” No detail of her anatomy escapes his eye, no grace of line or beauty of contour. M. de Goncourt, in detailing the great prints of Utamaro, transports us to the Orient. He unrolls the film of memory, so that again the Japanese woman stands, reclines, and lives before us.
“Vous avez la Japonaise en tous les mouvements intimes de son corps; vous l’avez, dans ses appuiements de tête, sur le dos de sa main, quand elle réfléchit, dans ses agenouillements, les paumes de ses mains appuyées sur les cuisses, quand elle écoute, dans sa parole, jetée de côté, la tête un peu tournée, et qui la montre dans les aspects si joliment fuyants d’un profil perdu; vous l’avez dans sa contemplation amoureuse des fleurs qu’elle regarde aplatie à terre; vous l’avez dans ses renversements où légèrement elle pose, à demi assise, sur la balustrade d’un balcon; vous l’avez dans ses lectures, où elle lit dans le volume, tout près de ses yeux, les deux coudes appuyés sur ses genoux; vous l’avez dans sa toilette qu’elle fait avec une main tenant devant elle, son petit miroir de métal, tandis que de l’autre main passée derrière elle, elle se caresse distraitement la nuque de son écran; vous l’avez dans le contournement de sa main autour d’une coupe de saké, dans l’attouchement délicat et recroquevillé de ses doigts de singe, autour des laques, des porcelaines, des petits objets artistiques de son pays; vous l’avez enfin, la femme de l’Empire-du-Lever-du-Soleil, en sa grâce languide, et son coquet rampement sur les nattes du parquet.”
To translate is to travesty, for the French language seems to be the only medium through which can be filtered the nuances of Japanese thought, which elude the ordinary elements of language, like the perfume of flowers, the bouquet of delicate vintages. Our blunt Anglo-Saxon mars that picture language, where one flexible, curved calligraphic stroke conveys to the æsthetically receptive oriental imagination what stanzas of rhyming rhapsody fail to define. Sir Edwin Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn approach the French, are, so to speak, orientalized. Ordinary English fails to give a Japanese equivalent. It is too emphatic, too objective; it suggests the dominant British hobnail upon the delicate Tea-house tatami—that immaculate, beautiful matting, into whose uniform lines embroidered draperies dissolve deliciously. Oh, those dreams of dresses!—the warp and woof of the visions of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, of Harunobu and Kiyonaga, Toyokuni and Kunisada, and all the rest, the idols of Parisian colourists!
“For us,” says M. de Goncourt, “Utamaro painted violet dresses, where, upon the border, degradation rosée” (fading into Beni, that mystic tint, the spirit of ashes of rose), “birds are swooping,—violet dresses, across which woven in light, zigzag insect characters, composing the Japanese alphabet,—violet dresses, where Corean lions, grim and ferocious, crouch, gleaming in shading of old bronze within the purple folds! Dresses of mauve, smoky, shading into bistre, where the purple iris unsheathes its head from the slender gray-green stalk!” Mourasiki-ya (maison mauve) was the name of the atelier of Utamaro. “Robes of that milky blue the Chinese call ‘blue of the sky after the rain,’ beneath clusters of pale rose peonies; dresses of silvery gray, fretted with sprays of flowering shrubs, making a misty moonshine; pea-green dresses, enamelled with rosy cherry blooms; green dresses, fading into watery tints, hidden by groups of the pawlonia, the coat of arms of the reigning family; purple costumes, channelled with water courses, where mandarin ducks pursue each other around the hem. Oh, the beautiful black backgrounds, controlling the scintillating mass of colour! Black robes sown with chrysanthemums, or showered with pine-needles, worked in white. Black dresses, where finely woven baskets are mingled with sceptres of office! ‘Oh! les belles robes!’ he cries, where flights of cranes dissolve into the distance, where birds are fluttering, where lacy fretwork of fans and little garlands are interwoven!—a motive delighted in by Utamaro as a framework for beloved faces.” All that is beautiful in nature and art lived and breathed in these dresses, upon which the loving hand of the painter left a grace in every fold.
The early inspirer of Utamaro’s genius was Kiyonaga, who had restored the glory of the school of Torii—the printer’s branch of Ukiyo-ye, which had sunk into temporary oblivion under the waning powers of Kiyomitsu. The atelier of Kiyonaga became the sanctuary of the artists of Ukiyo-ye, who, upon entering, forsook their individual traditions. There worshipped Toyokuni of Utagawa; Yeishi, the scion of classic and aristocratic Kano; and at the master’s feet sat the Young Utamaro, absorbing his methods until, in his early compositions, said M. de Goncourt, the technique and mannerisms of Kiyonaga “saute aux yeux.”
The influence of Kiyonaga pervades his most beautiful work; but later, under a life of constant self-indulgence, amongst associations all tending to demoralization, his genius suffered an eclipse. His loss of self-control affected his art, until the sweeping lines and noble contours which his brush had acquired in the atelier of Kiyonaga were lost or widely travestied into a “delirium of female tallness.” In these wild flights his brother artists followed in headlong pursuit, and the contagion of the movement swept the studios of Paris. In the modern poster we see the degenerate offspring of the genius of Utamaro, and of Toyokuni. Professor Fenollosa said, “The generation of Aubrey Beardsley prefer these tricks to the sober grace of Harunobu, Kiyonaga and Koriusai.” It is art born of excess, a “Zolaism in prints.”
The horrors of diseased imagination, the visions begotten of absinthe, which blot the brilliant pages of De Maupassant and the verse of Paul Verlaine, were reflected by Utamaro in his studies of the loathsome and the abnormal, where Montaigne declares, “L’esprit faisant le cheval eschappé, enfante des chimères.” The blasphemous impieties of this culte, deplored by all true Frenchmen, in the country of Hugo and Molière, were distanced by Utamaro, who suborned his art, his cynical brush caricaturing under the distorted figures of noted courtesans the saints and sages of the sacred Buddhist legends. Trading upon his vast popularity, he issued a pictorial satire upon one of the famous Shoguns, but this act of lèse-majesté brought him into disfavour with the reigning Shogun, the Louis XV of Japan, an artistic voluptuary, like his prototype, the subject of Utamaro’s cartoon, and the artist was condemned and cast into prison. From his cell the gay butterfly of the Yoshiwara emerged, spent and enfeebled, daring no more flights of fancy, and dying in 1806, before he reached his fiftieth year, from the effects of his confinement and the misuse of pleasure.
Oh, the pity of it! the profound pathos in the picture, in Sekiyen’s preface of the little “Outa” holding his treasured prize, “la petite bestiole,”—the childish artist-hands of the embryo master clasping the insect so gently to preserve its ephemeral life, yet later plunging into the dissipation and excesses which shortened his own. Living with the déclassé, however we may gloss their imperfections and cover with the cloak of charity their sorrowful calling, he became himself a cynic, an outcast, an iconoclast, learning that “hardening of the heart which brings
“Irreverence for the dreams of youth.”
Though Utamaro was one of the greatest of the popular artists, his demoralization led to the decadence of his school, which later was regenerated by the great master of Ukiyo-ye, Hokusai, the artist of the people. In Hokusai, “Dreaming the things of Heaven and of Buddha,” breathed the pure spirit of art,—that Spirit of poetry and purity which calls to us in Milton’s immortal lines: