Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/20

8 natural and appropriate when traced by the brush of Utanosuke or Shiutoku. But the point to which attention may be directed is not the merits or defects of such styles for pictorial purposes so much as the fact of their accurate differentiation and faithful employment by Japanese experts. We are thus carried into a field practically unexplored by European and American artists who associate with the best line drawing no qualities other than strength, delicacy, and directness.

If again we pass from the caligraphic training of the hand to the hand itself, we are confronted by a fact which the most cursory observation confirms, namely, that nature has endowed the Japanese people with hands singularly supple and sensitive. Manual dexterity ought to characterise such a nation. If we find them wielding the artist’s brush with admirable strength and accuracy, we look also to find them revelling in microscopic elaboration of detail; if at one time they suggest a whole répertoire of facts by a few bold touches, at another they may be expected to lavish a whole mine of minutiæ upon the working out of a few facts. And so indeed it is. Side by side with sketches which astonish us by the suggestive wealth of half a dozen salient brush-strokes, we see pictures which almost eclipse the illuminated missals of mediæval times, so conscientious is their detail, so profuse their elaboration. What perplexes many students, too, is that the same brush dashes out at one moment a design of colossal boldness, and devotes itself, the next, to work of marvellous detail. Let us, by way of illustration, refer to Kanaoka and Hokusai, names very familiar to Western connoisseurs, the first because he is erroneously supposed to have laid the foundation of pictorial art in Japan, the second because, with equal error, he is imagined to stand at its pinnacle. If the average Japanese dilettante be asked to describe Kanaoka’s characteristics, he will reply, delicacy of touch, illimitable minutiæ of detail, and exquisite harmony of tints. Yet it is a fact established beyond query that the genuine works of Kanaoka show him to have been a master of noble vigour and place him incomparably above the illuminator of a missal, or the painter of a peacock’s tail. So, too, if the average American or European collector had to define Hokusai’s style, he would speak of bold outlines, of wonderfully realistic figures, and of a wealth of humorous conception. Yet there exist pictures by Hokusai which rank with the finest etching in the matter of minutiæ, and with the most delicate engraving in the matter of mechanical accuracy of line. It is scarcely possible to conceive that the laborious limner of such works can be identical with the daring artist of the Man-gwa (ten thousand sketches) or the poetical painter of the Hundred Views of Fujiyama. Some may say, perhaps, that the Japanese hand is a product of the ideograph; that the manipulation of the brush through long centuries has modified the shape of the fingers and caused a special adjustment of muscles. That is a question beyond the range of our discussion. It has concern for those that advocate the displacement of the ideographic script by the Roman alphabet, but we confine ourselves here to noticing the three