Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/39

34 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