Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/46

Rh personality was not recognised, and when an artist adopted the name of Hiroshige by merit and general consent, it meant that he grew at once incarnated with it; what use is there to talk about its second or third? I prefer to regard Hiroshige as the title of artistic merit since it has ceased in fact to be an individuality; indeed, where is the other artist, East or West, whose life-story is so little known as Hiroshige's? And I see so many pictures which, while bearing his signature, I cannot call his work, because I see them so much below the Hiroshige merit—for instance, the whole upright series of Tokaido and Yedo, and so many pictures of the "Noted Places in the Provinces of Japan"—because they are merely prose, and even as prose they often fail. But to return to this "Awa no Naruto," a piece of poem in picture, where the whirlpools of the strait, large and small, now rising and then falling in perfect rhythm, are drawn suggestively but none the less distinctly. I see in it not only the natural phenomenon of the Awa Strait, but also the symbolism of life's rise and fall, success and defeat; I was thinking for some time that I shall write a poem on it, although I could not realise it yet.

I have my own meaning when I call Hiroshige the Chinese poet. Upon my little desk here I see an old book of Chinese prosody; there is a popular Chinese verse, Hichigon Zekku, or Four