Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/49



art of Gaho (Hashimoto's nom-de-plume, signifying the "Kingdom Refined") is not to discard form and detail, as is often the case with the artists of the "Japanese school," while they soar into the grey-tinted vision of tone and atmosphere. His conventionalism—remember that he started his artist's life as a student of the Kano school, whose absurd classicism, arresting the germ of development, invited its own ruin—was not an enemy for him by any means. With the magic of his own alchemy he turned it into a transcendental beauty, bearing the dignity of artistic authority. I am sure he must have been glad to have the conventionalism for his magic to work on afterward; and when he left it, it seems to me, he looked back to it with a reminiscence of sad longing. Conventionalism is not bad when it does not dazzle. To make it suggestive is an achievement. To speak of Gaho's individuality in his pictures does no justice to him. His thought and conception are the highest, and at the least different from many Rh