Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/51

46 blasphemy against Nature. In that respect he is the humblest artist, and at the same time his humility is his own pride. Indeed, it is only through humility you are admitted to step into the inner shrine of Nature. Art for Gaho was not the matter of a piece of silk and Chinese ink, but a sacred thing. And to be an artist is a life's greatest triumph, and I am sure that Gaho was that.

I have been for some long time suspecting the nature of development of artistic appreciation of the Western mind, when only Hokusai's and Hiroshige's pictures, let me say, of red and green in tone of conception, called its special attention, and I even thought that our Japanese art, with the silence of blue and grey, would be perfectly beyond its power of reach. When Nature soars higher, she turns at once to the depth of dreams, whose voice is silence. To express the grey stillness of atmosphere and tone is the highest art, at least, to the Japanese mind. Not only in the picture, but in the "tea house" or incense ceremony, or in the garden, the appreciation of silence is the highest esthetics. It gives you a strong but never abrupt thrill of the delight which is nobly touched by the hands of sadness, and lets you lose yourself in it, and slowly grasp something you may be glad to call ideal. And the same sensation you can entertain from Gaho's art, which you might think to be reminiscent