Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/52

Rh of a certain artistic paradise or Horai, the blest—one of his favourite subjects—enwrapped in silent air. You may call it idealism if you will, but it was nothing for him but the realisation. While you think it was his fancy, he saw it with his own naked eyes. It is true that he had been delivered from idealism. And I should say that dream, too, is not less real than you and I.

He never jars you. His art is a grey ghost of melody born from the bosom of depth and distance, like a far-off mountain. And it gives you a thrill of large space that binds you with eternity, and you will understand that what you call reality is nothing but a shiver of impulse of great Nature. His art, indeed, is the highest art of Japan, which, I believe, will be also the highest art of the West. It quite often stirs me with a Western suggestion, which, however, springs from the soil of his own bosom. I know that there is a meeting-point of the East and West, and that, after all, they are the same thing. He found the secret of art, which will remind any highly developed mind of both the East and West of some memory, and let it feel something like an emotion and fly into a higher realm of beauty. (Gaho's beauty is the beauty of silence.) It goes without saying that his art is simple, and his vision not complex. However, it is not only an Oriental philosophy to say that the