International studio (23.1904)

Hashimoto Gaho

municates any sense of the true mountain spirit,
that in the presence of this one I find myself think-
ing of Segantini’s work, which more than that of
any other Western artist succeeds in lifting the
imagination and the consciousness into the upper
regions. But even granting, for the sake of argu-
ment, that each exerts an equal spell over us, could
we find a more striking difference of method or of
the point of view which guides it ? The Italian,
so laboriously faithful, ascetically conscientious,
so religiously devout toward the dignity of matter;
while Gaho, emancipated, as it were, from its
thraldom, works with apparently effortless facility
and the suggestiveness of piquant simplicity. In
his picture, to quote a finely instructive passage
from Mr. Okakura’s Ideals of the East: “ It is mind
speaking to mind, a mind strong and self-refusing
-—unmoved, because it is so simple.”
Simplicity of comprehension, complete and
crystalline, of what the artist wishes to express,
interpreted by means equally simple in their cer-
tainty and effectualness, characterizes all these
pictures of Gaho’s. The ideal of the Ashikaga
knight was “not to use the sword, but to be the
sword—pure, serene, immovable, pointing ever 10
the polar star,” and this old artist, whose work
revives the dignity of that period, has disciplined
to the same ideal his own art and life. Hence we
find ourselves, if we study his pictures with sympa-
thetic understanding, in presence of something
superlatively fine, rarefied, aloof from that weak-
ness on which we are so prone to lean for strength—
the temperamental quality.
How marvelous the detachment from all obses-
sion either of the artist’s sentiment or our own in
Winter Morning and Wild Ducks. The picture is
filled with the passionless vacancy of nature; its
silence only stirred by the shiver of the dry reeds.
Nor has this scene, so free from any obvious features
of grandeur, that homeliness and meagreness of
suggestion which often offend one in kindred sub-
jects of the paysage intime. The high-bred dis-
tinction of its lineal and tonal composition, so
clearly felt to be expressive of mental elevation,
lifts it to a level of pronounced dignity.
What Gaho can accomplish in the expression of
movement in nature is admirably illustrated in
Wind Among the Trees. The scene is a gully
between hills, the latter expressed by a line of
imperial sweetness; a laborer is hurrying home,
bending his body to, and staggering in, the force of
the wind which drives through the hollow and
sweeps up the hillside. While the man breasts the
storm, the scattered trees, firmly gripping the

earth with their feet, have turned their backs to it,
their arms gesticulating, their foliage tossed and
tangled, like masses of hair. One drops without
affectation into this kind of metaphor, because the
trees seem possessed of personality; it is the man
himself that is impersonal; introduced, like one of
Corot’s figures, as an additional mnaifestation of
the spirit of the scene.
I had almost written Kokoromochi; but Corot’s
point of view was intensely subjective, and the more
one studies the application of this term in Japanese
art the stronger becomes the realization that its
conspicuous quality is objectivity. Corot’s power
of analysis was possibly as keen as Gaho’s; but,
while the former used what he discovered to repre-
sent nature as responding to his own mood, the
latter attunes himself to the secret he has extracted.
Accordingly, his work, by the time that one has
identified oneself with its point of view, has a wider
and at the same time a more poignant suggestive-
ness. Into this particular picture, for example,
the local and incidental do not enter; it is a wind
from the corners of the universe that is blowing
through it.
The picture helps us also to understand the atti-
tude of Gaho’s mind toward realism. Painting,
by its very nature, is a system of conventions and
symbols—certain signs and formulas, put on can-
vas or on paper, which we have agreed to accept
as convenient summaries of the object to be repre-
sented, or which, when we see them for the first
time, we can co-ordinate with what we have already
accepted, and so admit to our habitual acceptance.
How slow is our acceptance of unaccustomed con-
ventions has been proved by our slow acceptance
of modern impressionism. Yet the latter, after all,
only urged upon our notice something with which
we might have been familiar long before, since
we have had sun and sunlight with us always. Not
so, however, with Japanese convention. Based,
as it has been, upon point of view, mental habit and
conditions of experience widely differing from our
own, it could not, by the nature of the case, be as
intelligible to us as it is to the Japanese, or as our
own is to us. To mention only one instance: We
are interested in the concrete, in the forms them-
selves of objects represented, and do not care for
convention except as a necessary to ocular recog-
nition; whereas to the Japanese the forms have
seemed of less account, because it was with the
mental rather than with the ocular vision that they
tried to see; therefore the convention itself became
a thing to be admired and to be made at once as
poignant, as concise and as stimulating to the mind

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