Chats on Japanese Prints

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had for long eclipsed the power of the Emperor-Iyeyasu laid a wise but iron hand upon Japan, forcing all departments of industry, society, and even art into rigid forms whose pattern was laid down by his far-seeing mind. The same policy gu

eness also. The Kano academies of painting-filled with the disciplinary instincts of Iyeyasu-of which four were under the direct patronage of the Shogun and sixteen under the Tokugawa Government, were constituted on the plan of regular feudal tenures. Each academy had its hereditary lord, who followed his profession, and, whether or not he was an indifferent artist, had under him students who flocked from various parts of the country, and who were, in their turn, official painters to different daimyos in the provinces. After graduating a

of Europe in those middle centuries when the old feudal system was breaking up. There, too, could be seen armoured lords of castles flourishing side by side with burghers and guilders. It is the same duality which forms the keynote of Tokugawa culture taken as a whole.... The keynote of Tokugawa life and art is their broad division into two main streams-the aristocratic and the plebeian. These two flowed on side by side with comparatively little intermingling. On the one side select companies of gentlemen and ladies congregate

and aristocratic classes and their tradition-hallowed schools of painting. The prints were solely the product of the popular school; they were i

e dominance of the great Iyeyasu, the life of the empire was brought to a focus. Iyeyasu forced all the great nobles, living customarily on their estates scattered throughout the empire, to come to Yedo and remain there in residence for at least half of each year, in order that he might keep his hand upon them and prevent them from springing up to rival power. The natural effect of this regulation was to g

o quote Mr. Laurence Binyon, "deals little in human figures and has no concern with the physical beauty of men and women, contenting itself mainly with the contemplation of wide prospects over lake and mountain, mist and torrent, or a spray of sensitive blossoms trembling in the air." Yet even though the earlier greatness of the aristocratic schools of painting was passing or had passed in this seventeenth and eighteenth century epoch, still the authority derived by the Kano painters f

ing a period of peace and a centralization of resources that gave the common people in their isolation a favourable opportunity to develop a culture of their own; and suffering from a growing degene

century, there arose in Yedo a new movement

tions of Chinese or old Japanese art; and on the other hand, the pulsing life of Yedo streets, the tea-gardens of the Sumida River, the theatres, and the brilliant houses of pleasure. Yet having suggested that the gap between the two was not immeasurable, we may grant that it was nevertheless real. Ukioye concerned itself with contemporary plebeian life, its shows and festivals and favourites of the hour, to an extent alien to the more restrained and almost monastic tradition of the older art. Ukioye means "Passing-world Picture"; there is implied in the word a reproach and an accusation of triviality. It suggests values not recognized by that orthodox Buddhistic attitude of contemplation which regards life as a show of shadows, a region of temporal desire and illusion and misery, a vigil to be endu

erver would describe it. Only by way of contrasting it with the idealism of the older schools can one thus classify the arbitrary attitudes, mask-like faces, and fanciful colour schemes of Ukioye. This arbitrariness indicates another characteristic of the new manner. It was a flippant style which took nothing seriously except itself. Its

many centuries to the founders of the art in China, and by the genuine lack of distinction in the spiritual attitude and outlook of many of these new painters. The modern European, bred of a different artistic lineage, may re

cultivation of feeling is to be found in the Ukioye painters. "Great art is that before which we long to die," says Okakura; and the overstrained intensity of his words conveys to the Westerner some conception of the passionate spirituality which the cultivated Japanese desires and finds in the works of the older painters. The Japanese connoisseur misses in Uk

Oriental spirit; but there is here a more human and lovable beauty, and

nd immemorial antiquity-Asia speaks in the older paintings; but in the amiable prints, the one voice is the defined, circumscribed, and beguiling voice of Japan. The colour-print constitutes almost the only purely Japanese art, and the o

1578 and died in 1650. At first it was the aristocracy that applauded this pioneer, who was not yet alienated from them; then some vital element in M

aching had its activity been always, as in its earliest days, confined to painting. It was, however, the destiny of the school to come into a relation with the hi

priest, produced a woodcut which is dated 1325. No date earlier than this last can be fixed upon with any confidence. The few specimens of early woodcuts that have survived are pious Buddhistic representations of rel

bellished. Most of the designs were very crude, and the cutting of the wood blocks displayed only elementary skill. These early books were in no way connected with the Ukioye School, which they in fact antedated; they were wholly the

ible. A few have a slight Ukioye cast. Not until the last quarter of the century, however, did wood-engraving achieve the dignity of a fine art and the