Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/45

technique or method of expression is secondary; even the seeming realistic picture of Oriental art is, when it is splendid, always subjective." I have many reasons to call Hiroshige an idealist or subjective artist, now playing an arbitrary art of criticism after the Western fashion, as I only see his artistic wisdom, but nothing else in his being true to Nature; that wisdom, I admit, helped his art to a great measure, but what I admire in him is the indefinable quality which, as I have no better word, I will call atmosphere or pictorial personality. It seems that he learned the secret from Chinese landscape art how to avoid femininity and confusion; the difference between his art and that of the Chinese artist is that where the one drew a bonseki, or tray-landscape, with sand from memory, the latter made a mirage in the sky. When Hiroshige fails he reminds me of Emerson's words of suggestion to look at Nature upside down through your legs; his success, as that of the Chinese artist, is poetry. And our Oriental poetry is no other kind but subjectivity. I have right here before me the picture called "Awa no Naruto," which is more often credited to be the work of the second Hiroshige; now let me, for once and all, settle the question that there were many Hiroshige; It is my opinion there was only one Hiroshige; I say this because in old Japan (a hundred times more artistic than present Japan) the individual