Excerpt from Hokŭsai: A Talk About Hokŭsai, the Japanese Painter, at the Century Club, March 28, 1896
I wish that the question of a talk about Hokusai, or any artist whose form of art is as far away from ours, did not divide into paths which tend away from a common point. Should I appeal to our fellow members who are artists, I need only draw their attention to some point of technique, and they them selves could gauge, as well as myself, the merit of the person whose handiwork, whose language, this was. For then the question of what might almost be called the meaning of the picture could be dropped; a mere movement of a pencil or of a brush, the peculiar manner in which it is used, is to us a proof of the quality of the person who does it. We know that it either takes very great study or very great natural capacity, or both, to make certain move ments of the hand over a canvas and a bit of paper. We know, as Dr. Otis knows, just how complicated is the machinery which is to be set in motion for these feats of sleight of hand, and it is often what seems the least important, or, rather, less showy, which would be our test. But for others than artists there might be, or there might not be, because there are many good artists who have never used a brush or a pencil but whose mind follows the mind of the painter - there might be, I would say, for many others a necessity to explain away some of these rather strange things, to diminish their strangeness by this explanation, and thereby make this foreigner speak, after all, a language not so far removed from our own. And this double current of statement is in a great degree difficult to me. I have thought that I should try to be as little didactic as possible, and as little controversial, because the appreciation of art is a question of sympathy, and the appeal it makes is a personal one. Especially, I do not want to teach. I should be delighted to suppose that everybody saw things as I do, and I should not wish to increase the opposition which a very healthy mind, sensitive to art, often feels before the very best things that there are. One of the things that we learn is that the merit ofa work of art does not depend upon our liking it, but yet that we must have some side in us to which there can be an appeal. We may, for instance, not feel in the mood for some of the greater music; we may not feel in the mood for the music that moves us at times so deeply - all which merely means that there are moments and times for things, and especially that the great things are not the com monplace or the light ones, which at times we need also.
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