Abstract
WE thank Mr. Elkin Mathews for sending us this charming volume. We have admired once more the delicate art of Hiroshige, and we have read Mr. Noguchi's criticism with interest (Mr. Noguchi is always interesting); but we are left wondering why a work of such purely artistic content was submitted for review in a scientific journal. And, as we muse, the question takes form. Is there, after all, so great a difference between the artistic and the scientific approach to Nature? The multitudinous facts and ideas that make up the manifold variety of the world must flood and overwhelm any mind that attempts to grasp the whole. Most of us are saved from seeing too much, if not by native blindness, then by the blinkers of custom and education; but the penetrating eye of the artist or the philosopher looks for safety to the guidance of selection. He is, to quote Mr. Noguchi, “like Hiroshige himself who paid no attention to the small inessential details, when he grasped firmly the most important point of Nature which he had wished before to see, hold and draw.” Perhaps the man of science may learn from the great artist, Hiroshige or another, that the searcher after Nature's secrets must frame a clear idea of what he wants to know; that he must not be led astray by facts, useful enough in their time and place, but irrelevant to his quest; that he must make himself the master and not the slave of his facts, so as, without falsifying Nature, to transcend her. It is the fearless vision, the intelligent choice, and the controlling imagination that produce alike the inspiring picture, the supreme poem, and the conquering theory of science.
Hiroshige.
By Yone Noguchi. Pp. 1x4 + 38 + 19 plates. (New York: Orientalia; London: Elkin Mathews, 1921.) 25s. net.
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Hiroshige . Nature 108, 301 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/108301a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/108301a0