SATO Hikari. Yanagi Muneyoshi to William Blake

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SATO Hikari. Yanagi Muneyoshi to William Blake: Kanryūsuru “Kōtei no Shisō” (Yanagi Muneyoshi and William Blake: The Philosophy of Affirmation of Life and Its Global Circulation), Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2015.

KODAMA Sanehide

A number of books and articles have been written about William Blake and Yanagi Muneyoshi and their relationship, but I have never read a book on the subject as thoroughly scholastic and fascinatingly well-organized as this. The author himself has written many essays and articles on Blake, Yanagi, and others, and this book appears to be a compilation of his arduous studies. It contains 15 chapters in 484 pages, plus 153 pages of notes, a chronological bibliography of Blake in Japan from 1893 to 1929, a list of works cited, a list of illustrations, and indexes. It is no wonder that the JCLS award was given to Dr. Sato for this work. * The author starts with a brief account of the life and artistic achievements of William Blake (1757-1827). A professional engraver and a rare visionary, Blake tried to portray in prints, paintings, poems, and prose works, the revelation of the truths he believed he had captured, mostly through mystic experiences. The back cover of Sato's book has an illustration of the charmingly trochaic and symbolic poem, “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright . . . .” However, he seems more concerned with Blake's later major works: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), The Book of Urizen (1794), Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804- 20), and especially Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), an illustration from which is on the front cover of the book. Through these works and others, the author demonstrates that Blake attempted to create a world of unconventional mythology based mainly on his own interpretation of Christianity, in order to convey unswervingly the values he believed highly important: vision, imagination, liberation, emancipation, love, and the idea of divinity of man; instead of reason, institutions, rituals, classic restriction, and the idea of original sin.

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* The author then goes on to discuss the aesthetics of Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961) in relation to Blake’s ideas. From an early age Yanagi was inter- ested in religion, mysticism, and art, and contributed essays on those subjects to the journal of the Shirakaba School, of which he was a charter member. Before Yanagi’s middle years, when he went on to focus on the simple and powerful beauty of folk art, he published a number of essays and books on Blake and Whitman. Yanagi liked especially Blake’s appraisal of intuition, and his idea of love, self-annihilation, and liberation from restriction. Yanagi trans- formed Blake’s ideas, and amalgamated and resolved them into a philosophy which he systematized with such terms as mushin (No Mind), fusoku furi (nei- ther attached nor non-attached), seeing eye, and reliance on grace. (The English terms above are used by Bernard Leach, in his adaptation of Yanagi’s work, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, 1972.) The author adumbrates that Yanagi’s philosophy of affirmation of life may have been heavily indebted to Blake’s view of God’s immanence and his asser- tion that “all religions are one.” But the author does not hurriedly jump to this conclusion. His strategy is to “lay siege” to Blake and Yanagi by shedding light on many people surrounding the two gifted men. * The second stage of the book is devoted to Sato’s laborious researches on the patrons, lovers, and critics of William Blake, mostly in nineteenth- and twenti- eth-century England and Japan, some of whom have long been hidden from the eyes of the Blake scholars. For example, in Chapter 9, the author takes up Wil- liam Hayley (1745-1820), a minor poet now almost forgotten but well known at the turn of the century. The author reminds us that for a few years Haley was a wealthy and learned patron of William Blake, and that he also wrote an elegy to William Jones at his death. (Jones was an amateur but authoritative scholar of In- dian culture.) After outlining the life of Hayley by quoting from George Gordon Byron, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Alexander Gilchrist, and from Hayley’s own letters, the author suggests that when collaborating on publishing Hayley’s poems with Blake’s illustrations, for such books as Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802), Blake may have been tempted to study Indian classics and philosophy. Another example is the author’s insatiable hunt for the source of the “Blake

288 xx fever” of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. He starts with Bernard Leach (1887-1979), who confided to Yanagi that the collection of Blake’s poems he brought with him from England was “my Bible” (p.63), and, by letting him bor- row his copy of the book, inspired Yanagi to write essays and books on Blake. Before he sailed to Japan, Leach had been introduced to and greatly fasci- nated by Blake’s works, both through his friend in the evening class at Chelsea School of Art, Henry Lamb, and through their esteemed teacher there, Augus- tus John. This was while Leach was reluctantly working at a bank in London during the daytime. In the same chapter, Sato goes on to show that before Augustus John opened the Chelsea School of Art in London, he was teaching at University College in Liverpool, where he met the librarian and Blake lover John Sampson (1862- 1931), who edited The Lyrical Poems of William Blake (1905). This book, with its elaborately annotated text, was published from the Clarendon Press, prob- ably because Professor Frederick York Powell of Oxford University, who also respected Blake, had suggested the project to Sampsom and advised him. Pow- ell inspired and encouraged Sampson, and Sampsom in turn inspired Augustus John, who inspired Henry Lamb and Bernard Leach. Thus, the author writes, one can draw “one line of the route of infection of the Blake fever.” (p. 179) Sato does not stop his research there. He flies to England, travels to Liv- erpool, and finds, among many boxes of manuscripts in the John Sampson Archive in the University Library, an autograph letter of “M. Yanagi” to John Sampson, dated “Aug. 10th 1915.” According to Yanagi, “. . . I owe to you very much indeed in understanding of that great world-genius.” (p. 45) From the context, it is clear that Yanagi sent a copy of his William Blake written in Japa- nese to Sampson with this letter. But the book is not in Liverpool. The author found the book in Cambridge, where Geoffrey Keynes, the com- piler of A Bibliography of William Blake (1921), was once a medical student. On the back paper of the book is a four-line autograph dedication: “To John Sampson Esqr. / With best regards / the Author. / Aug. 10th 1915.” Sato is cer- tain that Keynes borrowed the book from Sampson in 1919, when Keynes was compiling his bibliography, but did not return it. (pp. 41-43) Sato’s persistent pursuit of significant facts in the “mountains of treasures” resulted in serendipity-like chains of evidence that connect the scholars and lov-

287 xxi ers of Blake in England and Japan. The author does not stop at his “eureka,” but goes on to point out the common characteristics of these Blake lovers: Powell, Sampson, Augustus John, and Bernard Leach were all interested in the values of the East, including Japan, India, and Romany. And he adds that the Blake lovers above were all tired of Victorian morality, institutionalization, rigidity, affluence, and other apparently “brighter” aspects of the Victorian temper. Here some readers may be amusedly tempted to compare them with Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and some of the other mid-twentieth- century “Beat” poets. All of them were interested in Eastern values such as Zen Buddhism and haiku, and were tired of their affluent middle class centered society in Pax Americana, howling against the “establishment,” and respecting the poets in the Whitman-Pound tradition. * Each chapter of this book is an independent scholarly essay like a festschrift dedicated to esteemed masters, but they are all linked together in “one line.” And there, like a line of baroque pearls, more well-known figures are also strung together, in chapters 6, 13, and elsewhere: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his brother William Michael, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, Laurence Binyon, Arthur Waley, Walt Whitman, James Whistler, Ernest Fenollosa, Takamura Kotaro, Hamada Shoji, Jugaku Bunsho, and many others. Reading through the book, many readers may be overwhelmed by the author’s erudition. Readers may also come to understand that the author is more interested in man and human relations than in analytical criticism or postmodern literary theories. He writes in his postscript that “close reading only” is not enough for literary studies.

It is indispensable for literary study to conduct steady and continuous researches into social and cultural circumstances surrounding the text, which will lead to new findings . . . . For me the study of literature is the study of history, based on close reading. (p. 480)

The author does not seem to be much interested in evaluating literary works, either. Instead, he seems to pay more attention to the history of ideas and values. * The third and final stage of the book is its culmination: the author’s attempt

286 xxii to prove his theory that Yanagi’s “philosophy of affirmation of life” is a fusion of Buddhism fluxing east-bound from India to Japan, with the reflux of Blake’s idea of love, forgiveness, and generosity, which is a unique synthesis of the west- bound flux of Indian values with Hebrew religion. The currents and counter- currents of the values of East and West are crystalized in Yanagi’s philosophy. Carefully and briefly redefining such terms as selfishness, self-denial, multiplic- ity, opposition, coexistence, mercy, forgiveness, and divinity, the author relates them to the philosophies of Blake and Yanagi. He tries to relate them also to John Keats’s idea of “negative capability” and Wordsworth’s sense of unity, which may be close to his experience on the banks of the Wye near Tintern Abbey: “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” The author scarcely mentions Shakespeare, or other possible sources of influence on Yanagi, but he indicates that he is aware that Blake is not the only source of inspiration for Yanagi. He concludes:

The west-bound “philosophy of affirmation” started from India, and, through eighteenth-century London, flowed into twentieth-century Tokyo. It was handed down from Blake to Yanagi through various intermediaries and it merged into the east-bound “philosophy of affirmation of life” from India, i.e., Mahayana Buddhism, in the mind of Yanagi, forming a circular flow of ideas beyond time and space. (p. 475)

* The book is a model of comparative studies, in the sense that, by carefully avoiding and rarely using the term “influence,” the author successfully makes it clear that Yanagi was influenced by Blake. The author is well-aware that “influence” is a convenient but ambiguous and therefore dangerous literary term, though it is an important concept. After all, even if you dissect the body of a lion that ate a lamb, you cannot find the lamb anywhere. Instead of looking for the inner evidence of “influence,” the author points to the common denominators among the important figures around Blake and Yanagi, and demonstrates that all of them are interrelated. This kind of “sieging strategy,” though it requires great labor, may serve as a useful and effectively persuasive weapon for comparatists. The discussion of “influence” reminds us of the famous controversial lecture

285 xxiii by René Wellek on “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” at the Second Con- gress of the ICLA. He attacked the “positivist” scholars at that time, especially Bardensperger, who wrote the preface to the first number of Revue de Litérature Comparée published in Paris. Wellek said that their definitions of “comparative literature” and their key word “influence” were too mechanical. He did not deny the study of influence, but complained that their “factualism” had critically fall- en into trivialism. It is because Wellek and many other mostly American schol- ars of the time, such as Harry Levin, Reuben Arthur Brower, Cleanth Brooks, were more keenly concerned with the critical evaluation of literary works of art. To those who appreciate the critical view of the scholars above, this book may seem to lack an aesthetic evaluation of the literary works of Blake and Yanagi. Some readers may be overwhelmed and feel discontented because of the large number of facts. But the author never falls into trivialism. He inter-re- lates the facts he has collected and selected, and connects them into “one line.” The author concludes the book with a most appropriate evaluation: Blake’s visionary ideas of love, coexistence, and the divinity of all creatures, which are distilled and resolved into Yanagi’s “philosophy of affirmation of life,” do certainly “point to a new direction we should take, to bring the history of our repeated conflicts and conquests to an end.” (p. 475)

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