A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia
Woolf: Kakuzo Okakura, Roger Fry, and
Virginia Woolf
Yukiko Kinoshita
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway defines her upcoming party as
“an offering,” or a disinterested act of realizing her idealistic vision of the world; and
the party, in return, offers her moments of “being” and is the occasion for her selfrealization. The same roles are given to Mrs. Ramsay’s last dinner party in Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse. The party is a ritual through which Mrs. Ramsay materializes her
vision of truth and beauty; thus her young painter friend Lily Briscoe perceives that
Mrs. Ramsay is an artist on her own merits and that her party is a perfect “work of art.”
Mrs. Dalloway’s and Mrs. Ramsay’s shared aestheticism, attributed to and expressed
through their parties, is what Kakuzo Okakura calls “Teaism” in his English-language
classic The Book of Tea (1906). This correspondence between Woolf’s and Okakura’s
aesthetics may seem to be a mere coincidence, but it is not. One important connector
between the two literary figures was Roger Fry, who met Okakura and whose
aesthetics, as critics have already pointed out, were affected by Okakura’s own. The
social and cultural contexts which surrounded Woolf and other modernists must
not be missed: in early twentieth-century Britain, the literary and art worlds were
awash with the second wave of British japonisme. This essay is an attempt to clarify
the Far Eastern elements of Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics which led her to establish her
modernist themes and methods; and its focus is to connect Okakura’s teaism with
Woolf’s aesthetic interpretation of a party and a party maker. The influence of the Far
East on Woolf was one aspect of japonisme which contributed as a catalyst to the
formation of modernist literature and art.
© 2013 by the Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
vol. 4, no. 1
June 2013 | pp. 63-86
64 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
1. Kakuzo Okakura and His Modernism
The Japanese art critic Kakuzo (or Tenshin) Okakura (1862–1913) would
seem at first glance to be more far-distant from than related to Virginia
Woolf (1882–1941). However, despite an occasional tone and color of
nationalism, Okakura’s aesthetics in his English-language classic The Book
of Tea (1906) are modernist, and in nature close to the aesthetics of Woolf,
as well as those of her forerunning and contemporary modernists.1
Okakura was, indeed, a curious mixture of the East and the West—
that is, Japanese traditional culture and fin-de-siècle British and French
modernism—partly due to his unique education but chiefly due to his
social and aesthetic consciousness. He had received both traditional and
Western education, and was, as a young man, a distinguished student
of English and Western philosophy and aesthetics as well as of Chinese
and Japanese classical literatures. He could be termed a fin-de-siècle
aesthete—an intellectual influenced by late nineteenth-century French and
British aestheticism. Okakura’s interest in Japanese cultural heritage was
stimulated by his friendship and collaborations with Ernest F. Fenollosa
(1853–1908), a Bostonian lecturer of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial
University, who helped the young Okakura become better acquainted with
fin-de-siècle European aestheticism, and, later, with William Sturgis Bigelow
(1850–1926), a physician and collector of Japanese art. Both these men
helped connect Okakura—first as an art critic and later as a curator for
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts—to their fellow Bostonian intellectuals.2
Upon returning to the U.S., Fenollosa made efforts to introduce Noh,
the traditional Japanese theater, to the West. His translation project of
Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh was, after his death, taken up by the
American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who interacted with other poets
and critics, including T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939),
and Arthur Waley (1889–1966), over the traditional Japanese theater in
London around 1910.3
Takashina Shūji defines Okakura as a modernist in “Hirakareta dentō-shugi-sha,
Okakura Tenshin,” 38–39.
1
See Shimizu Emiko, Okakura Tenshin no hikaku-bunnkashi-teki kenkyū, esp. ch. 1,
“Okakura’s Boston Network.”
2
Pound published his translation, Certain Noble Plays of Japan, with Yeats’s introduction,
in 1916. See Sung Hae-kyung, Seiyo no mugen noh: Yeats to Pound, 170–92.
3
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
65
Through his association with his Bostonian professor Fenollosa,
Okakura’s academic attention was turned from the West to his own
mother culture; and this led him to entertain a great concern over the
marked decline in influence and the deterioration of cultural tradition
in fin-de-siècle Japan in the face of that country’s radical modernization,
industrialization, and rising philistinism. This was a concern shared by a
number of Japanese intellectuals and artists, as well as by European and
American intellectuals who were attracted to Japan’s cultural heritage,
such as Fenollosa and Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), a British modernist
active in fin-de-siècle Japan.4
Okakura’s criticism of modernity is that of a modernist, and his
modernist aesthetics can be identified in the understanding and view of
the tea ceremony which his book contains. Okakura wrote his major works
in English, including his two best-read ones, Ideals of the East with Special
Reference to the Art of Japan (1903) and The Book of Tea (1906); the latter
is now among the Penguin Modern Classics. Okakura chose to address to
an English- rather than Japanese-speaking audience the values of Japanese
and Asian fine arts, aesthetics, and worldviews. He did not merely
challenge colonialism and imperialism; rather, he was aware that Western
intellectuals’ positive appraisal of Japanese and other Asian cultures could
affect the cultural policies of the rapidly modernizing Japan and encourage
its government and populace to reevaluate, conserve, and even reactivate
their own cultural heritage that was being discarded.
My study of Times Literary Supplement (hereafter TLS) and Athenaeum
reviews between 1903, when Okakura’s first book was published, and
1920, the year in which the republication of his first work followed that
of The Book of Tea (hereafter BT), has led me to conclude that Okakura’s
books were at first received by the British with reservation and skepticism
but gradually came to be fully appreciated, and that he had secured a
position of authority on Japanese studies by 1910. Okakura’s books met
the trend of the age. They were published during the period when Britain
was awash with the second wave of japonisme, which was triggered by the
1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance and Japan’s unexpected victory in the RussoJapanese War (1904–1905), and encouraged by the 1910 Japan–British
4
Lafcadio Hearn’s negative view of Japan’s modernization as a destructive force to its
culture is found in the introductory part of his “Chin-Chin Kobakama” and in his “The
Genius of Japanese Civilization.”
66 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
Exhibition in London, organized by the Japanese government as a cultural
and industrial strategy.5
Fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Britain’s interest in Japanese
art and culture—or British japonisme—and its influence on the Western
country’s own art and culture were not superficial.6 Okakura himself—
once a student of Western aesthetics and philosophy and now an art critic
whose concern was how to revitalize Japanese culture—was highly alert
to and conscious of the ways in which late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century French and British modernism absorbed Asian cultures
as “new” elements in their own traditional cultures. What attracted
early twentieth-century British liberal intellectuals to his Book of Tea in
particular was its aestheticism and anti-imperialist pacifism. Okakura’s
lines—“He [the average Westerner] was wont to regard Japan as barbarous
while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace [the tea ceremony]; he calls
her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian
battle fields” (BT 2–3)—were quoted and responded to by a number of TLS
and Athenaeum reviewers.
Emiko Shimizu’s study demonstrates that Okakura’s meditation was
an organic adaptation of the new aesthetic (or the occidental) to the
old aesthetic (or the oriental).7 Okakura’s intellectual indebtedness to
British and French modernist aesthetics is fairly easily identified, and
a careful reading of his works would reveal their traces. Concerning
the influences of Western modernism on Okakura, for instance, Isao
Kumakura’s article “Chadō-ron no keifu kara mita Cha no hon no ishitsusei” (Okakura Tenshin’s Untraditional View of the Tea Ceremony) is a
revelation. Kumakura points out that it was Okakura who first defined the
tea ceremony as “whole art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) and an accomplished tea
master as an artist—an idea which came rather naturally to the Wagnerian
Okamura, and is widely accepted today.8 Yet turn-of-the-century tea
5
See Yukiko Kinoshita, “British Intellectuals’ Response to Kakuzo Okakura and Japan,”
and “The 1910 Japan–British Exhibition.” Okakura, in Boston, assisted the steering of
the 1910 London Exhibition by making the English edition of the catalogue of national
treasures with his colleagues; see Shimizu, Okakura Tenshin, 179–80.
6
See Tanita Hiroyuki, Yuibi-shugi to japanizumu; Ono Akyako, Bi no koryū; Mastumura
Eri, Kabegami no japonisumu; and Mastumura Masaie, Nihon to vikutoria-chō-eikoku.
7
8
See Shimizu, Okakura Tenshin, 31–44.
Okakura familiarized himself with Wagner’s operas, to which fin-de-siècle intellectuals
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masters, who were ignorant of Western aesthetics and aestheticism, never
thought of viewing cha-no-yu from such an aesthetic point of view. Given
that the tea ceremony was developed and established along with the Noh
theater in the court of the Ashikaga shogunate between the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, it seems rather rash to conclude that cha-no-yu had
never been regarded as art. It is, however, true that Okakura’s full grasp of
European fin-de-siècle aestheticism enabled him to “analyze” the practice of
tea-serving, give a proper aesthetic and philosophical definition to it, and
connect it with modernist aesthetics.
2. ‌A New Perspective: Some Internal Proofs of the Influence of
Okakura’s Aesthetics upon Virginia Woolf
The readings of Woolf’s texts such as Mrs Dalloway (first published in
1925), To the Lighthouse (in 1927), and her essays would suggest that her
sense of “being,” her understanding of art’s faculty of crystallizing the
passing moments of our life, and particularly the enhancing of a party
to the level of art parallel those of Okakura as expressed in The Book of
Tea. Her protagonists’ grasp of the relationship between art and life—the
heightened consciousness of our ephemeral existence in this world and the
fleeting moments dear to us as individuals, and art’s function of arresting
and eternalizing the beauty of such moments—is not only Paterian and
Proustian but also of a piece with Okakura’s aesthetics; and here we should
remember Proust’s enthusiasm for Japanese art and see the possibility of
connecting his inclination to japonisme with his philosophy of carpe diem.9
Woolf’s protagonists regard a party not merely as a “ritual”—which is a
traditionally Christian and European view and yet still unique to Woolf—
but also as “a work of art,” which is typical of Woolf, but singular.10 In
both in Europe and in Japan eagerly responded; Shimizu discusses Wagner’s influence
on Okamura’s libretto The White Fox. See Shimizu, Okakura Tenshin, 388–411.
9
On Proust’s passion for things Japanese, see Suzuki Junji, “Proust ga mita nihon.”
The symposium entitled “Virginia Woolf no party kūkan” [Defining Virginia Woof’s
Party], held for the Thirtieth General Meeting of Virginia Woolf Society of Japan in
November 2010, was an inspiration: Motoko Ōta, Taye Yamamoto, Kiriyama Keiko, and
Reiko Ishikawa attempted to interpret the qualities that Woolf attributed to the party
chiefly from sociological as well as intertextual points of view.
10
68 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
her 1929 essay “Dr Burney’s Evening Party,” Woolf again terms a certain
Mrs. Throle’s party “a work of art”: “the combination of Dr Johnson and
Mrs Throle created something as solid, as lasting, as remarkable as a work
of art” (The Essays 5: 96; emphasis added). We should probably associate
Dr. Johnson’s episode in her essay with Okakura’s reference in The Book of
Tea to the great literary figure as one of the English Teaists, or tea-loving
aesthetic philosophers. This view of a party that Woolf expressed in her
works was “new,” both in light of the English tradition and among her
British contemporaries, and yet was shared by Okakura.
Few Western modernist writers treated a party as a work of art.
Oscar Wilde gave Dorian Gray’s party a highly aesthetic color, which he
consciously created as an equivalent to that of Huysmans’s “japonisant”
protagonist in À rebours. Dorian’s is a ceremony symbolic of his hedonist
absorption in sensual beauty and pleasures; and yet, as an extremist
hedonist, Dorian disregards spirituality, which Epicureanism requires and is
essential to cha-no-yu, or the tea ceremony. Dorian’s party could be called
a work of art, although I must add that Wilde’s aestheticism is, unlike
Dorian’s, at once “sensual” and “spiritual,” and that in this sense Dorian’s
“art work” is described as imperfect. Wilde’s text never fails to suggest to
the reader that it is Dorian’s very lack of spirituality that leads him to his
fatal fall.
In “Babette’s Feast” (1950), Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen, pseud., 1885–
1962) treats a party in a way similar to Woolf: Babette’s marvelous culinary
skills transform a dinner party, given by two elderly spinsters to celebrate
their deceased father’s one-hundredth birthday, into “a work of art” that
conjures up an Epicurean world in which spiritual ecstasy and sensual
joy of life could be perceived as one. In Dinesen’s work, Babette, the chef
and acting director of the party, is described as an artist, and the party is
treated as a ritual and provides the diners with a moment of revelation.
However, it is the food that Babette serves and her exquisite culinary skills,
rather than the party itself, that are regarded as a work of art.
Okakura regarded the tea ceremony not only as a ritual, being a
“ceremony,” but as a work of art, and the great tea master as equivalent
to a great artist, or even to art itself. For Okakura, the atmosphere that the
tea master creates for his choice guests is a work of art, or the embodiment
of his aesthetics and philosophy of life. The tea master creates this through
his arrangement of the garden and of the rooms; through his choice of
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69
flowers and kakemono (scrolls of painting and/or calligraphy), selection
of tea, tea service, and utensils, presentation of a simple but carefully
prepared meal of savory dishes, followed by sweets, subtle employment of
incense and clothes; and, above all, through his way of serving tea—all of
which are meant to be T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” that leads to a
single intended theme.
The tea ceremony is the “extraordinary” woven out of the seemingly
“ordinary” and “habitual.” The tea master’s skills and taste in the settingup of the place and the tea-making are “art,” which is a conscious act
but one that must be free of egotism and therefore impersonal, for “our
very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding,”
although “we see only our own image in the universe—our particular
idiosyncrasies dictate the mode of our [aesthetic] perceptions” (BT 47).
Thus it is not only a tea master’s trained skills and aesthetic taste but his or
her perfect disinterestedness that lead to a tea ceremony being a “success,”
which is defined as the creation of the moment of “being.”
Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse show that Woolf regarded a
party—created by her protagonists’ hospitality, aesthetic taste, spirit and
skills, and freedom from egotism—as a work of art. The key to Woolf’s
protagonists’ success as artists lies very much in their impersonality. While
Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party is a “success” in this sense, Clarissa Dalloway’s
faint egotism nearly destroys her party, and Mrs. Throle’s shatters hers.
Along with Eliot and Wilde, Woolf viewed the artist’s freedom from his or
her egotism as indispensable to creating a great work of art, as is expressed
in A Room of One’s Own (1928).11 Attaining the state of “impersonality” is
Woolf’s and her protagonists’ shared concern as artists.12
For Wilde’s aesthetics with reference to T. S. Eliot’s notion of impersonality, see
Kinoshita, “The Autonomy of Art and New Romanticism in Wilde’s Symbolism in ‘The
Decay of Lying,’” in idem, Art and Society, 39–43.
11
For a discussion of Woolf’s notion of “impersonality” expressed in A Room of One’s
Own, see Kinoshita, “Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality.”
12
70 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
3. ‌A Theory of Cultural Interaction: Connecting Virginia Woolf
and Kakuzo Okakura via Walter Pater
“Real” influence—the vital influence that affects the core character of
an artist or a culture—is often hidden and submerged, as Perry Meisel,
the author of The Absent Father, and T. S. Eliot would agree, not only
because of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” in establishing one’s
own aesthetic identity, but also because influence must be merged and
fully integrated into one’s own subjective entity. Therefore, when we
suggest that we recognize japonisme in Woolf, we do not refer to anything
superficial, for japonisme is a sophisticated and intricate application of
things Japanese which reflects the artist’s grasp of the aesthetics that
characterize Japanese works of art. In japonisme, as opposed to japonaiserie,
Japanese elements are not apparent: only a close examination reveals its
thematic and technical ties with Japanese art. Indeed, the artist’s discovery
and interpretation of its aesthetics are often identified primarily in the way
in which he or she has radically transformed the manner and style of the
original.13
We should pay attention to yet another truth: influence is interactive,
even when it appears to be one-way, and no culture is static, no tradition
unchanged. A close examination of any culture—or any masterpiece that
represents the artist’s “culture”—shows that tradition is, as T. S. Eliot
points out in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), a continual
process of complex amalgamation of the conventional and the modern, the
communal and the individual, the familiar and the strange. No culture is
genuinely mono-cultural; and culture is in its nature “multicultural” while
maintaining certain powerful and overriding elements of its own. Hence
the tea ceremony, which is often regarded as uniquely Japanese, is, in its
origin and development, multicultural; and even the aesthetics and basic
principles of the tea ceremony have never been static.
Apart from its Chinese origin, the tea ceremony which Sen no Rikyu
(1522–1591), the grand master, established is in part European. The
sixteenth century in Japan was known as the period when people’s passion
for “foreign” objects and cultures was particularly keen, and imported
13
See Takashina, “Japonisumu to ha nanika.”
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
71
artifacts and works of art stimulated domestic pottery and textile industries
and craftsmanship. European taste as well as Chinese, Korean, Southeast
Asian, and Middle and Near Eastern tastes vitalized and tinted the world
of cha-no-yu. Roman Catholicism was then influential in people’s spiritual
lives and affected their aestheticism: Rikyu was also under its influence—
one view is that he was struck by the beauty of the Christian service and
applied the practice of the ritual to the tea ceremony.14 Before trading
familiarized the West with things Japanese and japonaiserie gradually
pervaded the European continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the tea ceremony had acquired something intricate that could
appeal to Western sensibilities.
With the above understood, I would like to posit my hypothesis: that
there must have been true intellectual interactions between British and
French (and American) modernists and Japanese modernists; and that
they had, it seems, come to share a common aesthetics and philosophy of
life. I would here define “modernists” as late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century artists and intellectuals who rejected “modernity” in
defense of humanity. Such modernists perceived society’s general emphasis
on material prosperity as destructive to humanity, and saw political
potential in the autonomy of art, or “art for art’s sake,” art as a “vision”
being a critique of modernity.
Despite the egregious aspects of their “acceptance” and “understanding”
of Eastern cultures, Western modernists did genuinely turn to the East and
other non-European cultures as “strangeness” in beauty,15 with the prospect
of discovering a new intellectual and spiritual horizon; and they did grasp
the essence, which was often part of self-discovery. Thus their spiritual
journeys were sincere even when their grasp turned out to be “subjective,”
and therefore “distorted.” Indeed, it had to be “distorted”: the Western
modernists’ encounter with the strange was of necessity subjectively
interpreted, and that subjectively interpreted “strangeness” needed to be
distilled, matured, and become, as it were, part of themselves. It was only
through this process that modernists’ encounter with the strange could help
them become truly creative and unique. Their quests were keen because
Roman Catholicism could be a connector between Okakura’s view of the tea ceremony
and Woolf’s view of a party, for Woolf associates Mrs. Ramsey’s party with a Roman
Catholic service.
14
15
Pater, “Postscript to ‘Appreciations,’” 57.
72 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
they desired the new and the strange in the face of their own spiritual and
aesthetic crises; and their subjective distortions were their ways of adapting
the “strange” to the “familiar,” or to their own inherited views and
methods. Their perfect adaptation left no obvious trace of amalgamation.
My analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway—entitled “A Party as
an ‘Offering’” (2009)—has suggested to me possible connections between
British (and French) modernists and Japanese modernists. The protagonist’s
view and grasp of a party as a “ritual” and as an occasion for the moments
of being fully alive, and her understanding of life as something ephemeral
that, as it is, offers us no clear meanings or purposes—these are not
an intellectual “whim” of Woolf’s but her recurring motifs. The same
perception and view of life, and also of a party as art, are repeated and
explored in To the Lighthouse.16 This grasp of life and art, and of a party
as a work of art shows a striking correspondence with Kakuzo Okakura’s
“Teaism.” The tea ceremony is, in its most refined form, a ritual and a
most reverential “offering” to selected guests, whom the master/host
understands to be susceptible and responsive to his aestheticism and
worldview, and therefore regards as worthy of serving. In the tea party, or
cha-no-yu, a tea master strives to give his or her guests, who are mortal and
limited beings in this world, an “eternal” moment: a moment that could
be described as a most memorable moment of congeniality and sacred
communion among those who share a mutual passion, love, and respect.
Okakura defines the aesthetic of the tea ceremony as “a living influence”
(BT 61). Woolf terms Mrs. Ramsay’s last party “something . . . which
survive[s]” (To the Lighthouse 164).
Let me compare the two apparently very different modernists’ similar
view of an aesthetic temperament and attitude toward art and life which
enables real appreciation of works of art:
The writer Walter Pater (1839–1904), Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic
“father,”17 maintains in his 1893 book that “‘[t]o see the object as in itself
it really is,’ has been justly said to be the aim of all the true criticism
whatever” (The Renaissance xix). According to Pater, to grasp the essential
characteristics of an object of beauty is first to observe the object, then to
absorb oneself in it, and finally to clarify the elements of beauty which
16
17
See Kinoshita, “Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality,” 16–20.
See Meisel, The Absent Father, 240.
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
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appeal to one. Thus, “[w]hat is important, then, is not that the critic should
possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain
kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of
beautiful objects” (ibid., xxi). An aesthetic experience is, in Pater’s sense,
to identify oneself with the object, and is hence termed “that strange,
perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (ibid., 188).
Okakura, in his Book of Tea, expresses a view very similar to Pater’s
when elucidating how tea masters appreciate beauty: “The masterpiece is
of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece”; “[t]he sympathetic communion
of minds necessary for art appreciation must be based on mutual
concession”; “[t]o the sympathetic a masterpiece becomes a living reality
towards which we feel drawn in bonds of comradeship” (BT 44); and,
further, “[n]othing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits
in art”; “[a]t the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself”;
therefore, “[a]t once he is and is not” (BT 45). The two critics share the
view that for a true appreciation of art, one needs to have the power of
aesthetic perception and sympathy and be free from egotism: they are
in a sense referring to what the romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821)
termed “negative capability,” which may be close to the Buddhist notion of
nothingness, or the moral state of “vacancy.”
Pater, who is believed to have offered “new” aesthetics for turn-ofthe-century and early twentieth-century modernist artists and critics, is
well known for his belief in seizing moments of “being” in our ephemeral
life through aesthetic appreciation, which is again in nature very close to
Okakura’s interpretation of the spirit of teaism. Had Okakura familiarized
himself with the writings of Pater, or of Proust or of Wilde, and adopted
Paterian, Wildean, or Proustian aesthetics to his interpretation of the tea
ceremony? It is very likely. Okakura suggests in The Book of Tea that the
turn-of-the-century modernists, or “[t]he poets of the decadence,” “in their
protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the
way to Teaism” (BT 7–8). Yet is this possible influence simply one-way?
Probably not.
The tea room that Okakura describes in his book reminds us more
of the early American “modernist” Henry David Thoreau’s hut in the
woods than of the dining rooms of European aesthetes. The simplicity of
Thoreau’s cabin in Concord, Massachusetts, would have been what the
great tea master appreciated, and a materialization of his philosophy “to
74 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
know what is enough” (Taru wo shiru): “a hut in the wilderness, a flimsy
shelter made by tying together the grasses that grew around,—when these
ceased to be bound together they again became resolved into the original
waste” (BT 38). Thoreau, a transcendentalist, was under the influence of
Buddhism, part of late nineteenth-century japonisme in New England; and
his sensibility being resonant with Okakura’s is understandable. Yet Woolf
was the one who could have understood and sympathized with such beauty
and spirit in their extreme simplicity.18 Woolf states in her 1917 essay on
Thoreau, “from nature, too, he [Thoreau] had learnt to be content, not
thoughtlessly or selfishly content, and certainly not with resignation, but
with a healthy trust in the wisdom of nature, and in nature, as he says,
there is no sadness” (The Essays 2: 137–38). It is as if Woolf were, here,
maintaining that Thoreau knew how to “enter” into the spirit of “the roll of
the billows” in the sky, for he knew the “joy and beauty” found there and
how to attain his “moral equilibrium” through his contact with nature (BT
63).
An interested reader can hear the echoes of Woolf’s response to
Okakura. One year after the publication of The Book of Tea, she reviewed a
book about Japan: in her 1907 TLS review of Charlotte Lorriemer’s The Call
of the East, a collection of the author’s essays on her life in Japan, Woolf
concludes that “the differences which we should think so insignificant
elsewhere are the only keys we have to unlock the mystery [of the East]”
(The Essays 6: 324). This passage reminds the reader of Okakura’s lines:
“Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt
to overlook the greatness of little things in others” (BT 2). Ms. Lorriemer is,
in Woolf’s view, the one who never “overlooks the greatness of little things
in others.” In Woolf’s 1925 review of Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale
of Genji, we see that her critical sensitivity grasps “the greatness of little
things,” or the beauty and the drama found in the “ordinary,” as opposed
to the apparently extraordinary, such as war, murder, political upheaval,
and other strong stimuli, which dull, not sharpen, our sensibilities:
“It is the common that is wonderful, and if you let yourselves be put
off by extravagance and rant and what is surprising and momentarily
Woolf was not the only Bloomsbury intellectual who responded to transcendentalism.
E. M. Forster’s interest in it can be observed in the surname and characterization of Mr.
Emerson and his son George in A Room with a View: Thoreau’s words are painted on
their furniture.
18
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
75
impressive[,] you will be cheated of the most profound of pleasures” (The
Essays 4: 266). Woolf, indeed, was an artist of letters, like Jane Austen and
Lady Murasaki, who were able to find the dramatic and extraordinary in
the seemingly ordinary and common.
We may further point out that Woolf’s Far Eastern aesthetic can be
recognized not only in her awareness of the ephemerality of human
existence in contrast to nature’s resilience and cyclic power of revival,
expressed in “Time Passes,” the linking middle section of To the Lighthouse,
but also in her imagist symbolism in this and the final chapters of the
novel. The character Lily Briscoe’s still-raw pain at the loss of Mrs. Ramsay
is, for example, expressed by an imagist description that is juxtaposed with
her desperate cry of “Mrs Ramsay!” Woolf’s prose-painting delineates Lily’s
state of being: “Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out
of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was
thrown back into the sea.” (To the Lighthouse 183).
Macalister’s boy represents God as a leviathan who mercilessly and
carelessly tears away an essential part of Lily’s own emotional self—Mrs.
Ramsay—and then mechanically releases her, alone, back into the sea of
the world. The salty water, or the general indifference of the world to her
pain, embitters her raw wound of loss. Exposed to the brine, which burns
her wound but quickly staunches its bleeding, making her mutilation
almost invisible to the world, she must silently bear the great pain;
awkwardly, clumsily, she continues to swim, with occasional gasps.
Heon-Joo Sohn suggests, in “Virginia Woolf in the Waves of Multimedia
Culture,” the influence of cinematography on her symbolist writings. While
recognizing the validity of this argument, I would suggest that the new
aesthetic and sensibilities first suggested by japonisme and later matured
by post-impressionism could have urged the acceptance of the cinema as
a new artistic genre; they might have also helped to explore its aesthetic
possibilities. The early cinematography, such as montage, could, for
example, be interpreted as a visual adaptation of haiku juxtaposition of
images.
76 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
4. Tracing the Development of Woolf’s Idea of a Party
As self-conscious young women aspiring to become professionals, Virginia
and her sister Vanessa Stephen never felt comfortable at parties: they were
keenly aware of being wallflowers, the subdued figures on grand social
occasions. Yet young Virginia loved simply to observe the lively, elegant
proceedings of parties and inhale their festive air, which was like a delicate
“flower” of upper-class refinement.
Ladies with social skills are, socially, the opposite of women desiring to
have professions, and Virginia could have depicted them, as she let Miss
Doris Kilman do in Mrs Dalloway, as worldly, superficial, and deplorably
conventional. Virginia’s eyes never failed to note the limitations of leisured
women with such social skills, but recognized their charm and power as
well. In her 1903 sketch “Thoughts upon Social Success,” young Virginia
states that “the truth is that we [Virginia and Vanessa] have not, or have
not cultivated, what one calls the ‘social gift’”; and that “[n]ow most young
women of our way of life have specialized in this branch of learning” (A
Passionate Apprentice 167). While questioning whether these flower-like,
pretty people have “stalks” or “bodies,” and suggesting the superficiality
and vanity that such beauty could contain, she still finds them “very
beautiful & attractive” (ibid. 168). She attempts to clarify and defend the
very charm of such people and their pleasures:
I protest that I do most honestly admire such scraps of society as I have
seen—even though I myself take no part in it. . . . All the same I can sit
by & watch with pure delight those who are adept at the [social] game.
Success is always able to move my admiration; & really no success seems so
rounded & complete as that which is won in the drawing room. The game
requires infinitely delicate skill, and the prize is of the subtlest possible. (I cannot
altogether defend myself, but I feel that to play the social game really well
demands great qualities: it is very rarely played well.) All achievement is coarse
beside it. . . .
To be socially great, I believe, is a really noble ambition—for consider what
it means. You have, for a certain space of time to realise as nearly as can be,
an ideal. You must consciously try to carry out in your conduct what is
implied by your clothes: they are silken—. . . . They are meant to please
the eyes of others—to make you something more brilliant than you are by
day. This seems to me a good ideal. You come to a party meaning to give
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
77
pleasure; therefore you leave your sorrows & worries at home—for the
moment, remember, we are all dressed in silk—. . . . For two or three hours
a number of people have resolved to show only their silken side to one
another: Heaven knows the other may be anything but silk, but tonight it
is ignored. . . . All this[,] a moralist might say, is very artificial. . . . —it is
easy to conclude that society is hollow—that the men & women who make
it are heartless, but I believe there is another side to the picture. . . . And
the Lady [who lost an only son in the war]—you may call her heartless, but
surely she does more good making the world laugh than by sitting at home
& weeping over her own sorrows. The truth is, to be successful socially one
wants the courage of a hero—. . . . It is a luxury to most people to express
their emotions. Society is the most bracing antidote for this kind of thing: to be
successful I think one must be a Stoic with a heart. (ibid.; emphasis added)
Young Virginia is suggesting that social occasions are extraordinary things
that are created out of, but consciously differentiated from, the ordinary
and habitual in life; that successful parties could be termed “spiritual”
and not “material”; and that the hostess’s social skills could be something
beyond mere tact. The creation of a party, which is intended for the wellbeing of all participants, is an act of disinterestedness. Her observation
may not be able to escape snobbism, but she at least attempts to define the
nature of nobility that she senses in it. Her eyes, in short, notice something
that those who are actively involved in social events probably fail to see:
the hostess’s conscious and trained social skills and moral qualities which
make the party a success.
We know that this appreciation of the party and the hostess’s
social skills was, after some twenty years, to be developed into Woolf’s
recognition of the party as a work of art and of the hostess as an artist in
Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. What inspired Woolf’s philosophical
and aesthetic speculation about the party and the social skills needed for it,
gave the finishing touches to it, and led it to maturity? The answer may be
found in her encounter with Okakura’s Book of Tea.
5. Roger Fry as a Connector
According to Denys Sutton, the art critic and the editor of Letters of Roger
Fry, the artist and art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934) gained a deeper
appreciation of post-impressionism through his exposure to Far Eastern
78 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
art, and Okakura and his Book of Tea were his main source of inspiration.
He probably got to know Okakura around 1905—through the art collector
Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) or through Matthew Prichard
(1865–1946), Okakura’s British colleague at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston—when Fry, then a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum
of Art, visited Boston. Fry’s letters tell us that Okakura’s Book of Tea had
been given a special place in his library by November 1906 (the book had
been published in April 1906 in the U.S., and in May in Britain), and that
he and Okakura were close enough to exchange private visits by 1911.19
Fry’s opening of Omega Workshops in 1913, the year of Okakura’s death,
could be interpreted as his realization of teaism, or his practice of unifying
art and life. This practice may even enable us to define Fry as a successor
to the artist and textile designer William Morris (1834–1896), who was,
with the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), also under
the influence of late nineteenth-century British japonisme; and yet one spur
to that direction of beautifying life must have been Fry’s association with
Okakura around 1910 and his appreciation of the Japanese critic’s work.
It struck Fry as natural that he should launch the first Post-Impressionist
Exhibition in Britain just after the massive 1910 Japan–British Exhibition,
for he recognized japonisme in post-impressionism: “[after their exposure to
Far Eastern art,] our artists will develop a new conscience, will throw over
all the cumbrous machinery of merely curious representation, and will seek
only the essential elements of things [which is one important principle of
the Far Eastern aesthetic].”20
Japonisme is obvious in the works of Vanessa Bell, a post-impressionist
artist and Woolf’s sister—for instance, in the lithographic image that she
designed for Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which is suggestive of Hokusai’s
woodcut of waves and Mount Fuji, entitled “Under the Wave off
Kanagawa.”21 The sisters’ intimacy with Fry developed in 1910; and he
became Woolf’s devoted friend and Bell’s mentor, co-worker, and lover.
Post-impressionists were modernists and “new romantics,” who found
beauty in strangeness, or in Asian and African art forms. Roger Fry might
See the 31 January 1905 and 30 November 1906 letters to Helen Fry; and the 28
March 1911 letter to Rothenstein, in Fry, Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Sutton, 1: 345, 235,
275.
19
20
21
Quoted in Sutton, “Introduction,” in Fry, Letters of Roger Fry, 1: 38.
See Kinoshita, “Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality.”
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
79
be understood as the one who made Virginia Woolf better acquainted with
Okakura’s work and aesthetics.
Woof was emotionally and aesthetically sympathetic to postimpressionism. She gave moral and intellectual support to Fry as well
as to Vanessa through her writings. Virginia published a review on postimpressionism partly to give Fry and his fellow post-impressionists her moral
support; and her 1911 article “The Post-Impressionists” received, according
to Vanessa, “the approval of both Roger Fry and Duncan Grant” (The Essays
1: 380n1). Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf were deeply involved in
the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, with Leonard working as
secretary for it. In 1927, Virginia published To the Lighthouse; one of its two
protagonists, Lily Briscoe, is a post-impressionist struggling to paint what she
grasps as the truth of life; and according to Andrew McNeillie, the editor of
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, this novel is the one in which Roger Fry’s “most
profound influence upon Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic finds its expression,” and
“the book she considered and regretted not dedicating to Fry” (The Essays
4: 465n28). In 1930 and 1934, Virginia volunteered to write a foreword to
Vanessa’s exhibition catalogue—“Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa
Bell” and “Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell.”
She was the biographer of Roger Fry and the chief speaker who heralded
the opening of the Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition in 1935. Although she
regarded herself as an amateur in the field of fine arts, Virginia believed
that, as an artist of prose, she shared the same concerns and was fighting for
the same cause as Vanessa and Fry: if they were post-impressionist painters
and critics, she was a post-impressionist novelist and critic.
6. No Direct Proof
There is no “direct” proof found so far to show that Virginia Woolf was
well acquainted with The Book of Tea; but there is “circumstantial”
evidence. One circumstantial proof is British japonisme. British intellectuals’
curiosity about Japan led to the establishment of the Japan Society in
London in 1891: they organized several lectures on Japan each year, and
published proceedings in book form. These include W. Harding Smith’s
22 March 1899 lecture “The Cha-no-yu, or Tea Ceremony,” part of which
was to become an appendix to the 1919 Foulis edition of The Book of
80 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
Tea. Okakura was an honorary member of the Society. A survey of TLS
and Athenaeum articles about Japan published in the early twentieth
century reveals not only that the British public’s interest in its politics,
society, and culture and art was growing; but also that, as the public’s
knowledge became substantial, Okakura’s books, particularly The Book of
Tea, acquired the status of a bible for students of Japanese studies. Woolf,
a cultured Londoner, could hardly have escaped such social and cultural
“fever,” which culminated in the 1910 Japan–British Exhibition in London:
she must have inhaled that particular intellectual air.
Virginia and Vanessa’s father Leslie Stephen’s Bostonian connections
should also be noted, for they may link Virginia to Okakura. The Boston
intellectual James Russell Lowell (1819–91) was Leslie Stephen’s close
friend and Woolf’s “god-father.”22 The Lowells were among the eminent
Bostonians with whom Okakura was associated. Henry James was a
literary friend of Leslie Stephen’s whose visits Virginia remembered, and
with whom she and Vanessa, even after their father’s death, occasionally
exchanged visits, and whose books, her diary entries show, Virginia
conscientiously and with much toil reviewed for the TLS. Henry James and
his brother, William, were in Mrs. Gardner’s cultural circle, where Okakura
was a popular figure, and the Japanese critic met and dined with Henry
James in London in 1908.23
In addition, a number of literary figures who surrounded and stimulated
Woolf are known to have responded to Japan eagerly. T. S. Eliot, a
Bloomsbury intellectual, encountered Okakura in Boston around 1905 and
“read Okakura’s books attentively”;24 he also became an enthusiast of the
Noh theater in London in the 1910s. A speculation is that it was Eliot’s
exposure to Far Eastern art that led him to meditate on the significance
of “tradition” and its relation to the artist’s individuality and the aesthetic
necessity of freedom from egotism; and that the fruit of his meditations
was his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919). Ezra Pound and his
fellow London poets practiced imagism, which was an amalgamation of
English poetry and haiku or tanka, Japanese poetry of seventeen or thirtyone syllables; the catalyst was, as T. S. Eliot might have put it, the poet
22
23
24
Lee, Virginia Woolf, 55.
See Kumamoto et al., eds., “Chronology,” in Okakura, Okakura Tenshin zenshu, 9: 429.
Benfey, “Introduction,” in Okakura, The Book of Tea, xiii.
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
81
himself—and, I would suggest, British modernism as japonisme in motion.
W. B. Yeats, who shared a passion for Noh with Eliot and Pound, adopted
the traditional theatrical aesthetic to his poetic plays; like Pound, while in
London he associated with Bloomsbury intellectuals, including Woolf.
As already mentioned, Roger Fry was inspired by Okakura and his Book
of Tea, which led him to confirm the contribution of the post-impressionist
aesthetic to fine arts. Arthur Waley, who started as a Chinese scholar at the
British Museum, was exposed to the Noh theater with Eliot and Yeats, and
gradually turned to Japanese studies: he published translations of Japanese
poetry in 1919; read his paper on Noh and his translation of some of the
plays, “The Nō: Some Translations,” presided over by Marie C. Stopes, the
scientist and author of the 1913 Plays of Old Japan: The Nō, at the Japan
Society in 1920; and then in 1925 published his well-known translation of
The Tale of Genji, which Woolf read and reviewed. According to Katherine
Mansfield’s biographer Gillian Boddy, Mansfield, Woolf’s literary rival, read
The Book of Tea as early as 1906,25 while Vincent O’Sullivan, the editor of
Mansfield’s letters, states that Mansfield went to the 1910 Exhibition in
London (The Collected Letters 102n2).
What about Woolf herself? Woolf’s diary entries, letters, and some of
her essays hint that she was interested in Japan and its art and culture,
although the Japanese tint is very subtle in her writings, which do not
directly discuss Japan. Her early diary entries tell us that, as young
aspiring artists, she and her sisters frequented the South Kensington (that
is, Victoria and Albert) Museum, which boasted a large collection of
Japanese items. Through her letters, we learn that her association with
Violet Dickinson, her surrogate mother and sister, made her, at least for
several months between 1905 and 1906, a passionate student of Japanese
art and culture. Mrs. Dickinson, with Lady Robert Cecil, embarked on a
world cruise, and Japan was one of the countries which they visited. Their
letters about Japan and the Japanese stimulated Virginia, who greedily
read books about Japan in London; in her 10 November 1905 letter to
Lady Cecil, she boasts that she has become “an authority about Japan” and
would be “given the Japanese books to do for the Times” (The Letters 211).
Her letters to Mrs. Dickinson and Lady Cecil show that she was as excited
about Japan as though she herself were with them in that strange country.
25
Hisayo Ikeda, “Katherine Mansfield,” 16; and Boddy, Katherine Mansfield, 45.
82 HORIZONS, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013)
Her interest in Japan endured: in April 1907, she reviewed Mrs.
Lorriemer’s The Call of the East for the TLS; and her brief letter in autumn
1907 to R. C. Trevelyan—who let her know about the lectures of Laurence
Binyon, an established scholar of Japanese and oriental arts—suggests
that her passion for Japan was being distilled. Her 14 and 16 June 1925
diary entries show that, by that time, Woolf felt at ease about reviewing
books about Japan. She wrote, with no difficulty, her review of Waley’s
translation of the first volume of The Tale of Genji: she read the book and
completed the first draft in two days, and on 16 June, she wrote, “This is
the fag end of my morning’s work on Genji, which runs a little too easily
from my pen & must be compressed & compacted” (The Diary 31). The
review for Vogue was published in late July that year.
Woolf, a very conscientious and committed reviewer who had the habit
of conducting a thorough study on a subject new to her, did no preparatory
research for this review—which shows that in 1925, when she published
Mrs Dalloway, she was able to write about Japanese art and culture with
confidence and ease. In her letters and articles she occasionally employs
things Japanese as figures of speech: in a 13 April 1909 letter, she says
that her imaginary obituary for Lady Cecil would be “something like a
Japanese watercolour, with an angular ivory face” (The Letters 390); and in
“Is Fiction an Art?,” her 1927 review of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel,
she maintains that Forster’s ordinary-sounding writing contains truths “like
those Japanese flowers which open up in the depth of the water” (The
Essays 4: 459).
Nevertheless, we have so far found no factual evidence that Woolf did
read Okakura’s Book of Tea. The title of the book cannot be found in the
list of the Woolfs’ private library—Washington State University’s Catalogue
of Books from the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf—although the list
is far from a complete list of all the books which they cherished.
With no definitive factual evidence, I would still suggest that Woolf
and her contemporary artists heard the “call” of long-lost ancestors and
“fathers,” as well as of “strangers,” in Okakura’s “call of the East” in
The Book of Tea, for the tea ceremony is, in both its spirit and form, an
amalgamation of Eastern and Western traditions, and Okakura’s teaism
was, as it were, his amalgamation of occidental and oriental aesthetics.
Okakura reconstructed in his work “the heaven of modern humanity”
which had been shattered into two opposing hemispheres, and by doing so,
Kinoshita | A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf
83
retrieved “the jewel of life” (BT 8), to which Woolf and her fellow London
intellectuals eagerly responded.
This paper is largely based on my presentation paper, “A Study for Far Eastern Influences on Virginia
Woolf: Okakura Kakuzo, Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf,” which was read at the second Japan–Korea
Virginia Woolf Conference, “Reading Woolf in the 21st Century,” held at Doshisha University, Kyoto,
Japan on 23 March, 2013. The paper was based on my five earlier research papers on Woolf, listed
below in the Works Cited. I am very grateful to Korean and Japanese participants for their feedback at
the 2013 conference. My recent research on Woolf and Okakura was made possible by a research grant
provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Most of the research was done at the
British Library, London; the Japan Society, London; Kyoto University Library, Kyoto; and National Diet
Library in Kansai, Japan.
Kobe Women’s University
K EYWORDS | Virginia Woolf, Kakuzo Okakura, Roger Fry, Modernism, Japonisme, Fin-de-siècle
aestheticism, Pater, Wilde, Proust
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