Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/62

Rh red-haired bacchanals of Chinese legend, we might say he betrayed, beside his full-faced confession of the love of the cup, the fact of his natural attachment to Toba Sojo, that apostle of humour, whose pictorial wantonness may have given him many a hint; indeed he might have, like Phil May, adorned the pages of Punch, although many an admirer of his, like Josiah Conder in Paintings and Studies by Kyosai Kawanabe, a sumptuous book on the artist containing the representative work of his last eight years, sees only the serious side of his work. And when he changed the Chinese character of his name from that of "dawn" to that of "madness," I think that he was laughing, at his own expense, over the lawless excitement he most comically acted when the excess of wine deceived him away from the imaginative path of inspiration, while, like Hokusai in the well-known epithet Gwakyo Rojin or Old Man Crazy at Painting, he sanctified to himself his own craze for painting. It is an interesting psychological study to speculate on the possible relation between the Japanese wine and our artists' minds; I think it was a superstition or faith, I might say, founded on tradition, that they called the wine an invoker of inspiration, as I see the fact to-day that many of them find the divine breath in something else. However, I am thankful to the Japanese liquid with its golden flash, if it really acted as the medium