Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/63

58 through which Kyosai's many pictures came into existence, while his many other works, for instance the frontispiece woodcut of Professor Conder's Kyosai book, the elaborate picture of a Japanese beauty of the eleventh century, or the famous courtesan, Jigoku-dayu, in company with a demon, also the highly finished work owned by Mrs. William Anderson, or the other pictures I have seen more or less by accident, prove that he can be an equally splendid artist in a different direction while in perfect sobriety. He was born in the year 1831, that is about thirty years, roughly speaking, before the fall of the Tokugawa feudalism, when the age was fast decaying into loose morality and saké-drinking; and when he became a man, he found that the art's dignity under whose kind shadow he had studied as a student of Tohaku Kano, the leading artist of that famous Kano family in those days, had fallen flat, and that his ability made no satisfactory impression on people who had likely forgotten their artistic appreciation in the tumult of the Restoration; and I think it was natural enough for Kyosai to call upon the wine, as we say here, to sweep away the grievance, and to invoke, through it, a divine influence upon his art. And it is the old Japanese way to speak of wine-drinking and general revel with innocent gusto, as I find in Kyosai Gwaden, an illustrated autobiography here and there humorously exaggerated