Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/66

Rh day of her third anniversary that he gathered all the musician accompanists of flute and drum before her lonely grave at Uyeno, and he, of course in the full costume of the character, performed the whole piece of the said Sambaso. Fancy the scene in the graveyard damp with mosses, dark with the falling foliage; and the actor is no other but fantastic Kyosai. Where could be found a more gruesome sight than that? This story among others we find in Kyosai Gwaden is most characteristic in that no other artist of the long Japanese history, perhaps with the possible exception of Hokusai, could make it fit for himself; the story reveals Kyosai's honesty almost to a fault, that sounds at once childish or madman-like, a temperament, unlike that of Southern Japan of female refinement and voluptuousness, which only the proud plebeianism of the Yedo civilisation (what an ultra-European imbecility of present Tokyo!) could create, the temperament, uncompromising, most difficult to be neutral. If we call Icho Hanabusa the most proper representative of old Yedo's Genroku Age, the time when people found spirituality through the consecration of materialism, I think we can well call Kyosai the representative of the later Tokugawa Age (although his life extended a good many years into the present Meiji era) which, again like his own art, fell with the abruptness of an oak-tree. I have some reason when I beg your