Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/67

62 attention to the above characteristic story of Kyosai.

The love of the No drama, the classic of lyrical fascination exclusively patronised by nobles and people of taste, would never be taken as strange in Kyosai who stayed sixteen long years with that master of the old Kano art, Tohaku Kano, till he parted from it in his twenty-seventh year perhaps for an art wider and truer, or, let me say, to find his own artistic soul all by his own impulse and strength; and when we see what attachment, even reverence, he had, during his whole life, toward the name of Toiku given him by the old master, the name we find in Kyosai Gwaden and other books, we can safely say that his classic passion in general must have been quite strong. The question is where his plebeianism could find room to rise and fall. That is the point where, not only in his art, also in his personality, he showed in spite of himself a tragi-comic oddity, mainly from the rupture between the two extremes of temperament. I am told by his personal friend who survives to-day that he was rather pleased to shock and frighten the most polite society which reverently congregated in the silent house of the No drama, to begin with, by his informal dress only suitable for the street shopkeeper or mechanic, then with his occasional shout of praise over the beautiful turn of the acting, in a voice touched with vulgar audacity; he exclaimed,