Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/70

Rh realistic accuracy; I wonder what artistic meaning there is, for instance, when people, even acknowledged critics, speak with much admiration of the anatomical exactness of those skeletons fantastically dancing to the ghost's music in that famous Jigoku-dayu picture. Let me ask again what the picture would lose, supposing, for instance, the most whimsical dancers around the courtesan's gorgeous robe had two or three joints of bone missing; is not Kyosai's realistic minuteness, which the artist was perhaps proud of displaying, in truth, rather a small subordinate part in his pictures? He was already in the present age, many years before his death, when many a weak artistic mind of Japan only received, from the Western art, confusion and reasoning, but not strength and passion. Now let me ask you: was it Kyosai's artistic greatness to accept the Western science of art?

He was never original in the absolute understanding as Sesshu, Korin, in a lesser degree Harunobu and Hokusai were; it might be that he was born too late in the age, or is it more true to say that his astonishing knowledge of the old Japanese art acted to hold him back from striking out an original line? Education often makes one a coward. When I say that he was himself the sum total of all Japanese art, I do not mean to undervalue him, but rather to do justice to his versatility and the swing of his power. And it 5