Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/73

68 is, after all, the best judge, as we know that those pictures of Yoshitoshi's early days, when he had not yet found his own art, are most peacefully buried under the blessed oblivion and heavy dusts to-day. You cannot make an art only by wisdom and prayer, and it is better to commit youthful sin when one must, like Yoshitoshi, with his period of foreign imitation, since his later work would become intensified, chastened, and better balanced by his repentance.

To speak most strictly, Kuniyoshi should be called the last master of the Ukiyoye school, this interesting branch of Japanese art interpreting the love and romance of the populace, peculiarly developed through the general hatred of the aristocratic people; but I have reason to call Yoshitoshi Tsukioka the very last master of that school, in the same sense that we call Danjuro or Kikugoro the last actors, not less by the fact of the age, already heterogeneous, naturally weakened for holding up the old Japanese purity, against which he struggled hard to find an artistic compromise, than by his own gift. I have often thought that, if he had been born earlier, he might have proved himself another Hokusai, or, better still, if the time were still earlier, when love and sensuality were the same word in peace and prosperity, he would not have been much below Utamaro. If he failed, as indeed he failed, now, looking back from to-day,