Page:The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi; 1915.djvu/79

74 Although he was, as I said above, most popular in the prime of his life (by the way he died in his fifty-fourth year in June of 1892), he had many years of poverty and discouragement when he complained of the fact that he was born rather too late; his hardship, not only spiritual, but material, soon followed after the happy period of student life with Kuniyoshi, when his artistic ambition forced on him independence. It was the time most inartistic, if there was ever such a time in any country, when the new Meiji Government had hardly settled itself on the sad ruins of the Tokugawa feudalism, under which all prosperity and peace, even art and humanity, were buried, and the people in general even thought the safety of their lives was beyond reach, now with the so-called Civil War of Meiji Tenth, and then with that or this. How could the artists get the people's support under such a condition of the times; indeed, Yoshitoshi fought bitterly for his bare existence then. It was the time when he was extremely hard-up that his home-students, Toshikage and Toshiharu, bravely served him in the capacity of cook or for any other work; we cannot blame him that he tried, with such pictures as the series called "Accident of the Lord Ii," to amuse and impress the people's minds, which grew, in spite of themselves, to love battle and blood. And the best result he received from such work, happy to