In five minutes he had carried me far away from the clattering, fidgetty folk around, to a quiet world where men meditated for three weeks over a bronze, and scoured all Japan for a sword-guard designed by a great artist and—were horribly cheated in the end.
"Who is the best artist in Japan now?" I asked.
"He died in Tokio, last Friday, poor fellow, and there is no one to take his place. His name was K——, and as a general rule he could never be persuaded to work unless he was drunk. He did his best pictures when he was drunk."
"Ému. Artists are never drunk."
"Quite right. I'll show you a sword-guard that he designed. All the best artists out here do a lot of designing. K—— used to fritter away his time on designs for old friends. Had he stuck to pictures he could have made twice as much. But he never turned out potboilers. When you go to Tokio, make it your business to get two little books of his called Drunken Sketches—pictures that he did, when he was—ému. There is enough dash and go in them to fill half a dozen studios. An English artist studied under him for some time. But K——'s touch was not communicable, though he might have taught his pupil something about technique. Have you ever come across one of K——'s crows? You could tell it anywhere. He could put all the wicked thoughts that ever came into the mind of a crow—and a crow is first cousin to the Devil—on a piece of paper six inches square, with a brush of Indian ink and two turns of his wrist. Look at the sword-guard I spoke of. How is that for feeling?"
On a circular piece of iron four inches in diameter and pierced by the pole for the tang of the blade, poor K——, who died last Friday, had sketched the figure of a coolie trying to fold up a cloth which was bellying to a merry breeze—not a cold wind, but a sportive summer gust. The coolie was enjoying the performance, and so was the cloth. It would all be folded up in another minute and the coolie would go on his way with a grin.
This thing had K—— conceived, and the faithful workman executed, with the lightest touches of the graver, to the end that it might lie in a collector's cabinet in London.
"Wah! Wah!" I said, and returned it reverently. "It would kill a man who could do that to live after his touch had gone. Well for him he died—but I wish I had seen him. Show me some more."
"I've got a painting by Hokusai—the great artist who lived at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. Even you have heard of Hokusai, haven't you?"
"A little. I have heard it was impossible to get a genuine painting with his signature attached."