He then began to talk upon the subject which interested him above all others, the smartness and swiftness of his yacht. 'I am trying to persuade your mother and aunt to go for a cruise with me, and I think I shall succeed.'
He directed me to the studio, and we parted.
I found Cyril in a large and lofty studio in Chelsea, filled with the curiously carved black furniture of Bombay, mixed, for contrast, with a few Indian cabinets of carved and fretted ivory exquisitely wrought. He greeted me cordially. The walls were covered with Japanese drawings. I began by asking him about The Caricaturist.
'Well,' said he, 'now that the House of Commons has become a bear-garden, and t'other House a waxwork show, and the intellect and culture of the country are leaving politics to dummies and cads, how can the artistic mind condescend to caricature the political world—a world that has not only ceased to be intelligent, but has even ceased to be funny? The quarry of The Caricaturist will be literature, science, and art. Instead of wasting artistic genius upon such small fry as premiers, diplomatists, and cabinet ministers, our cartoons will be caricatures of the pictures of Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Watts, Sandys, Whistler, Wilderspin: our letterpress will be Aristophanic parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne; game worth flying at, my boy! The art-world is in a dire funk, I can tell you, for the artistic epidermis has latterly grown genteel and thin.'
Already I was beginning to ask myself whether it was possible to make a confidant of this inscrutable cynic. 'You are fond of Oriental things?' I said, wishing to turn the subject. I looked round at the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese monstrosities scattered about the room.
'That,' said he, pointing to a picture of a woman (apparently drunk) who was amusing herself by chasing butterflies, while a number of broad-faced, mischievous-looking children were teasing her—'that is the masterpiece of Hokusai. The legend in the corner is "Kiyó-jo chó ni tawamureru," which, according to the lying Japanese scholars, means nothing more than "A cracked woman chasing butterflies." It was left for me to discover that it represents Yoka, the goddess of Fun, sportively chasing the butterfly souls of men, while the urchins, the little Yokas, are crying, "Ma! you're screwed."'
'But what are these quaint figures?' I asked, pointing to certain drawings of an obese Japanese figure, grinning with lazy good-humour above several of the cabinets.
'Hoteï, the fat god of enjoyment.'
'A Japanese god?' I asked.
'Yes, nothing artistic is quite right now unless it has a savour of blue mould or Japan. Wonderful people, the Japanese, to have discovered the Jolly Hoteï. And here is Hoteï's wife, the goddess-queen Yoka herself—the real masquerader behind that mystic veil which has so enveloped and bemuddled the mind of poor Wilderspin. She is to figure in the first number of The Caricaturist.'