The crowning glory of the popular Japanese school was Hokusai, “The old man mad about painting,” who wrote of himself, in a preface to his “Hundred Views of Fuji”:
At seventy-five I have learned a little about the real structure of nature—of animals, plants and trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do—be it but a line or dot—will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I do to see if I do not keep my word.
Hokusai died in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, his work revealing a continual increase in power to the last. Of his work, Mrs. Amsden writes:
His fecundity was marvelous. He illustrated books of all kinds, poetry, comic albums, accounts of travels—in fact, his works are an encyclopedia of Japanese life. His paintings are scattered, and countless numbers lost, many being merely ephemeral drawings, thrown off for the passing pleasure of the populace.
On his death-bed Hokusai murmured, “If heaven had but granted me five more years I could have been a repainter.”—Dora Amsden, “Impressions of Ukiyo-ye.”
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FAME, ILLUSIVE
A rather amusing illustration of the slender foundation on which literary fame rests is found in the following:
“Literary fame is not always highly regarded by the people,” says William Dean Howells. “I remember when I was in San Remo, some years ago, seeing in a French newspaper this notice by a rat-trap maker of Lyons:
“‘To whom it may concern: M. Pierre Loti, of Lyons, inventor of the automatic rat-trap, begs to state that he is not the same person and that he has nothing in common with one Pierre Loti, a writer.’”