“Dr. Wernekke’s [translation] is the more literal, but Miss Wadsworth’s reads more smoothly.”
+ Ind. 60: 1597. Je. 28, ’06. 360w.
“The chief defect of the book is its tone of assurance, the author’s fancies being affirmed with the same positiveness as if they were scientific observations of philosophical deductions.”
– + Outlook. 83: 243. My. 26, ’06. 190w. Outlook. 83: 357. Je. 16, ’06. 1210w.
Fenollosa, Mary McNeil (Mrs. Ernest F. Fenollosa) (Sidney McCall, pseud.). [Dragon painter.] †$1.50. Little.
The depth of feeling which the Japanese of the passing generation hold for Japan and the art that has always been hers is strongly brought out in this story of Kano Indara, the last of a line of great artists, who views with terror the encroachments of western art. He hears of Tatsu, the wild mountain dragon painter and, in his deathless longing for an artist-son, he sends for him and gives to him his daughter Umè-Ko that he may be indeed his son, and also because he could not hold him otherwise, for the youth has painted his dragon-pictures merely because his soul was filled with a longing for the dragon-maid, his mate thruout all incarnations. When he finds her in Kano’s daughter his great love absorbs the artist in him and Kano, who lives for art alone, in his rage and disappointment takes the young wife from her too-loving husband until, from the depths of his great grief and agony of spirit, the artist in him once more emerges, then she is restored to him as from the dead.
“In our judgment ‘The dragon painter’ is far inferior as a novel to either ‘Truth Dexter’ or ‘The breath of the gods.’”
+ – Arena. 36: 686. D. ’06. 530w. + + Ind. 61: 1494. D. 20, ’06. 590w. + Nation. 83: 396. N. 8, ’06. 330w. N. Y. Times. 11: 812. D. 1, ’06. 170w.
“One does not need to have had any personal experience in the land of which Mrs. Fenollosa writes in order to be perfectly certain that these pages give a truthful picture of Japanese domestic life and a faithful revelation of the inner depths of Japanese feeling—not one of those specious translations of Japan in terms of modern ‘Westernism.’”