KYOSAI
I acknowledged my friend's characterisation, after some reluctance, of our Kyosai Kawanabe as a Japanese Phil May; as the artist of Punch has often received the appellation of an English Hokusai, I do not see much harm, speaking generally, in thus falling into the feminine foible of comparison-making. Putting aside the question of the material achievement in art of those artists of the East and West, in truth so different (Kyosai surpassing the other, let me say, in variety), one will soon see that their innermost artistic characters are closely related; their seeming difference is the difference of education and circumstances from which even their original minds could hardly escape. I do not know much of the bacchanalianism of Phil May, but I know well enough that its sway is not so expansive in England as in Japan, at least old Japan, where the fantastic artists like Kyosai revelled around the ghosts they created in the sweet cup of saké. When we see Kyosai writing in front of his name the epithet Shojo, applied to the half-human
