"Hokusai is incomparable," writes the commentator who furnished the introduction to one of his books. "While all his predecessors were more or less slaves to classical tradition and inherited rules, he alone emancipated his brush from all such fetters, and drew according to the dictates of his heart." True: and this was his curse. No man has ever lived with heart profound and subtle enough for such emancipation. Nor have the supreme artists ever attempted it. In Hokusai's case this upstart-abandoning of all tradition was an error from which he was able later to retrieve himself; but so great was the impression produced by his vulgarities on the mob that even to this day popular Japanese art has remained under the cloud of it. Hokusai himself did recover. In his third period, the stylistic one, the greatness that was in him transcended his petty interest in the trivial idiosyncrasies of seen things, and he created those visions which constitute his lasting glory. Between 1823 and 1830 he issued those series, "The Thirty-six Views of Fuji," "The Bridges," "The Waterfalls," "The Loocho Islands," and "The Imagery of the Poets," in which we hail him as master. No longer the dupe of realism, he brings us his dreams. "The Thirty-six Views of Fuji" stands as one of his two greatest works. Here, in the forty-six plates that constitute the main series and the supplement, the same motive is treated recurrently, but with infinite variety. He depicts Fuji, the sacred mountain, in storm and calm, in mist and sunlight--sometimes dominating the colossally empty frame of the design, sometimes receding to a mere speck in the distance; and around the noble peak beat the waves of the sea and the foam of the clouds and the restless stream of human life, in a great epic of infinite diversity and profound unity. [Illustration: HOKUSAI: FUJI, SEEN FROM THE PASS OF MISHIMA, PROVINCE OF KAHI. One of the Series "Thirty-six Views of Fuji." Size 10½ × 15. Signed _Saki no Hokusai I-itsu, hitsu_. _Plate 50._] In this series his trivial realism is forgotten, or employed only in just subordination. Throwing aside his earlier vulgar absorption in the minutiæ of existence, he concentrated his vision on one conception, one chosen impression, so sharply and personally seen that he evoked a new style in landscape. Much it borrowed from tradition; but the flavour was Hokusai's. These designs are, primarily, magnificent studies in linear composition. The great sweep of Fuji's slope is related to the rhythm of every other line in the picture. And the line-dominance is preserved by the use of the simplest and most original of colour-schemes--green, blue, and brown--broadly laid on in large masses. A highly decorative quality and great boldness are the result.