From the standpoint of Buddhism, Hokusai was the crowning glory, the supreme efflorescence of countless previous incarnations. In his career he epitomized the theory of evolution, the embryonic stages being exemplified by his progress through the schools. Trained in the atelier of Shunsho, the most skillful exponent of Ukiyo-ye art, he rapidly absorbed the methods of his master; but even the Popular School was trammelled by convention, and Hokusai’s genius, rejecting academic fetters, winged its flight through all the realms of oriental art. He drank at the fountain-head of China, then absorbed the traditions of the “two great streams of Kano and Tosa, which flowed without mixing to the middle of the eighteenth century.” Kano, springing from Chinese models, was transformed by the genius of Masanobu and his followers, and became the most illustrious school of painting in Japan. It was the official school of the Shoguns, in opposition to “Tosa”—that elegant and exquisite appanage of the Mikados, which represented aristocratic taste. The Tosa school is characterized by extreme delicacy of execution and fine use of the brush, as in Persian miniature painting. The splendour of the screens of Tosa has never been surpassed, with their precious harmonies in colour and delicate designs (so often imitated in lacquer), against glorious backgrounds in rich gold-leaf. He studied the technique of Okio, founder of the school of realism, which, maturing at Kyoto, led up to “Ukiyo-ye,” the popular art of the masses of Yedo. Ukiyo-ye, literally “The Floating World,” despised by the ascetic disciples of Buddha and Confucius for picturing the gay world of fashion and folly, was the name of the school which liberated Japanese art from the shackles of centuries of tradition. [Illustration: Two Ladies. By Hokusai.] Ukiyo-ye is the supreme expression, the concentrated essence of the schools, a river of art whose fount was India, Persia and China. For centuries it was forced into narrow channels by the haughty and exclusive aristocracy; but ever widening, its branches at last united and swept into their joyous current the common people of Japan, who, intuitively art lovers, had ever thirsted for the living stream. Now they beheld themselves reflected, in all the naturalness of daily life, yet with a spiritual rendering, “appealing,” said Jarves, “to those intuitions with which the soul is freighted when it first comes to earth, whose force is ever manifested by a longing for an ideal not of the earth, and whose presence can only be explained as an augury of a superior life to be, or else the dim reminiscence of one gone; and the recognition of this ideal is the touchstone of art—art which then becomes the solution of immortality.”