richness and splendour, with those made in the sumptuous days of the Ashikawa Regents. Aniline dyes and ‘Maypole Soaps’ are not for the Japanese, and even in these days the depth and delicacy of vegetable pigments for colouring silks and crêpes have not yet depreciated to that level.
But most of all in colour printing, in pictorial art, Japan has maintained the high excellence of her past standards. I am aware that most people will dispute this statement, and I am a little frightened when I make it, remembering the tons of meretricious pictures sold to my country people and others in the Treaty Ports, and abound to testify to the contrary. Oh, the glaring Fujis, the awful moonlight scenes, the crude and—happily—impossible sunsets behind inky-edged sail-boats, the dreadful, grinning geishas, which are sold by the thousand, to prove Japan’s poverty of purse and the wandering foreigners’ of taste! I quail when I look back on my former statement. But again, when I recollect the shops, obscure and small, in Tokio and Kyoto, where one can buy nothing else but beautiful colour prints—so happy, so inspired in design, that a handful picked up at random would mean half a dozen real treasures, to be examined at leisure later, I am reassured. For a few sen each one can buy little prints that no artist would scorn to own to-day, and that no layman would dare to scorn to-morrow.
