Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/238

 a many-plyed train which followed her like a gigantic enlargement of the fan that never for a moment left her hand, she always seemed to be struggling to emerge from a cataract of habiliments that threatened at any moment to overwhelm her. The records say, and the paintings of contemporary artists show, that twenty garments, one above the other, went to the costume of a fine lady à la mode of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Of course the object of this extravagance was not to produce an appearance of bulk. On the contrary, the aim of a well-dressed woman was to have her robes cut so deftly and to don them so skilfully that they conveyed the impression, not of a mass of stuffs, but of a play of harmonious colours. There was nothing garish or rainbow-like in the combination. The ground colour—that is to say, the colour of the outer garment—seemed at first to be all-pervading; but closer inspection showed that where these multitudinous robes lay folded across the bosom and where their pendent sleeves telescoped into one another, each ply receded by a fraction of an inch from the ply below it, so that the whole produced the effect of a slightly oblique section made across numerous superimposed layers of differently tinted silks. Much attention was directed also to the art of transmitted colour. By using material thin enough to give passage to a breath of the underlying garment's hue, and by carefully studying, not the science of colours, but