Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/77

RV 55 printer should exercise very great care in placing each sheet accurately in position on each successive block. Otherwise the colours will overlap the outlines of one another.

Of course, in the greater number of cases the artist will leave many of the duties here assigned to him to his subordinates. In recent times, this must have to a great extent been the case, and both engraving and printing, to say nothing of the arrangement of the colour blocks, must have been left to the supervision of a pupil, or even in the hands of the engraver, or, more likely still, in those of the publishing printer.

What are the special charms which have won for the paintings, woodcuts, and chromo-xylographs of the ukiyo-ye masters such applause in Europe and America? How is it that a branch of pictorial art which Japanese connoisseurs have always regarded with a certain measure of contempt, evokes the unstinted admiration of Occidental critics? Some answer the question by reference to the motives of the pictures. Here, they say, we have accurate representations of the people's occupations and pastimes, of domestic life with all its graces and conventions, of the fête and the festival, of love, of battle, of the chase, of elf-land, of the theatre, of the danseuse, of the demi-monde, of highway scenes, and of street panoramas. Some, again, reply by pointing to the immense mine of decorative wealth that Western designers may find in the detail of the nishiki-ye. Such comments are doubtless true, but they appear very unsatisfying. It is not to obtain information about Japanese fashions and habits, nor yet to find a novel pattern for a book cover or a wall-paper, that the collectors of New York, of Boston, of Paris, and of London eagerly seek and jealously preserve these specimens of Japanese art. Other reasons present