Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/177

Rh the Greeks and Etruscans never turned out more classically lovely although simple designs) have reached a very high level of art. I wonder why they never seem to be mentioned in the artistic rhapsodies of writers on things Japanese. It is a well-known fact that however common the object, however modest and lowly the use to which it is allotted, taste and care and love—for it comes to that—is put into the shape and the decoration of it. The latches of their doors, the screws of their cabinets, the shapes of their wooden water buckets, the patterns on their towels, indeed everything they have, either for use or for beauty, is adorned, and well adorned too. And so these stone basins close to the veranda, used for washing hands in a simple peasant’s modest domain, may be of so truly good and artistic a shape as to be worthy of a place near the work of the early Greeks. This is not in the least an exaggeration; indeed, it is the latter who are honoured in the comparison: for in dignity, simplicity, chastity, and restraint in decoration the Japanese are second to none, and yet this is not at the expense of beauty and of the greatest conceivable variety.

I would not say, nevertheless, that all water-basins are of a sort to withstand the test of comparison with those of the acknowledged masters of form, the Greeks, for many can only be compared with Nature’s own hewing,