hat I never should--for he went away crushed.

THE GEISHA

CHAPTER VIII

THE GEISHA

With all their practical gifts--which, as one of themselves has
remarked, will enable them to beat the world with the tips of their
fingers--and all the power of assimilating and adapting to their own
purposes the best that other nations have to offer them,--the Japanese
are essentially and beyond all a nation of artists. It is not only in
the work-shop and the studio, but also in the simplest act and detail of
daily life, that this sense of the decorative oozes unconsciously forth,
and most of all, and most unconsciously, in the Japanese woman--the
geisha.

The _raison d'etre_ of the geisha is to be decorative. She delights in
her own delightsomeness; she wants frankly to be as charming as nature
and art will allow; she wants to be beautiful; and she honestly and
assuredly wants me and you and the stranger artists to think her
beautiful. She wants to please you, and she openly sets about pleasing,
taking you into her confidence (so to speak) as to her methods. She does
it with the simple joy and sincerity of a child dressing up. There is
no mock shyness, no fan put up, no screen drawn, no pathetic struggle to
deceive you into belief in the reality of an all-too-artificial
peach-bloom; there is nothing of the British scheme--no powder-puff
hidden in a pocket-handkerchief, no little ivory box with a
looking-glass in the lid, no rouge-tablet concealed in a muff to be
supplied surreptitiously at some propitious moment. The Japanese woman
has the courage to look upon her face purely as so much surface for
decoration, a canvas upon which to paint a picture; and she decorates it
as one might decorate a bit of bare wall. The white is simple vegetable
white; the red is pure vermilion toning with her kimono. The white makes
no effort to blend with the natural tone of her neck: it announces
itself in a clear-cut, knife-edge pattern above the folds of the kimono.

[Illustration: BUTTERFLIES]

I remember a little story that I once heard (it was told me by the
designer of the waterworks in Tokio)--only a trifling incident; but it
struck me as being thoroughly typical of the naive, almost childish
simplicity of the Japanese woman. It was on the day that the waterworks
were completed, and the high officials and their wives were being
escorted over the works in trucks, in order that they might see and
admire this great engineerin