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A Japanese netsuke is an elaborately-carved ivory button of various shapes and sizes no two are alike; they take the form of men or animals and, as a rule, are executed with amazing delicacy, and, if signed and old, are of considerable value. Mrs.
No more than from the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
In addition to his tsubas and prints, Willy had a collection of so-called netsuke, some in boxwood, some in ivory, small, dice-like carvings, representing with remarkable animation all sorts of real and fantastic scenes. Among the finest of Willy's possessions was a Japanese figure carved in wood not more than a foot high, a woman selling oysters. Each least detail was most precisely rendered.
Still, it was nothing but a bare hypothesis until we had seen Futashima and, indeed, is no more now. I may, after all, be entirely mistaken." He was not, however; and at this moment there reposes in my drawing-room an ancient netsuke, which came as a thank-offering from Mr. Isaac Löwe on the recovery of the booty from a back room in No. 13, Birket Street, Limehouse.
Tobacco was introduced into the country in the same century, and the smoking thereof soon came greatly into vogue among the Japanese people. Tobacco necessitated a pouch or bag to contain the same, and this in turn induced or produced the manufacture of something wherewith to attach the bag to the girdle. Hence the evolution of the netsuké, now as famous in Europe as in Japan.
The netsuké, strictly speaking, was the toggle attached by a cord to the tobacco pouch, inro, or pipe of the Japanese man, with the object of preventing the article slipping through the girdle or sash, but the word has been more loosely employed by foreigners until, in popular parlance, it has come to embrace all small carvings.
The distinguishing characteristic of the true netsuké is two holes admitting of a string being run through them. These holes were often concealed behind the limbs of the figure. The material of which netsukés were made varied, and consisted of ivory, wood horns, fish-bones, and stones of various kinds.
Of the first kind are the beautiful bronze figures of the Buddha, like the Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and ninety-seven feet round, in whose face all that is grand and noble lies sleeping, the living representation of Nirvana; and of the second, those odd little ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the most part, grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and devils.
The netsuké, I must reiterate, was an almost indispensable adjunct to the costume of every Japanese man, and it was, accordingly, made for use and not for ornament alone. Of late years wood and ivory sculpture in Japan has largely degenerated and deteriorated owing to the output of articles not of utility, but made for the foreign market "curios," in fact.
He may have spoken twenty words, he was too stupid to speak more; the others spoke a good deal, but, except that they had been told beforehand, as to each act, about as much as the reader has been told about the second, all they said was impromptu, so that each repetition, like a Japanese netsuke, would be a unique work of art.
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