The whole question of condition is one of personal taste; collectors are by no means agreed about it. European collectors have been, as a rule, less insistent upon condition than have the Japanese and Americans. There are collectors--though they grow fewer daily--who positively prefer faded and "toned" prints, because of their softness. This view is an ill-advised one. I do not say that, if one can have none other, the damaged prints may not give one pleasure and intimations of the original beauty that was theirs; but I do affirm that such prints are but makeshifts, and that their market value is, and always will be, very slight. When I began collecting many years ago in Japan, I purchased a number of Hokusai prints that were much blackened by exposure. I thought at the time that any trace of the work of so famous a master was worth treasuring. But I have found that my purchase was quite valueless, not only from the commercial point of view, but also from the artistic, since they do not represent the work of Hokusai with the slightest approach to adequacy. Perfect condition conveys to us perfectly the artist's conception; anything else obliterates or modifies his design. Though the beauty of faded or damaged prints is often indisputable, and though some prints are so saturated with beauty that a certain charm remains as long as any trace of the printing is visible, yet these wrecks and fragments are not the desirable specimens. The slight softening of the colours that almost always comes with age is perhaps not detrimental; but when the luminosity of the colours and the brilliant whiteness of the paper is gone, an irreparable loss has been suffered. For the white spaces and the reflective effect of the white fibres under the coloured spaces were integral and vital elements in the artist's design; and one cannot say that this is not injured when the paper has been turned to a dingy brown. Further, it is almost childish to prefer the time-changed colours to the fresh ones. For surely, if these prints have any value at all, it is not the kind of value that beautifully weather-marked pebbles have: their significance lies in whatsoever spiritual values their designers put into them. They are not curiosities of nature, but monuments erected by the human spirit in its search for beauty. We go very far astray when we admire what is in fact lamentable disintegration. To delight in the faded tone of a print is like delighting in the cracks of the Sistine Chapel.