This editorial from the American Harper's New Monthly Magazine describes what the editor calls "the present Japanese craze in this country," by which he means the intense popularity of Japanese aesthetic and objects. The "Editor's Easy Chair" from April 1886 discusses the editor's exasperation with Gilbert's famous irascibility and litigiousness.

"The Editor's Easy Chair" was a several-page assemblage of thoughts, broken into sections. I reprint here only the second section from the April issue.

The full citation is

• "Editor's Drawer." Harper's New Monthly Magazine April 1886 (Vol. LXXII [72], No. CCCCXXXI [431]): 815.

It is getting to be very embarrassing, this civilization, especially to women. We are accumulating so much, our establishments are becoming so complicated, that daily life is an effort. There are too many "things." Our houses are getting to be museums. A house now is a library, an art gallery, a bric-a-brac shop, a furniture warehouse, a crockery story, combined. It is a great establishment run for the benefit of servants, plumbers, furnace-men, grocers, tinkers. Regarded in one light, it is a very interesting place, and in another, it is an eleemosynary institution. We are accustomed to consider it a mark of high civilization; that is to say, the more complicated and overloaded we make our domestic lives, the more civilized we regard ourselves. Now perhaps we are on the wrong track altogether. Perhaps the way to high civilization is toward simplicity and disentanglement, so that the human being will be less a slave to his surroundings and impedimenta, and have more leisure for his own cultivation and enjoyment. Perhaps life on much simpler terms than we now carry it on with would be on a really higher plane. We have been looking at some pictures of Japanese dwellings, interiors. How simple they are! how little furniture or adornment! how few "things" to care for and be anxious about! Now the Japanese are a very ancient people. They are people of high breeding, polish, refinement. They are in some respects like the Chinese, who have passed through ages and cycles of experience, worn out about all the philosophies and religions then on, and come out on the other side of everything. They have learned to take things rather easily, not to fret, and to get on without a great many encumbrances that we still wearily carry along. When we look at the Japanese houses and at their comparatively simple life, are we warranted in saying that they are behind us in civilization? May it not be true that they have lived through all our experience, and come down to an easy modus vivendi? They may have had their bric-a-brac period, their over-loaded-establishment age, their various measles stages of civilization, before they reached a condition in which life is a comparatively simple affair. This thought must strike any one who sees the present Japanese craze in this country. For, instead of adopting the Japanese simplicity in our dwellings, we are adding the Japanese eccentricities to our other accumulations of odds and ends from all creation, and increasing the incongruity and the complication of our daily life. What a helpless being is the housewife in the midst of her treasures! The Drawer has had occasion to speak lately of the recent enthusiasm in this country for the "cultivation of the mind." It has become almost a fashion. Clubs are formed for this express purpose. But what chance is there for it in the increasing anxieties of our more and more involved and overloaded domestic life? Suppose we have clubs -- Japanese clubs they might be called -- for the simplification of our dwellings and for getting rid of much of our embarrassing menage!

To Act I or Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

To the homepage of this Mikado website.

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