of the perpetual
slight novelty which was Aristotle's ideal of the language poetic ("a
little wildly, or with the flower of the mind," says Emerson of the way
of a poet's speech)--and such novelty it is, like the frequent pulse of
the pinion, that keeps verse upon the wing; no, what the Japanese are
intent upon is perpetual slight disorder. In Japan the man in the fields
has eyes less for the sky and the crescent moon than for some stone in
the path, of which the asymmetry strikes his curious sense of pleasure in
fortunate accident of form. For love of a little grotesque strangeness
he will load himself with the stone and carry it home to his garden. The
art of such a people is not liberal art, not the art of peace, and not
the art of humanity. Look at the curls and curves whereby this people
conventionally signify wave or cloud. All these curls have an attitude
which is like that of a figure slightly malformed, and not like that of a
human body that is perfect, dominant, and if bent, bent at no lowly or
niggling labour. Why these curves should be so charming it would be hard
to say; they have an exquisite prankishness of variety, the place where
the upward or downward scrolls curl off from the main wave is delicately
unexpected every time, and--especially in gold embroideries--is
sensitively fit for the material, catching and losing the light, while
the lengths of waving line are such as the long gold threads take by
nature.

A moment ago this art was declared not human. And, in fact, in no other
art has the figure suffered such crooked handling. The Japanese have
generally evaded even the local beauty of their own race for the sake of
perpetual slight deformity. Their beauty is remote from our sympathy and
admiration; and it is quite possible that we might miss it in pictorial
presentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beauty
where we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is
certainly not difficult to guess at. And, accordingly, you are generally
aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity,
even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese artist, and
is represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior or
mousme. But even with this exception the habit of Japanese
figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked. It is
curious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant as
to ma