he search for slight deformity is so constant as
to make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspective
foreshortening. With us it is to the youngest child only that there
would appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violently
forward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders." The
European child would not see fun in the living man so presented,
but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiously
humorous in a drawing. But so only when he is quite young. The Japanese
keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour. It amuses him, but
not perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened
figure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and
dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it than
the simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion of
ignominy. And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not precisely
scorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models. He
makes free with them on equal terms. He is familiar with them.

And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need to
insist upon the ignoble character of those that are intentional
caricatures.

Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of
symmetry. The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, and
would be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that art
afresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew. But whatever may be
the phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in the
body of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul. Its balance is
equal. Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological fact
where there is no symmetry interiorly. For the centres of life and
movement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality. Man is
Greek without and Japanese within. But the absolute symmetry of the
skeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a
principle. It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human
action. Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infinite
incidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of
sleep--the symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is that
symmetry complete in attitude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance and the
battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because this
hand holds the goad and that