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 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.