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 the harrow, this the shield and that the sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequal heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength are inflections thereof.  All human movement is a variation upon symmetry, and without symmetry it would not be variation; it would be lawless, fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art.  The order of inflection that is not infraction has been explained in a most authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak experiments:  “Law, the rectitude of humanity,” says Mr Coventry Patmore, “should be the poet’s only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse’s will and knew it not.  As all the music of verse arises, not from infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the greatest poets have been those the modulus of whose verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings