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.
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