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.
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