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. 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