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The Colour of Life-Part7_Alice Meynell(1847-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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for a time indefinitely longer than the life of man, such dull form



as you had given to your work; to intrude upon posterity. To

survive yourself, to-day, is to let your work go into daily



oblivion.

Now, though the Japanese are not a destructive people, their paper



does not last for ever, and that material has clearly suggested to

them a different condition of ornament from that with which they



adorned old lacquer, fine ivory, or other perdurable things. For

the transitory material they keep the more purelypictorial art of



landscape. What of Japanese landscape? Assuredly it is too far

reduced to a monotonous convention to merit the serious study of



races that have produced Cotman and Corot. Japanese landscape-

drawing reduces things seen to such fewness as must have made the



art insuperably tedious to any people less fresh-spirited and more

inclined to take themselves seriously than these Orientals. A



preoccupied people would never endure it. But a little closer

attention from the Occidental student might find for their evasive



attitude towards landscape - it is an attitude almost traitorously

evasive - a more significant reason. It is that the distances, the



greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains,

and the flight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions



of a people intent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to

define by that phrase the curious Japanese search for accidents?



Upon such search these people are avowedly intent, even though they

show themselves capable of exquisiteappreciation of the form of a



normal bird and of the habit of growth of a normal flower. They are

not in search of 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 pictorialpresentation, and that the






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