Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/59

 sent several easily distinguishable types, notably the patrician and the plebeian. This is not a question of mere coarseness in contrast with refinement; of the degeneration due to toil and exposure as compared with the improvement produced by gentle living and mental culture. The representative of the Japanese plebs has a conspicuously dark skin, prominent cheek bones, a large mouth, a robust and heavily boned physique, a flat nose, full straight eyes, and a receding forehead. The aristocratic type is symmetrically and delicately built; his complexion varies from yellow to almost pure white; his eyes are narrow, set obliquely to the nose; the eyelids heavy; the eyebrows lofty; the mouth small; the face oval; the nose aquiline; the hand remarkably slender and supple.

Here are two radically distinct types. What is more, they have been distinguished by the Japanese themselves ever since any method of recording such distinctions existed. For from the time when he first began to paint pictures, the Japanese artist recognised and represented only one type of male and female beauty, namely, that distinguished in a marked, often an exaggerated, degree by the features enumerated above as belonging to the patrician class. There has been no evolution in this matter. The painter had as clear a conception of his type ten centuries ago as he has to-day. Nothing seems more natural than the supposition that this higher type represents the