Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/248

162 alone is employed, and the upper fields of consciousness (if he has any, and I doubt it, in the case of these workpeople—artisans, not artists) are off somewhere else. For him is not the vision; the patient, painstaking toil is for pay; small as the object in ivory which he is carving. The Japanese, on the other hand, works joyously; the tiny figure throbs with arrested movement. No Noah’s Ark models for him, but sinuous, sleek bodies, rough, hairy monsters, microscopically perfect; not for him China’s fat, licentious gods, mandarins of nodding heads with human hair inserted for beards; but his Buddhas are mysterious in repose, his animals seem to snarl with life, his old men to stagger under their loads, his wrestlers to tussle with bone and sinew beneath the flesh, his rats to crawl, and his snakes to coil shudderingly. Now I must not be understood as admiring all this, because the most perfect ivory and porcelain figures seldom appeal to me; a carved netsuké used by a Japanese as a knob, as he intends it, not as a senseless ornament on a shelf in a cabinet, does.

In painting, this exquisiteness of detail is, as one might say, only in spots, to give the necessary relief to the freedom and boldness of the body of the design. But this restraint from the ‘touch too much’ is, to my mind, the greatest art of all. Then comes the appeal to the imagination, which carries the thoughtful