Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/192

162, he had a touch, a lovely feeling, an impressiveness of his own. When he sought a foundation for his discourses upon art, he wisely went to the best ideals known to him. His lectures are in the main sound; no artist, even a recanter, can afford not to read them; yet the attempt to carry them out almost confirmed the English School in "correct," rigid, and lifeless methods. And why? Because Sir Joshua, an original painter in his studio, in his teachings did not sufficiently allow for and inculcate a local, climatic, racial divergence from his revered Italian models.

Now, the Indo-European ideals of beauty usually Diverse ideals of another people. have been the foundation of academic theoretics upon art, just as they are interwrought, in sooth, with English poetry, and with the great criticism thereon,—from Lamb and Coleridge to Dryden and Arnold and Lowell. But what would Sir Joshua Reynolds have made of the extreme antipodal type, that of those Asiatic Greeks,—our delightful Japanese? To be sure, there were Indian and Chinese cults, but these were merely capricious and accessory, and not pursued to any just appreciation of their ideals. Here, then, in The Japanese. Japan is a race developed under distinctive biological conditions, with types of art and life almost the reverse of our own, yet perfectly consistent throughout, and—as we now see—superior to those of Western civilization in more than one department. Its ideals are just as perfect as those