The art of Japan has none but an exterior part in the history of the art of nations.Being in its own methods and attitude the art of accident, it has, appropriately, an accidental value.It is of accidental value, and not of integral necessity.The virtual discovery of Japanese art, during the later years of the second French Empire, caused Europe to relearn how expedient, how delicate, and how lovely Incident may look when Symmetry has grown vulgar.
The lesson was most welcome.Japan has had her full influence.
European art has learnt the value of position and the tact of the unique.But Japan is unlessoned, and (in all her characteristic art) content with her own conventions; she is local, provincial, alien, remote, incapable of equal companionship with a world that has Greek art in its own history - Pericles "to its father."Nor is it pictorial art, or decorative art only, that has been touched by Japanese example of Incident and the Unique.Music had attained the noblest form of symmetry in the eighteenth century, but in music, too, symmetry had since grown dull; and momentary music, the music of phase and of fragment, succeeded.The sense of symmetry is strong in a complete melody - of symmetry in its most delicate and lively and least stationary form - balance; whereas the leit-motif is isolated.In domestic architecture Symmetry and Incident make a familiar antithesis - the very commonplace of rival methods of art.But the same antithesis exists in less obvious forms.The poets have sought "irregular" metres.Incident hovers, in the very act of choosing its right place, in the most modern of modern portraits.In these we have, if not the Japanese suppression of minor emphasis, certainly the Japanese exaggeration of major emphasis; and with this a quickness and buoyancy.The smile, the figure, the drapery - not yet settled from the arranging touch of a hand, and showing its mark - the restless and unstationary foot, and the unity of impulse that has passed everywhere like a single breeze, all these have a life that greatly transcends the life of Japanese art, yet has the nimble touch of Japanese incident.In passing, a charming comparison may be made between such portraiture and the aspect of an aspen or other tree of light and liberal leaf;whether still or in motion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness and expectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks and elms are gathered in their station.All this is not Japanese, but from such accident is Japanese art inspired, with its good luck of perceptiveness.
What symmetry is to form, that is repetition in the art of ornament.
Greek art and Gothic alike have series, with repetition or counter-change for their ruling motive.It is hardly necessary to draw the distinction between this motive and that of the Japanese.The Japanese motives may be defined as uniqueness and position.And these were not known as motives of decoration before the study of Japanese decoration.Repetition and counter-change, of course, have their place in Japanese ornament, as in the diaper patterns for which these people have so singular an invention, but here, too, uniqueness and position are the principal inspiration.And it is quite worth while, and much to the present purpose, to call attention to the chief peculiarity of the Japanese diaper patterns, which is INTERRUPTION.Repetition there must necessarily be in these, but symmetry is avoided by an interruption which is, to the Western eye, at least, perpetually and freshly unexpected.The place of the interruptions of lines, the variation of the place, and the avoidance of correspondence, are precisely what makes Japanese design of this class inimitable.Thus, even in a repeating pattern, you have a curiously successful effect of impulse.It is as though a separate intention had been formed by the designer at every angle.
Such renewed consciousness does not make for greatness.Greatness in design has more peace than is found in the gentle abruptness of Japanese lines, in their curious brevity.It is scarcely necessary to say that a line, in all other schools of art, is long or short according to its place and purpose; but only the Japanese designer so contrives his patterns that the line is always short; and many repeating designs are entirely composed of this various and variously-occurring brevity, this prankish avoidance of the goal.
Moreover, the Japanese evade symmetry, in the unit of their repeating patterns, by another simple device - that of numbers.
They make a small difference in the number of curves and of lines.
A great difference would not make the same effect of variety; it would look too much like a contrast.For example, three rods on one side and six on another would be something else than a mere variation, and variety would be lost by the use of them.The Japanese decorator will vary three in this place by two in that, and a sense of the defeat of symmetry is immediately produced.With more violent means the idea of symmetry would have been neither suggested nor refuted.
Leaving mere repeating patterns and diaper designs, you find, in Japanese compositions, complete designs in which there is no point of symmetry.It is a balance of suspension and of antithesis.
There is no sense of lack of equilibrium, because place is, most subtly, made to have the effect of giving or of subtracting value.
