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 counterchange
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 counterchange, 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. A small thing is arranged to reply to a
large one, for the small thing is placed at the precise distance that
makes it a (Japanese) equivalent. In Italy (and perhaps in other
countries) the scales commonly in use are furnished with only a single
weight that increases or diminishes in value according as you slide it
nearer or farther upon a horizontal arm. It is equivalent to so many
ounces when it is close to the upright, and to so many pounds when it
hangs from the farther end of the horizontal rod. Distance plays some
such part with the twig or the bird in the upper corner of a Japanese
composition. Its place is its significance and its value. Such an art
of position implies a great art of intervals. The Japanese chooses a few
things and leaves the space between them free, as free as the pauses or
silences in music. But as time, not silence, is the subject, or
material, of contrast in musical pauses, so it is the measurement of
space--that is, collocation--that makes the value of empty intervals. The
space between this form and that, in a Japanese composition, is valuable
because it is just so wide and no more. And this, again, is only another
way of saying that position is the principle of this apparently wilful
art.
Moreover, the alien art of Japan, in its pictorial form, has helped to
justify the more stenographic school of etching. Greatly transcending
Japanese expression, the modern etcher has undoubtedly accepted moral
support from the islands of the Japanese. He too etches a kind of
shorthand, even though his notes appeal much to the spectator's
knowledge, while the Oriental shorthand appeals to nothing but the
spectator's simple vision. Thus the two artists work in ways dissimilar.
Nevertheless, the French etcher would never have written his signs so
freely had not the Japanese so freely drawn his own. Furthermore still,
the transitory and destructible material of Japanese art has done as much
as the multiplication of newspapers, and the discovery of processes, to
reconcile the European designer--the black and white artist--to working
for the day, the day of publication. Japan lives much of its daily life
by means of paper, painted; so does Europe by means of paper, printed.
But as we, unlike those Orientals, are a destructive people, paper with
us means short life, quick abolition, transformation, re-appearance, a
very circulation of life. This is our present way of surviving
ourselves--the new version of that feat of life. Time was when to
survive yourself meant to secure, 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 purely pictorial 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
exquisite appreciation 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 pictorial
presentation, and that the Japanese artist may have intended human beauty
where we do not recognise it. But if it is not easy to recognise, it is
certainly not difficult to guess at. And, accordingly, you are generally
aware that the separate beauty of the race, and its separate dignity,
even--to be very generous--has been admired by the Japanese artist, and
is represented here and there occasionally, in the figure of warrior or
mousme. But even with this exception the habit of Japanese
figure-drawing is evidently grotesque, derisive, and crooked. It is
curious to observe that the search for slight deformity is so constant as
to make use, for its purposes, not of action only, but of perspective
foreshortening. With us it is to the youngest child only that there
would appear to be mirth in the drawing of a man who, stooping violently
forward, would seem to have his head "beneath his shoulders." The
European child would not see fun in the living man so presented,
but--unused to the same effect "in the flat"--he thinks it prodigiously
humorous in a drawing. But so only when he is quite young. The Japanese
keeps, apparently, his sense of this kind of humour. It amuses him, but
not perhaps altogether as it amuses the child, that the foreshortened
figure should, in drawing and to the unpractised eye, seem distorted and
dislocated; the simple Oriental appears to find more derision in it than
the simple child. The distortion is not without a suggestion of
ignominy. And, moreover, the Japanese shows derision, but not precisely
scorn. He does not hold himself superior to his hideous models. He
makes free with them on equal terms. He is familiar with them.
And if this is the conviction gathered from ordinary drawings, no need to
insist upon the ignoble character of those that are intentional
caricatures.
Perhaps the time has hardly come for writing anew the praises of
symmetry. The world knows too much of the abuse of Greek decoration, and
would be glad to forget it, with the intention of learning that art
afresh in a future age and of seeing it then anew. But whatever may be
the phases of the arts, there is the abiding principle of symmetry in the
body of man, that goes erect, like an upright soul. Its balance is
equal. Exterior human symmetry is surely a curious physiological fact
where there is no symmetry interiorly. For the centres of life and
movement within the body are placed with Oriental inequality. Man is
Greek without and Japanese within. But the absolute symmetry of the
skeleton and of the beauty and life that cover it is accurately a
principle. It controls, but not tyrannously, all the life of human
action. Attitude and motion disturb perpetually, with infinite
incidents--inequalities of work, war, and pastime, inequalities of
sleep--the symmetry of man. Only in death and "at attention" is that
symmetry complete in attitude. Nevertheless, it rules the dance and the
battle, and its rhythm is not to be destroyed. All the more because this
hand holds the goad and that the harrow, this the shield and that the
sword, because this hand rocks the cradle and that caresses the unequal
heads of children, is this rhythm the law; and grace and strength are
inflections thereof. All human movement is a variation upon symmetry,
and without symmetry it would not be variation; it would be lawless,
fortuitous, and as dull and broadcast as lawless art. The order of
inflection that is not infraction has been explained in a most
authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should
save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak
experiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore,
"should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been
the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's
will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from
infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the
greatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been most
variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings and
passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Law puts
a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law.
Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a
continual _slight_ novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton,
these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all
chime together in praise of the truer order of life."
And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order most
beautiful and most secure when it is put to the proof. That perpetual
proof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of life. Symmetry is
a profound, if disregarded because perpetually inflected, condition of
human life.
The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle or
be fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it has an obvious
life, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law and
the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form
of man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be the
nobler and the more perdurable relation.