the unproved past and refuses the deference due to the burden of years
which is ours, which--grown still graver--will be our children's.

SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT

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 liber