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.