Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the effectual and final success of their measures—­would their writ run in time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their subjects?—­whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, they silenced by legislation and yet more legislation.  They wrote in statute books; they would have written their will across the skies.  Their hearts would have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonials that mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did ever doubt lest posterity might try their lock.  Perhaps they did never so much as foresee the race of the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their prohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history.

If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of these our more diffident times!  They, who would have written their present and actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written it in petroleum and wax upon the stone.  Fate did them wrong in withholding from their hands this means of finality and violence.  Into our hands it has been given at a time when the student of the race thought, perhaps, that we had been proved in the school of forbearance.  Something, indeed, we may have learnt therein, but not enough, as we now find.

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and the probable wisdom of our successors.  A certain reverend official document, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommended to the veneration of the present times “those past ages with their store of experience.”  Doubtless, as the posterity of their predecessors our predecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors, none—­none.  Therefore, if they were a little reverend our own posterity is right reverend.  It is a flippant and novelty-loving humour that so flatters 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.”