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.