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