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 liberal leaf; whether still or in
motion the aspen and the free-leafed poplar have the alertness and
expectancy of flight in all their flocks of leaves, while the oaks and
elms are gathered in their station. All this is not Japanese, but from
such accident is Japanese art inspired, with its good luck of
perceptiveness.