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.