Painting in the Far East, by Laurence Binyon

Painting in the Far East: an introduction to the history of pictorial art in Asia, especially China and Japan
by Laurence Binyon
1913

PREFACE

THE first edition of this book was published five years ago. In the interval much has happened. A quantity of new material has been brought to light ; interest in the subject has everywhere grown and widened. In most of the countries of the West collectors are beginning to collect, seriously and studiously, and no longer with a haphazard curiosity, specimens of the classic art of China and Japan. Museums begin to realise that these things are worthy of acquisition for their own sake and not merely as illustrations of ethnography or religion. At this moment an entire museum, exclusively devoted to the art of Eastern Asia and built expressly for the purpose, is being opened at Cologne. The example will doubtless be followed. It is a sign of the times.

It is now possible, therefore, in Europe and America to get some first-hand acquaintance with Asian painting, both of early and modern times. But, as I pointed out in the preface to the first edition of this book, the student who cannot make the journey to the Far East will find indispensable the immense series of reproductions published in Japan.

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In my former preface I noted my indebtedness to the Kokka, the monthly magazine which was founded so long ago as 1889. The drawback to this array of volumes, treasure-house as it is, is that the Western student cannot easily find what he wants or bring the examples of each artist together for comparison. In the British Museum the plates of the Kokka have been detached from the text and arranged according to schools and artists for the convenience of the student. Besides the Kokka, there are numerous and splendid publications of the Shimbi Shoin. In the notes to the first edition of this book reference was made to the reproductions of famous and typical pictures scattered among the twenty volumes (not all of them at that time published) of the " Shimbi Taikwan," or " Selected Relics of Japanese Art." These references now seem hardly necessary, since there has appeared another (not yet completed) publication from the same house, the" Toy o Bijutsu Taikwan," or "Selected Masterpieces from the Fine Arts of the Far East," which has the great advantage of being arranged chronologically. To supplement this, there are separate works devoted to particular schools and artists. The coloured reproductions in all these Japanese publications are of a beauty and quality of texture which must be seen to be believed. I must reiterate the debt which the following pages owe viii

PREFACE

to these volumes, as to the well-known works of Dr. Giles, Dr. Hirth, and others, mentioned in the text.

The preparation of this new edition has brought home to me my great temerity in attempting the original enterprise. In the last five years the opportunity of studying the array of masterpieces so generously lent by Japan to England in 1910 and exhibited at Shepherd's Bush, as well as the chief treasures of the Boston Museum, of the marvellous collection of Mr. Freer at Detroit and of other American collections, has been a stimulating experience, by which I hope the present edition has benefited. I have not tried to alter or enlarge the scope of the volume ; it does not profess to be more than an introduction to the subject. As stated in the original preface, it is " an attempt to survey the achievement and to interpret the aims of Oriental painting, and to appreciate it from the standpoint of a European in relation to the rest of the world's art. It is the general student and lover of painting whom I have wished to interest. My chief concern has been, not to discuss questions of authorship or archaeology, but to inquire what aesthetic value and significance these Eastern paintings possess for us in the West. Therefore in each period I have chosen a few typical masters who concentrate in their work the predominant ideals of their time,

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rather than bewilder the reader with lists of unfamiliar names." But, after all, questions of authorship and archaeology involve themselves in aesthetic questions: one wants to be on firm ground; and I have found myself revising a good many statements. Especially is this the case with the chapters on Chinese painting. The wonderful discoveries made in Chinese Turkestan during the last few years have proved of the highest importance. We now really know something about the religious art of China during the great T'ang era, or at least we have the means of knowing. The difference made by these discoveries, and also, one must add, by the unsuspected riches which Chinese collections have revealed at the same time, has necessitated a considerable amount of re- writing.

In spite, therefore, of the fact that since my first edition several elaborate works have appeared I need only mention Fenollosa's " Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art," M. Raphael Petrucci's " La Philosophic de la Nature dans FArt d 'Extreme Orient," Mr. Arthur Morrison's " Painters of Japan," each of which in one way or another treats of its subject in much greater fullness of detail than I have attempted in spite of this, I still hope that these pages may continue to serve their purpose of kindling an interej* in the art of Asia and setting the reader on the road to more exhaustive study. x

PREFACE

The notes have been entirely re- written. In them I have given lists of important artists of the several periods to supplement the text, together with references to original paintings in accessible collections, both European and American, or to published reproductions of pictures. Neither lists nor references are in any sense complete ; they are merely intended as guide-posts to the reader who desires to make acquaintance with the actual material of study.

The illustrations in this edition have been increased in number, and a good many of the old ones have been exchanged for other examples, either more representative, more attractive, or more amenable to photography. It is hopeless to expect more than a suggestion of the originals from any of our mechanical processes of reproduction, though Mr. Donald Macbeth has carried out a most difficult task with unusual success. Nearly half of the illustrations are from the British Museum, which in the last five years has been enriched, on the Chinese side, by a number of fine examples from Frau OlgaJulia Wegener's collection and from other sources, and on the Japanese side, quite recently, by the splendidly munificent gift from Sir William G wynneEvans, Bart., of the Arthur Morrison collection. For the rest I am indebted to Mr. Freer of Detroit ; the Trustees of the Boston Museum ; Dr. F. R.

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Martin of Stockholm ; Sir William van Home ; Mr. A. D. Hall ; Mr. A. W. Bahr ; the Director of the Shimbi Shoin ; and Mr. Sei-ichi Taki, the editor of the Kokka. I wish to record my gratitude to these and the many other collectors and museum authorities in Europe and America, who have shown me much kindness and greatly aided my studies ; and to my wife, who has helped me to prepare this new edition and compiled a fresh index for it.

L. B.

October 1913.

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CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE ART OF THE EAST AND THE ART OF THE WEST . i

II. EARLY ART TRADITIONS IN ASIA . . . . . 26

III. CHINESE PAINTING IN THE FOURTH CENTURY , . 39

IV. THE ORIGINS AND EARLIEST PHASES OF PICTORIAL ART

IN CHINA . . . ....*.',,..' . 54

V. CHINESE PAINTING FROM THE FOURTH TO THE EIGHTH

CENTURY . . . . . .... 62

VI. THE T'ANG DYNASTY . ... . . ,. . 70

VII. EARLY PAINTING IN JAPAN , . . . . . 93

VIII. JAPANESE PAINTING IN THE KAMAKURA EPOCH OF THE

CIVIL WARS . . . . . . .115

IX., THE SUNG PERIOD IN CHINA 130

X. THE MONGOL EMPIRE : PAINTING IN TIBET AND PERSIA 157

XI. THE ASHIKAGA PERIOD IN JAPAN .... 168

XII. THE MING PERIOD IN CHINA ..... 184

XIII. THE KANO SCHOOL IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH

CENTURIES . . ... . . 192

XIV. MATABEI AND THE BEGINNINGS OF GENRE . . 204 XV. THE GREAT DECORATORS . ., ,, . . . 211

XVI. NEW MOVEMENTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES ... . . . 223

XVII. UKIYOY AND THE COLOUR-PRINT . . . * 240

XVIII. CONCLUSION . . . . . ... . 266

NOTES . . . , . . . . . . . ... 275

INDEX . . ... . . ; . . 289

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LOTUS, WHITE HERON, AND KINGFISHER Frontispiece

Sung dynasty. British Museum.

TO FACE PLATE PAGE

I. TOILET SCENE 38

Portion of a scroll-painting by Ku K'ai-chih.

British Museum.

II. Liu PEI ,.! . . . . . , .- . 62 Traditionally attributed to Wu Tao-tzii. Freer Collection, Detroit.

III. KWANYIN . . ... . . .70

Sung dynasty. Perhaps after a design by Wu Taotzfi. Freer Collection.

IV. DEMONS AND ANIMALS . . . . .74

Said to be after Wu Tao-tzii, by Li Lung-mien. F. R. Martin Collection.

V. SAKYAMUNI . . . . . . . .76

T'ang dynasty. Freer Collection.

VI. LANDSCAPE . ; . . . . . . 80

Portion of a scroll-painting by Li Ssti-hsun. Freer Collectioit.

VII. LANDSCAPE . . . : . . ... 84 Portion of a scroll-painting by Chao M6ng-fu, copied from a painting by Wang Wei. British Museum.

VIII. TARTAR HUNTSMAN . . . > ,-* iv 88

Attributed to Han Kan. Collection of Sir W. Van Home, Montreal.

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TO FACE PLATE PAGE

IX. EAGLE ON ROCK . . . . . .92

Attributed to Pien Luan. Freer Collection.

X. THE WATERFALL OF NACHI . . . . 96 Attributed to Kanaoka. Tetsuma Collection, Tokio. From the Kokka.

XL MICHIZANE IN CHINESE DRESS .... 102

Traditionally ascribed to Kanaoka. British Museum.

XII. GROUP OF LAMENTING FIGURES, FROM THE

DEATH OF BUDDHA . . . . . 106

Kosd or Takuma School. British Museum.

XIII. AMI DA AND ANGELS DESCENDING TO MEET THE

BLESSED . 112

Kamakura Period. Jofukuji Temple, Kioto. From the Shimbi Taikwan.

XIV. MONKEY PURSUED BY HARE AND FROG . .118

By Toba Sojo. Portion of a scroll reproduced by the Shimbi Shoin.

XV. KOBO DAISHI AS A CHILD IN PRAYER . .122

By Nobuzane. Murayama Collection. From the Kokka.

XVI. SOLDIERS FIRING A PALACE . . . 126

Portion of the scroll-painting by Keion. Boston

Museum.

XVII. WOMEN AND CHILDREN ON A TERRACE . . 130

Portion of a scroll-painting ascribed to Chou WenChii. British Museum.

XVIII. AN ARHAT WITH A LION 136

Sung dynasty. Freer Collection.

XIX. PINES AND ROCKY PEAKS

By Ma Yuan. Collection of Baron Yanostike Iwasaki, Tokio. From the Shimbi Taikwan.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PLATE PAGE

XX. Two GEESE 150

Sung dynasty. British Museum.

XXI. THE SAGE IN THE FOREST . . . .156

A pair of paintings, attributed to Tzu-Chao. British Museum.

XXII. SCENE AT A FEAST . . . ... 162

Mogul School. British Museum.

XXIII. PORTRAIT OF SHOICHI KOKUSHI . . .'. 168

By Cho Densu. Tofukuji Temple, Kioto. From the

Shimbi Taikwan.

XXIV. JUROJIN . ... . . . . .172

By Sesshiu. From the Kokka.

XXV. THE HAUNT OF THE WILD GEESE . . . 174

By Sesson. British Museum.

XXVI. SHORIKEN CROSSING THE SEA ON A SWORD . 178

By Motonobu. British Museum.

XXVII. WILD GEESE BY A MOUNTAIN STREAM . . 182

By Lin Liang. British Museum.

XXVIII. FAIRY AND PHCENIX . . . . . .186

By Wu Wei. British Museum.

XXIX. LADY ASLEEP ON A LEAF . . . . 190

By T'ang Yin. A. W. Bahr Collection.

XXX. PINES IN WINTRY MOUNTAINS . . . . 192

By Yeitoku. Freer Collection.

XXXI. RAIN . . . . . ... .. . . , 196

By Sansetsu. British Museum.

XXXII. MONJIU . . . , /'. . . . 200

By Tanyu. British Museum.

XXXIII. DANCER . . ,. . . . . .204

By Matabei. British Museum.

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TO FACE PLATK I'AGE

XXXIV. MAIZE AND COXCOMB SCREEN .... 210

By Koyetsu. Freer Collection.

XXXV. WAVE SCREEN . . . : . . . . .218

By Korin. Boston Museum.

XXXVI. HOLLYHOCKS . . . . . . 226

By Kenzan. From the Kokka.

XXXVII. TIGER , ... 236

By Ganku. British Museum.

XXXVIIL DEER . .246

By Sosen. British Museum.

XXXIX. MUSICIANS . . . . . . . 256

Colour-print by Hokusai. A. D. Hall Collection.

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CHAPTER I. THE ART OF THE EAST AND THE ART OF THE WEST

IN the great mystical poem of Persia, the " Masnavi," it is told how the Greeks and the Chinese disputed as to which were the better artists. Their dispute was brought before the Sultan ; a contest was arranged, and a house allotted to each party for them to embellish in their own way. The poet tells how the Chinese covered the walls of their house with paintings, while the Greeks contented themselves with cleaning theirs till the walls shone bright and clear as the heavens. The work of the Chinese was greatly admired, but it was the Greeks who were adjudged the prize.

This story is told merely by way of illustration, and is put to symbolic use by the poet. It would be rash to treat it as historic relation. Yet doubtless it reflects some truth of tradition. At any rate it embodies a traditional antithesis between the art of the East and the West.

In what precisely does this antithesis exist ? Does the Persian poet's allusion emphasise, as we might perhaps infer, a reliance of the East on colour, a reliance of the West on form ? Such an interpretation would commend itself probably to general acceptance in this country. This thesis has, in fact,

A I

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been recently promulgated by a thoughtful writer in an interesting and ingenious essay.* In seeking to form a conclusion on such a subject, we cannot do better than follow Aristotle's method, and start by examining some theory already in the field. And as this theory accords with popularly received impressions, we shall do well to see what support it really has from facts.

" The two main ideas," writes the critic in question, " with which all art is concerned seem to have 1 been separately contributed, one by the West, the other by the East. Form is chiefly a matter of the intellect. The arts which deal with form convey ideas. Their appeal is to the mind. Colour, on the other hand, conveys no ideas. It is emotional, and appeals to the senses rather than the intellect. And this being so, it seems natural that the Western temperament, intellectual rather than sensuous, should excel in form rather than colour ; while ( the Eastern, sensuous rather than intellectual, should excel in colour rather than form."

There is more than one point in these too absolute statements which challenge discussion and criticism. But let us first follow our author in the development of his theory.

After characterising Oriental colour as something different from Western colour, as distinguished by a note of " swarthy and deep half-melancholy rich-

* " Byzantine Architecture." Edinburgh Review, October 1904. 2

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ness,'* he goes on to say that in the Eastern conception of colour there is " that union of strength and simplicity which reveals itself only when a nation is dealing with the things which it understands and which correspond to its own genius. To match the Eastern sense for colour we must have recourse to the Western sense for form." And the West is weak, trivial, and uncertain in*colour, as the East is unstable, eccentric, and capricious in/ form.

But more : " Though the idea of colour is indigenous to the East, yet of an adequate expression of that idea, of its embodiment in any great work or school of art, the East has never been capable. . . . Diffused throughout the life of the East as this sense for colour is, we look in vain for any great artistic manifestation, any school of painting or architectural style of Eastern origin and growth, which shall centralise and collect that sense for colour for us. The impotence that saps the emotional temperament has waited on the East." According to this writer, it was the Byzantine Greeks who were called upon to effect a manifestation of the Oriental ideal of colour, an ideal which the Oriental races had been too feeble-willed to do more than trivially illustrate in minor arts and crafts.

All this is as plausible at first sight as it is interesting. But now we must ask, On what evidence

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is this theory based ? The writer has many and definite illustrations to draw from in the field of Western art, but his illustrations from the East are fragmentary and vague. Have the Oriental races really been so impotent and uncreative ? Do the vague associations of luxury and sensuous magnificence which the " gorgeous East " brings into our minds really represent all that is to be known of it ? Is there nothing besides carpets and embroideries, lustrous wares and richly ornamented metal- work, familiar to our eyes in our shops, as Aladdin 's trays of rubies and the glowing furniture and background of the " Arabian Nights," together with a hundred phrases from the poets, are familiarly impressed on our imagination, with the same vague and sumptuous effect ? If so, then we must indeed say that art in the East has never emerged from the barbaric stage, the stage in which decoration precedes design, and in which the sense for beauty remains childish, fascinated by colour and movement, unable to grasp organic relations, incapable of coherent and articulate production.

We say " the East," with how huge a generalisation ! Most Englishmen, if they ask themselves what materials their minds have collected to furnish and fill out this broad idea, will think above all of India. And if they pursue the question into a special field of art, reminiscences of travel or of reading will recall images of architecture that are, 4

THE ART OF EAST AND WEST

at least to our eyes, inexpressive and fantastic, together with, it may be, some scattered specimens of Persian miniature painting or Japanese colourprints, and for the rest mere craftsman's work, textiles, and bric-a-brac.

Whatever be the merits of Oriental architecture, one may say at once that it is not in this art that the genius of Asia has found its supreme expression. There is a reason for this, which we shall revert to later.

Let us take pictorial art : Persian paintings, Japanese prints and drawings, what have these in common ? Are they sporadic outbursts, one on the western the other on the eastern verge of the vast continent ? Or are they both related to an older and more central art ?

The latter answer is the right one. It is in China that the central tradition of Asian painting must be sought for. Of all the nations of the East, the Chinese is that which through all its history has shown the strongest aesthetic instinct, the fullest and richest imagination. And painting is the art in which that instinct and that imagination have found their highest and most complete expression. If we are to compare the art of the East and the art of the West, in their essential character and differences, we must take as our type of the former the pictorial art of China.

But why not of Japan ? some may ask. For it

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has been popularly believed though the belief is fast losing ground that in art the Japanese have enormously improved on what they have derived from China. Certainly they have added new elements, and in some particular respects have surpassed the older nation, though in other respects they have never attained the same level. So vast an amount of Chinese painting has been lost or destroyed that we have no means for any detailed comparison. Yet even what little remains vindicates its great claim. The Japanese look to China as we look to Italy and Greece : for them it is the classic land, the source from which their art has drawn not only methods, materials, and principles of design, but an endless variety of theme and motive. As in the late nineteenth century Japan has taken over the material civilisation of Europe, so, more than a thousand years earlier, she took over and absorbed the civilisation of China, its art, its religion, its thought. But it was not foundation and startingpoint alone that Chinese art supplied, but a pattern and ideal. Again and again the painters of Japan have renewed their art with fresh life and inspiration from the vigorous schools of the continent. The first great school of painting in Japan derived entirely from the grand and forcible style of the masters of the T'ang dynasty. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a school arose which developed a native character in its design, and enrolled in its 6

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ranks a number of splendid draughtsmen and gorgeous colourists. When this school decayed, it was again from China that the renaissance came, the great renaissance of the fifteenth century which established the three classic schools of painting in Japan, and gloried in infinite variations on themes already handled with consummate feeling and expression by the galaxy of artists who flourished under the Emperors of the House of Sung. The next phase in Japanese painting was inaugurated by emulation of the rich and decorative colouring of the earlier Ming epoch ; and once more, in the eighteenth century, a last wave from the now declining art of China left its traces on impressible Japan.

The painting of the two countries, therefore, represents one great and continuous tradition, a tradition maintained and made illustrious by countless artists for two thousand years. From China that tradition, with its principles and ideals, originates ; not only Japan in the East, but (to a less degree) Persia in the West, has derived inspiration for its art from the fertilising overflow of that wonderful nation whose history has been the continued absorption from without of barbarous neighbours and invaders, and the imposition .on its conquerors of its own civilisation.

The general conception of Chinese art which till the last few years prevailed in Europe was entirely

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founded on the productions of its decadence. Even in the case of the porcelain, it was the later kinds that were collected and prized : the simpler and grander forms of the earlier periods are only beginning to be appreciated. In the case of painting, the real nature of the art remained unguessed at for centuries after " Chinoiseries " won their first vogue in the West. The bastard and comparatively worthless productions made now for two centuries for the European market in Canton represented for those of the general public who had formed any idea at all on the subject the pictorial art of the Empire ; and they associated that art with bright, if harmonious, colours, a tame and flaccid sense of form, and the monotonous repetition of effete conventions.

But if we take the central tradition of Asian painting in its great periods and most typical form of expression, what do we find ? We find a type of painting in which colour, so far from being predominant, is an always subordinate element, and is often entirely absent.

The painting of Asia is throughout its main tradition an art of line. The Chinese of the twelfth century, the Japanese of the fifteenth, evolved an art of tone, but in both cases eliminated colour.

A Chinese critic of the sixth century, who was also an artist, published a theory of aesthetic principles which became a classic and received uni8

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versal acceptance, expressing, as it did, the deeply rooted instincts of the race. In this theory it is Rhythm that holds the paramount place ; not, be it observed, imitation of Nature, or fidelity to Nature, which the general instinct of the Western races makes the root-concern of art.

In this theory every work of art is thought of as an incarnation of the genius of rhythm, manifesting the living spirit of things with a clearer beauty and intenser power than the gross impediments of com- r plex matter allow to be transmitted to our senses in the visible world around us. A picture is conceived as a sort of apparition from a more real world of essential life.

Everyone knows the story of the grapes of Zeuxis which appeared so like real grapes that birds came to peck at their tempting clusters. The Chinese have parallel fables about famous masterpieces, but how different an order of ideas they attest ! A great artist painted a dragon upon a temple wall, and as he put the final touch to it, the dragon, too instinct with life, soared crashing through the roof and left an empty space. The inner and informing spirit, not the outward semblance, is for all painters of the Asian tradition the object of art, the aim with which they wrestle.

Let us take an example, a Chinese painting of the thirteenth century. The subject is " The Moon over Raging Waves." Doubtless to the Chinese

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mind the theme had its symbolic side ; the peace of the radiant soul above the fluctuating tumult of the passions is perhaps the parallel suggested ; but we need no more for enjoyment than the inherent poetry of the contrast. The picture presents us with a vision of the sea, a waste of waves curling over into foam, pale under the brightness of the full moon. And the waves are represented by lines which, if they neglect the accidental edges and broken forms of rough water as we see it, emphasize the continuous curve and rhythm by which waves are actually created. Another treatment of this subject traditional, like so many of the subjects of Asian art shows the golden moon appearing over the shoulder of a shadowy promontory, and at its base a single wave flung up out of darkness into the moonlight. The same treatment of water persists throughout this art, from the earliest examples we know down to Okio and Hokusai in Japan. It is always the essential character and genius of the element that is sought for and insisted on : the weight and mass of water falling, the sinuous, swift curves of a stream evading obstacles in its way, the burst of foam against a rock, the toppling crest of a slowly arching billow ; and all in a rhythm of pure lines. But the same principles, the same treatment, are applied to all subjects. If it be a hermit sage in his mountain retreat, the artist's efforts will be concentrated on the expression, not only in the 10

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sage's features, but in his whole form, of the rapt intensity of contemplation ; towards this effect every line of drapery and of surrounding rock or tree will conspire, by force of repetition or of contrast. If it be a warrior in action, the artist will ensure that we shall feel the tension of nerve, the heat of blood in the muscles, the watchfulness of the eye, the fury of determination. That birds shall be seen to be, above all things, winged creatures rejoicing in their flight ; that flowers shall be, above all things, sensitive blossoms unfolding on pliant, up-growing stems ; that the tiger shall be an embodied force, boundless in capacity for spring and fury this is the ceaseless aim of these artists, from which no splendour of colour, no richness of texture, no accident of shape diverts them. The more to concentrate on this seizure of the inherent life in what they draw, they will obliterate or ignore at will half or all of the surrounding objects with which the Western painter feels bound to fill his background. By isolation and the mere use of empty space they will give to a clump of narcissus by a rock, or a solitary quail, or a mallow plant quivering in the wind, a sense of grandeur and a hint of the infinity of life.

Who shall say of such an art that it is not mature, still less that it is impotent to express ideas ? In its coherence and its concentration, in its resolute hold on the idea of organic beauty, this tradition,

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so old in the East, manifests the character of an art that has reached complete development.

This painting, we have said, is an art of line rather than an art of colour. Yet it is not difficult to see how an art of line can come to have for one of its chief characteristics, and for its most obvious attraction, the charm of colour. The Japanese prints of the eighteenth century, for instance, proved a revelation of exquisite colour to Europeans ; and yet they too are in their essence linear designs. The reason is that these linear designs, though expressive of interior form, aim at no illusion of relief, and ignore cast shadows. The spaces to be coloured are flat spaces, and the instinct of the artist is to invent a harmony of colours which intensifies and gives added charm to the harmony of line. Such an art never loses sight of the primary condition of a picture as a decoration on a flat wall ; and with this decorative aim the free and undistracted development of colour-harmonies is naturally associated. It is when a new and absorbing interest is added to pictorial art, when the artist attempts to produce the likeness of figures and objects as they appear in relief, and begins to use light and shade as a means to this end, that his mind is distracted from the pursuit of harmony in line and colour ; these become secondary aims, and as a natural consequence the sense for colour becomes weak and uncertain. Why is it that in Italian painting before 12

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the Renaissance, even where no decided genius for colour is shown, the colour of quite minor, insignificant, and provincial masters pleases us ? It is because the painting of those early periods was as yet unconfused and undistracted by the problems of chiaroscuro. European painting, however, was soon committed to the portrayal of relief and the ideal of complete realisation. In the North this was inevitable because of the powerful instinct towards realism innate in the races of the Netherlands, the early flowering of whose genius directed the aims of painting. In Italy it was equally inevitable, because of the intellectual passion for science which was inseparable from the genius of Florence ; and it is from the great Florentine school that Europe inherits its main tradition of design for all ideal subjects. Scientific curiosity has, ever since the Renaissance, played a potent part in the history of European art. In painters like Paolo Uccello we find the struggle to master perspective overshadowing the purely artistic quest for beauty, just as in our own time an intense interest in scientific discoveries about the nature of light has led a whole school of landscape painters to sacrifice fundamental qualities of design in a passionate endeavour to realise on canvas the vibration of sunlight.

Science must of course play a part in the production of all mature painting. The artist in his desire to discover beauty is confronted with difficult

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problems which he must acquire the science to solve ; but it is as a means to an end, and only as a means. It is the besetting vice of our Western life as a whole, so complex and entangled in materials, that we do not see things clearly ; we are always mixing issues and confounding ends with means. We are so immersed in getting the means for enjoying life that we quite forget how to enjoy it, and what is called success is, oftener than not, defeat. So, too, in current criticism of painting, we find it commonly assumed that an advance in science is of itself an advance in art ; as if correct anatomy, a thorough knowledge of perspective, or a stringent application of optical laws were of the slightest value to art except as aids to the effective realisation of an imaginative idea.

The scientific aim which has warped and weakened certain phases of modern painting in Europe is a symptom of Western tendencies in extreme. The East has also sometimes carried its tendencies to extreme ; we find the expression of them in what is known as the Literary Man's Painting of China and Japan, a kind of art which has as little reference as possible to external fact and relies entirely on vague suggestions of poetic mood.

But, ignoring these extreme expressions, let us regard rather the sum of classic painting in Asia and in Europe.

The main arresting difference is, as we have seen,

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that the painting of Europe does not limit itself ; it is not content till it has mastered every possible means of communicating ideas through the representation of the visible world : it emulates the effects of sculpture, in order to communicate the emotions which alone can be produced by figures seen in roundness and relief ; it emulates the effects of architecture, in order to communicate the emotions that only ordered spaces and perspective can evoke. And it wants to produce all these effects at once, as well as the effects of harmonious line and colour.

The painting of Asia, on the other hand, limits itself severely. It leaves to sculpture and to architecture the effects proper to those arts. But it has not remained merely decorative, as so many people assume ; it is in its own way fully as mature as our own.

The great painters of either continent have pursued the same end. They have sought to communicate life-giving ideas of beauty in a sensuous embodiment. The means employed have been different, yet not so different as would appear at first sight. Limited to line, the painters of Asia have concentrated centuries of study on the effort to make that line intimately expressive of form ; and with mere contour they succeed in producing the illusion of perfect modelling. The very ease with which relief can be represented by shadows, as with us, has taken away from our painters the

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necessity for this concentration and weakened their sense for expressive line. The painters of the East have succeeded in giving life to their figures ; and that the figures in a picture should impress us as real, breathing, laughing, sorrowing humanity, this is the essential thing we demand. Absolute anatomical correctness, which pedants demand, detracts from this impression, and is no more present in the great painting of Europe than in the great painting of Asia. The fact is, we are so used to our own set of conventions that we forget how large a part they play even in the most realistic pictures, and when confronted, in the art of Asia, with a different set of conventions, we are apt to fix our attention entirely on them, instead of allowing ourselves to receive the suggestions of reality which these are intended to produce. So it is often said that there is no perspective in Chinese and Japanese painting. M. Raphael Petrucci, in a most illuminating, comprehensive, and masterly essay,* has entirely exploded this fallacy. He has conclusively shown that the mastery of perspective in Eastern painting is quite comparable to that of European painting, only it is different in the conventions it allows ; it has been naturally evolved out of the past history of art in Asia, whereas in Europe its problems were approached in the fifteenth

* " Les Caracteristiques de la Peinture Japonaise." Par R. Petrucci Revue de I'Universitd de Bruxelles, Janvier-Fevrier, 1907.

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century from an abstract point of view, as geometry, in a conscious effort to recover effects known to have been achieved by the Greek painters. As we shall see, Chinese painters of the eighth century and the twelfth century, among many others, have left treatises on the means of representing in a picture the appearances of the relative distances of objects in space. But M. Petrucci has also shown that in European painting, even in masterpieces of artists like Leonardo and Ingres, the laws of perspective are boldly violated in obedience to aesthetic necessities, although we are entirely persuaded of the reality of the effect produced, and the violation is only perceived when we resolutely discard the artistic impression and make a patient scrutiny from the point of view of science alone. He reminds us, too, how easily Hokusai was able to assimilate European perspective, learnt from the Dutch at Nagasaki, to the perspective of the Japanese.

Readers of Goethe's " Conversations " will remember his striking comment on a landscape by Rubens. He showed an engraving after this picture to the ingenuous Eckermann, and asked him to say what he noticed in it. After minutely describing every detail, Eckermann at last saw what he was intended to see, that the figures in the picture cast their shadows one way and the trees another. Light, in fact, was introduced from two different sides, in a manner " quite contrary to Nature." " That is the

B 17

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point," said Goethe. " It is by this that Rubens proves himself great, and shows to the world that he with a free spirit stands above Nature and treats her conformably with his high purposes." Admitting that the expedient was somewhat violent, still Goethe praises " the bold stroke of the master, by which in a genial manner he proclaims to the world that art is not entirely subject to natural necessities, but has laws of its own.'* : The artist," he continues, " has a twofold relation to Nature ; he is at once her master and her slave. He is her slave, inasmuch as he must work with earthly things in order to be understood ; but he is her master, inasmuch as he subjects these earthly means to his high intentions."

Goethe's mind, so magnificently free from prejudice, at once sheds the light of truth upon the subject. The laws of science are not the laws of art. Yet so permeated are our ways of thought (how much more so since Goethe's day !) by scientific conceptions, that to many this criticism of his will seem a startling paradox and a dangerous heresy. On the contrary, the danger and the heresy are with those who import scientific views into judgments on art. Few of us probably realise how strong this influence is ; to what a degree, in the public, it prevents a free judgment of painting, and how tyrannical a claim it makes upon the painter of to-day. 18

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Here is one thing we can learn from the study of Oriental painting. We can learn to distrust this tendency, absorbed from an age of triumphant science, to set up an external objective standard, asking of a picture whether it correctly represents the objects it portrays, instead of asking to what service the materials have been used, and whether it is a real experience to our souls. Our art, like our civilisation, too often defeats its own end ; in the thirst for reality it falls into indiscriminate acceptance, and loses or obscures essentials. The art and the life of the East stand, with far more constancy, for a finely valuing choice.

We may now turn back for a moment to re-examine the theory with which we started. The notion that the idea of form is the great contribution of the West to art, and the idea of colour the great contribution of the East, is, we can now see, founded on entirely inadequate evidence, and even if true would not touch the essential question. There is indeed an unreality in the antithesis. What is meant by the idea of colour and the idea of form ? The phrases have no meaning except in so far as the idea of harmony or rhythm underlies both. Nor can the intellectual appeal in art be divorced from the sensuous or emotional appeal. Great art only begins when all these are absorbed and unified in one complete yet single satisfaction. It is a proof of the profound ignorance prevailing in the West

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of Asiatic art that so earnest and thoughtful a student as the critic I have quoted should totally ignore the painting of China and Japan. In that painting the Oriental sense for colour is assuredly " collected and centralised " to magnificent effect. Yet I do not believe that the sense of colour is peculiar to the East, and that the West has only a " taste " for colour, without instinctive sense. Remember how easily even the Oriental sense for colour, strengthened by ages of tradition, can be corrupted by the introduction of cheap pigments invented by the chemists of Europe. Nowhere is there lovelier colour than in the Japanese prints of the fine period in the eighteenth century ; nowhere is there viler or more hideous colour than in those same prints when invaded during the 'sixties of the last century by the aniline pigments of the West. In Europe also the multiplication of pigments by chemistry has further weakened a colour sense already enfeebled or obscured among painters by scientific aims imported into art ; just as our sense for form has been vitiated and degraded by the commercial manufactures of machinery. I incline to believe that in the life of mediaeval Europe the sense for colour played as strong a part as it is still claimed to play in Oriental life.

Both in this and in other respects, if we take a comprehensive view of the pictorial art of both continents, the differences which arrest at first sight 20

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tend to lessen or disappear on closer scrutiny. The critic I have quoted was misled, I think, by concentrating his attention on architecture rather than on painting. With Oriental architecture this book is not directly concerned. Yet all art is one, and I do not wish to ignore conclusions that such a study might provoke. We find that painting in the East has carefully eschewed all emphasis on the solidity of materials ; it ever tends to absorb object in idea ; it is natural, therefore, that we should not expect the Asian spirit to find congenial expression in such an architecture as our own. I write with diffidence on the subject, but so far as I understand the architecture of Japan, for instance, I would say that it was conceived in a different spirit from our own ; that a building was regarded less in itself than as_a fusion of man's handiwork into Nature, the whole surroundings of the scene making part, and perhaps the chief part, of the architect's conception. And here we touch what is certainly a very real and animating principle in the pictorial art of the East, and come at last on a more essential difference between the art of the East and the West.

This difference is rooted in philosophy of life, in mental habit and character. An opposition between man and Nature has been ingrained in Western thought. It is the achievements, the desires, the glory and the suffering of man that have held the central place in Western art ; only very slowly and

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unwillingly has the man of the West taken trouble to consider the non-human life around him, and to understand it as a life lived for its own sake : for centuries he has but heeded it in so far as it opposed his will or ministered to his needs and appetites. But in China and Japan, as in India, we find no barrier set up between the life of man and the life of the rest of God's creatures. The continuity of the universe, the perpetual stream of change through its matter, are accepted as things of Nature, felt in the heart and not merely learnt as the conclusions of delving science. And these ways of thought are reflected in Eastern art. Not the glory of the naked human form, to Western art the noblest and most expressive of symbols ; not the proud and conscious assertion of human personality ; but, instead of these, all thoughts that lead us out from ourselves into the universal life, hints of the infinite, whispers from secret sources mountains, waters, mists, flowering trees, whatever tells of powers and presences mightier than ourselves : these are the themes dwelt upon, cherished, and preferred.

The Italian Renaissance, and all the art deriving from its inspiration, represents the glorification of man. Only lately have we begun to feel dissatisfied with the ideas embodied in that movement and its splendid productions ; to become conscious that Europe has lost something which we desire to recover from those times which in the great Gothic

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cathedrals had power to transmute materials, even the most solid and massive, into ideas and aspirations. Setting out to conquer the material world, to master its secrets and harness its energies to our uses, we have given our devotion to science ; but in the end science has humbled us. In the nineteenth century we in Europe came to apprehend more justly the true place of man in the world, and the art of our time arrives at just such a conception as the art of China had expressed, with perhaps even more truly modern feeling, a thousand years ago. I hope to make this plain when we come in the course of our survey to the painting of the Sung period, and can consider its productions in more detail.

It is in landscape, and the themes allied to landscape, that the art of the East is superior to our own. The power of the art of the West excels in the human drama.

The Western spirit is full of an overpowering sense of the sublime capacities of mankind.

' What a piece of work is a man ! how noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving how express and admirable ! in action how like an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! '

Yet it is inevitable that to this spirit the hour of discouragement and dismay should bring, with a

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sharpness unknown to the Oriental temper and the detached Oriental mind, the desolation of the sentence of mortality :

"And yet what to me is this quintessence of dust ! "

The high Renaissance pride and glow are apt to leave this bitter taste in the end. Absorption in man as the centre of the world and hero of existence leads certainly to loss of that sanity and sweetness which an openness to the abiding presences of the non-human living world around us infuses into life, and which are so abundant and refreshing in the art we are about to consider. It is not by that absorption that we shall find the full meaning or animating power of our Western faith that in man the divinity is revealed.

I have sometimes thought that if our modern painting had developed continuously from the art of the Middle Ages, without the invasion of scientific conceptions which the Renaissance brought about, its course would appear to have run on very similar lines to that of the painting of the East, where the early religious art, so like in aim to that of the early Italian frescoes, flowered gradually into naturalism, always pervaded by a perfume of religious idealism. As it is, the painting of Europe is richer, more complex, it has added powers and new resources ; its contrast with Eastern art is like 24

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that of dramatic poetry with lyric poetry ; more matter has been taken in hand, more difficulties attempted. The limitations of Eastern tradition keep its art pure and make even the productions of insignificant artists a pleasure to look upon. In our more burdened and more troubled art failure is far more frequent, though to its greatest triumphs attaches, it may be, a greater glory.

CHAPTER II. EARLY ART TRADITIONS IN ASIA

IN the winter of 1895-96, Dr. Sven Hedin, travelling across Central Asia, passed in the district of Khotan the mounded remains of deserted cities, covered up with drifts of sand. Khotan is in Chinese Turkestan. It was a small kingdom, paying tribute to China, lying to the north and somewhat to the east of Kashmir, on the southern edge of the Takla-Makan Desert.

Already there had filtered through to India objects claimed to have been found in the ruined cities of Khotan ; and now the information brought by Sven Hedin suggested that the sites which he had noticed should prove a favourable startingpoint for systematic excavation. An expedition was sent out by the Indian Government under Dr. (now Sir) Aurel Stein, and the results of his successful exploration published in 1903, and more fully in 1907, proved of singular interest. That expedition has been followed up by numerous missions to Turkestan, Russian, German, French, and Japanese, as well as English, all of which have added greatly to our knowledge.

The cities of Khotan were abandoned about the 26

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eighth century A.D. The sand encroaching in waves from the great desert had made them no longer habitable. It was not, as with Pompeii and Herculaneum, a sudden calamity arresting a people in its daily life ; what the people of Khotan valued they took away with them ; yet what was left is interesting enough. And the dry sand of the desert has preserved it all with perfect freshness for more than a thousand years.

What, then, do we find in this little, remote kingdom in the heart of Asia ? We find sculpture and paintings ; we find heaps of letters on tablets of wood ; odds and ends of woven stuffs and furniture ; and police notices on strips of bamboo. The police notices couched in just such terms as we use to-day, " Wanted, a man with a grizzled moustache," &c. &c. the police notices are in Chinese. The letters are written in a form of Sanskrit. But the string with which the wooden tablets are tied is sealed with a clay seal ; and in most cases the seal is a Greek seal, the image of an Athene or a Heracles.

Here then we touch three great civilisations at once : India, Greece, China.

Each of these three great civilisations contributes to the building up of Asiatic art. What, then, of the paintings and the sculpture ?

The paintings are in outline, with a certain amount of flat colour, on a white ground. The

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subjects are mostly figures from Buddhist legend. The style is of a primitive character.

If we ask ourselves what affinities these paintings reveal, with what art we can connect them, we cannot answer very definitely. We are reminded of features in Indian, Persian, Chinese, and early Japanese painting. What is certain is that these paintings represent, probably in a provincial type, the traditions of the early pictorial art of Asia, characterised by the definite strong outline on a white ground. They represent, we may safely assume, a whole world, whole epochs, of painting which are lost to us.

Will the sculptures tell us more ? They at once remind us of other sculpture ; of the numbers of statues and reliefs found in the district called Gandhara, lying along the lower valley of the Kabul River. These, like those of Khotan, are all Buddhist images. We know that the art of the sculptors of Gandhara was at its finest in the first and second centuries of our era. But in their statues we notice a gradual change and development. We see what seems a Greek Apollo ; and then little by little the Greek features become more Indian ; Apollo transforms himself into Buddha. The glad serenity of the Sun- God of the West, so open-eyed, so triumphant, takes on an ever-deepening shade of thought, the rapt smile of the worldwithdrawn spirit contemplating eternity. 28

ART TRADITIONS IN ASIA

Here, then, in Gandhara, as farther east in Khotan, the art of Greece makes its power felt. We know how immense that power has been as a living influence through centuries of European art, and we may be tempted to ascribe to it a governing influence in Asia. Yet in truth these traces that we have noticed mark the ebb of a receding tide.

In 323 B.C., Alexander died in Babylon. He had carried the arts and civilisation of Hellas far into the East. Cities on sites that he had chosen, Kabul, Kandahar, endure to this day. He had penetrated into remote regions north-west of India, and on into Turkestan. From the mouths of the Indus he had sent his fleet westward to explore the Indian Ocean. Arrian's narrative of the voyage reveals to us what a tremendous, unwilling adventure this was to the Greek sailors : they felt embarked on another Odyssey, and at every isle they touched expected legendary monsters to attack them. The will of one man, whose magnificent ambition was to conquer the world for the mind even more than to possess its riches and dominions, had hurried with him a home-sick army thousands of miles from its base, over deserts of burning sand, over mountains of perpetual snow, into the plains of India and to the shores of the Ganges. He reduced the Indian Ocean from a sea of terror and romance to known and navigated waters ; he was preparing, even when death overtook him, to

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man his fleet again and send it from the Euphrates westward round the continent of Africa.

So much a single brain, filled with the conviction that " man's foe is ignorance," could do. He had brought Asia and Europe into contact, as they have never really been in contact since till Japan in our own day, filled with the passion for knowledge, absorbed the achievements and the civilisation of the West.

But Alexander died, not forty years old ; and after his death the two continents shrank apart. Even his own exploits relapsed into fable. He became a hero of romance. Even now in common opinion he is conceived as a dazzling figure of knight-errantry in the mists of history, too remote to be more than half believed in. His empire was split into fragments. One of these fragments was Bactria (Bokhara) ; and there, it has been supposed, a school of sculptors maintained some tradition of the art of Greece, though the traces of Greek style visible in the statues of Gandhara are now generally thought to be due rather to later contact with the Roman world. Still, it was Alexander who gave Hellas her footing in Asia.

In spite of the tendency of the two continents to shrink apart, the lines of communication between East and West were more open than is commonly supposed. Darius had already sent an expedition eastwards to explore Asia and discover the mouths 30

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of the Indus. Great trade routes were established. Nor was all the enterprise on the side of the West. In 200 B.C. the Chinese, seeking markets for their silk, opened communications with Western Asia. A century later the Emperor Wu Ti sent a mission to the same regions. Greek designs appear on the earliest metal mirrors of China. It is possible that in the Chinese fable of the Paradise of the West * the Myths of the Greeks may be reflected.

Conquest and commerce we note, therefore, as two powerful influences in the dissemination of the arts. But a third and far more powerful influence was religion.

The history of the art of Asia is intimately bound up with the history of Buddhism, just as the history of European art is intimately bound up with the history of Christianity. By the growth and spread of Buddhism all the various influences we have noticed in the arts of many races were swept along and fused into a vitalising stream. Sakyamuni, the prince of a little territory in Nepal, who abandoned his throne, his wealth, and his family, stricken with the thought of the miseries of mankind ; who abandoned asceticism after years of practice, as he had abandoned the world before, and at last found enlightenment in the discovery that all evil resided in the individual will to live Sakyamuni lived and died in the sixth century B.C. Three centuries

* H. A. Giles, "Adversaria Sinica," No. i.

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later the religion of the Enlightened One, the Buddha, Sakyamuni, was embraced by the great Emperor Asoka, that pure and lofty soul whom Marcus Aurelius would have hailed with fraternal emotion, whose name is venerated over all the East, who united India, and whose mild edicts engraved on pillars were set up all over India, some of which are found standing to-day. The Buddhist art encouraged by Asoka was affected by Western sculpture, whether through inheritance from Alexander's conquest, or through contact with Roman art, or through both of these influences ; and thus the Graeco- Indian style was born.

Soon Buddhism spread beyond the confines of India. Its destiny was to wander. In time it died out completely from the land which had given it birth, but was passing like a fire over Asia, kindling and transforming new and diverse races. In Gandhara the flame of enthusiasm burnt fiercely, and then died, as it would seem, of its very excess. In A.D. 404 a pilgrim found five hundred temples in that country, thronged with worshippers. By the seventh century all were in ruins. Meanwhile Buddhism had reached China. In A.D. 67 the Emperor Ming Ti sent across the Himalayas to seek the truth about this religion. His messengers, we know, brought back images with them. During the next centuries many were the Chinese pilgrims who crossed the mountain passes to visit the sacred

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sites. Most famous of these is Fa Hsien, who journeyed, A.D. 399-414, from China through Khotan westward, entered India through Gandhara and Peshawar, visited the sacred sites in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, and returned home over sea by way of Ceylon. This we know from the record he has left.

From China to India Fa Hsien travelled over the great beaten route which was only to be closed in later times by the conquering Mohammedans. By this same route Buddhism had travelled from India into China. It had, we cannot doubt, a transforming influence on the art of the countries through which it passed. In Gandhara it combines with Hellenism to give a new character to the native Asiatic style. Moving east along the chain of oases which border the great deserts, it impresses its genius on the painting and sculpture of Turkestan, but less perhaps in the way of style than in the way of content. The art of Khotan as of the more eastern sites points to the existence of a tradition of painting which seems to have been common to the Asian continent, and may well have flourished in Central Asia before the advent of Buddhism. Passing yet farther north-east, we come to Turf an ; and here successive German expeditions have discovered and brought back to Berlin frescoes and paintings on silk and paper which are of great interest, as well as manuscripts of extraordinary importance for the

c 33

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study of philology and religion. These latter throw light on the history of Manichaeism and of its founder Mani, who attempted to combine in one religion Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. The paintings show a variety of styles, and affinities now with Ajanta, now with Gandhara, now with China, while fragments of miniature paintings suggest the beginnings of the rich mediaeval art of Persia.

But in purely artistic interest even these discoveries have been surpassed by the wonderful finds of Sir Aurel Stein on his latest expedition. An account of his adventurous and romantic journey has been given in the explorer's " Ruins of Desert Cathay " published in 1912, and the detailed description of the treasures found at Tun-huang and other sites will shortly be given to the world. The immense importance of the paintings brought home from this expedition is that, among a good deal of mere provincial art, there are splendid specimens of the real T'ang art of China, hitherto known only in the most fragmentary way : and several of these are dated. After Sir Aurel Stein, M. Pelliot visited the same rock-temple of Tun-huang and brought away the manuscripts and paintings left by his predecessor, and these are now in Paris.

And so we come to China itself. Though some writers have presumed that Buddhism in this long journey northward and eastward created art as it went, and found in China but rudimentary begin-

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nings which its inspiration at once transformed, I believe, on the contrary, that Chinese art was fully developed before Buddhism brought its new store of motive and imagery. Indeed, the importance of Buddhism as a creative factor in the art of China can be easily exaggerated. The truer view would be that it came to infuse with devotional fervour conceptions already rooted as philosophic ideas in the mental habits of the Chinese.* I shall presently show what evidence supports this view. But first let us see what we have ascertained already.

It must be remembered that the great mass of the new material discovered by the several missions in these regions of Central Asia dates from an epoch (round about the eighth century A.D.) contemporary with the grandest period of Chinese art, the T'ang dynasty : little can be assigned to a date so early as the sixth or fifth century. But it is in provincial localities that the oldest traditions linger ; and we cannot doubt that among this material is to be traced the primitive pictorial tradition of Eastern Asia.

Asia in the first centuries of our era we have found to be not sharply divided into self-contained empires, but a continent in which communication was so free that not only the commodities of trade, but the animating ideals of religion, could bring

* An admirable and lucid treatment of the question is given in Petrucci's " Philosophic de la Nature dans 1'Art d'Extreme Orient."

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about a fertilising contact between its different races. To assume that the cradle and origin of Asiatic art belonged to any one country of the continent in particular would be a vain supposition, an unprofitable starting-point for inquiry. We must rather assume that there was, in painting at all events, a common Asiatic style, an art of line ; and our aim should be to inquire which of the races of Asia developed this style to finest use and power. It might be natural, in lack of evidence, to suppose that India, which gave to Asia the kindling ideals and imagery of Buddhism, was the land to which we should turn for the noblest creations of art. Yet we are confronted at once by the fact that in creative art, at least if we judge by what survives, India is comparatively poor.

One great monument of Indian painting remains the frescoes of the cave-temple of Ajanta, dating from the fifth to the seventh centuries A.D. In a gorge of the Western Ghats, among magnificent mountain scenery, the Buddhist monks hewed out of living rock this vast temple of many caves, cool in their gloom even when the neighbouring valleys are scorched with unbearable heat. And here on the walls Indian artists painted the scenes of the life and death of Buddha. Darkened and damaged copies from some of these frescoes have hung for long in the Indian Museum at South Kensington ; but the recent copies made by Mrs. Herringham

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with the assistance of Indian artists, which have been lent by the India Society to the same museum, give much better scope for study. The paintings can also be studied in the two large and elaborately illustrated volumes published by Mr. John Griffiths in 1896. The art of Ajant& is characterised by the strong outline which marks the early Asiatic style ; is bold and broadly massed, greens, reds, and yellow foiled by white ; the figures and faces are animated, there is force and individuality in them, a strong sense of life. We feel that the painters were possessed by their subject ; they worked with fervour and devotion. This, and the scale of the frescoes, the energy of the drawing, the beauty and vigour of many individual figures, make a forcible and imposing impression, even though the composition is often turbid, and we are left with a sense of splendid struggle rather than of mastery. This great group of paintings takes in the history of Asian art the same kind of place that is taken in European art by the frescoes of Giotto and his followers at Assisi. The same Indian artists, or artists of the same school, were probably the authors of a less important but very interesting series of cavepaintings found in the rock of Sigiri in Ceylon, an abrupt mass rising from a plateau which was occupied and fortified at the end of the fifth century by the parricide king Kassapa. These paintings consist of about sixteen pictures of women deities

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or queens, attended by maids who carry lotusflowers in their hands.* The colours employed are shades of yellow, red, and green. But after this date what do we find ? Nothing apparently for close on a thousand years ! This portentous gap and blank is due, we are told, to merciless destruction. Yet it seems hard to believe that if the art of painting had been an instinctive and dominant passion of the Indian races, some more definite traces should not have survived. But perhaps further evidence is yet to come to light ; for the study of Indian painting has been signally neglected, and it is only in the last few years that, owing chiefly to the impassioned zeal of Mr. E. B. Havell and the enthusiastic research of Mr. Coomaraswamy, the characteristics of the later Indian schools have been differentiated from the Persian tradition fostered by Akbar and his successors. In those schools reappears something of the old, far-off tradition of the Ajantzi frescoes.

In India, then, we can follow up no line of continuous growth in pictorial art. It is to China that we must turn.

* See the report of Mr. H. C. P. Bell in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, 1897, p. 115. For a note on these paintings I am indebted to Mr. A. K. Coomaraswamy.

Plate I.

Toilet Scene. Portion of a scroll painting by Ku K'ai-chih.

British Museum.

CHAPTER III. CHINESE PAINTING IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

IT was long assumed that the frescoes of Ajant& were the earliest Asiatic paintings known to us. It was assumed that nothing of the pictorial art of China, the third of the three great civilisations which we found met together in Central Asia, had been preserved of a date prior to the time of the T'ang dynasty.

There are, however, at least two paintings which claim to be by the hand of one of the most famous of the early Chinese masters, Ku K'ai-chih, who flourished in the fourth century of our era.

One of these paintings is now in the British Museum, the other was one of the chief treasures in the great collection of the late Tuan Fang, exViceroy of Tientsin. The Tuan Fang picture is a scroll, painted in illustration of a poem by Ts'ao Chih, who flourished in the early part of the third century. It is described in the Kokka, No. 253, June 1911 ; and Mr. Taki, who wrote the article, published at the same time reproductions of two of its three scenes. One of these scenes is very remarkable, and shows what the ancient bas-reliefs also attest how early the Chinese genius excelled in mastery of movement. It shows us a goddess

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riding over the clouds in a chariot drawn by six dragons, and the sense of a buoyant rushing through space is inimitably given. The other scene reproduced shows us gods and goddesses floating over earth, with rocks and trees and streams below. The landscape, however, is of a primitive character, as compared with the figures, which are drawn in fine expressive lines.

To judge from these reproductions, which are all that I have seen, the painting, though of extraordinary interest, is distinctly inferior in actual workmanship to the roll in the British Museum.

Since the first edition of this book appeared, this roll has attracted much attention among scholars, and their studies have brought a number of new facts to light. It was at first thought that the scenes represented by the painter were illustrations to a work by a lady known as the Female Historian, Pan Chao. But Professor Chavannes has discovered the actual text, which proves to be a short composition by Chang Hua, a third-century writer, consisting of precepts addressed to the ladies of the Imperial Harem. The true title of the painting is therefore i:< Admonitions of the Instructress in the Palace."

Incidentally, M. Chavannes has shown that the picture was longer than it is at present : for the first few precepts are not illustrated, and the text relating to the first of the nine scenes is missing. 40

THE FOURTH CENTURY

And this is confirmed by the fact that the beginning of the roll has a ragged edge, though repaired so long ago and with such skill that only a careful scrutiny reveals it. At the end of the roll is the signature of Ku K'ai-chih. This is certainly a later addition. But the painting also bears, among a great number of collectors' seals, the seal of the Imperial collection. Now this collection was catalogued in the early part of the twelfth century. The catalogue, published anonymously, is known as the " Hsiian ho hua p'u." In it, seventh among the nine paintings by Ku K'ai-chih, is " Admonitions of the Instructress," the exact title which the picture now in the Museum bears on the outside. The picture is painted on a long roll of silk, and at the end of it is a eulogy of the painter, written in 1746 by the hand of Ch'ien Lung, the famous Emperor, who certainly believed in its authenticity, and who could rely on the most skilled connoisseurship of his day. He had the painting remounted, and wrote the label on it in his own hand. " The picture has not lost its freshness," he wrote ; and ' Of the painter's four works this is the best." Among the many collectors' seals are those of Sung Ch'i, a statesman of the eleventh century, and of Hui Tsung, the artist-Emperor of the twelfth.

When we add that the types, the costumes, and the style of painting are unlike any later Chinese work known to us, there can be no reasonable doubt

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that the picture represents the art of the fourthcentury master. Whether it is Ku K'ai-chih's actual handiwork or not, no one can prove with certainty.* If not, it is a very ancient copy. The condition of the silk, repaired many times over with exquisite skill and care, shows that it is of high antiquity, as also that it has been most jealously preserved. Even a copy of a fourth-century painting would be of extraordinary interest ; indeed, as a document, of almost equal importance with an original. But that it is a copy is in the highest degree unlikely. The brushwork is confident and spontaneous. The hand that painted it was beyond all dispute the hand of a great master. It is true that in China and Japan great masters have copied their predecessors, but in such cases as we know of the copy is a free one, whereas in this case curious details of dress and ornament are rendered in a way that only a servile copyist could reproduce. But it is time to describe the work itself. It is a roll of brown silk, a little over eleven feet long, a little over nine inches wide. On it are painted nine scenes. The subject of the first is taken from actual history. The story is told that on a certain occasion, when games were being held in the Emperor's presence, a bear broke loose.

* The painting has this year (1913) been reproduced entire in colourwoodcut by Japanese artists, and published by the Trustees of the British Museum. The text issued with the reproduction discusses at length the question of the picture's authenticity, and describes it in fuller detail than can be attempted here.

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It was rushing towards the Emperor, when a lady boldly threw herself in its path. In the painting we see her, a superb figure, with folded arms, confronting the furious animal, which two tall guards step forward to despatch with their broad-bladed spears. The three figures are admirably disposed and brought together, and effective use is made of the straight lines of the spears in a pyramidal design. Another subject which has a historical basis shows the lady Pan Chieh-yu (of the first century B.C.) refusing the Emperor's invitation to ride with him in his palanquin. " In old paintings," she is reported to have answered, "it is only ministers that we see riding beside their monarch." The other subjects illustrate various maxims and admonitions. One is a toilet scene, in which a maid is dressing her mistress's hair before a round mirror ; lacquer boxes lie on the floor beside them. Another, of great interest for the student of architecture, shows a bed-chamber. In another we are introduced to the family circle of the Imperial house. On one side sit the Emperor and Empress, on the other are two children with their nurses ; one of them, a boy, is having his hair shaved and shrinks with a rebellious grimace. In the background a tutor is holding up a scroll for a child to read. Domestic harmony is the moral. All through these maxims runs a strong vein of Taoist philosophy, applied to the vindication of polygamy. ' No one

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can please for ever. When love has reached its height, it begins to diminish. This is a law of nature to which all must submit." That is the burden of the admonitions.

In the middle of the roll is a landscape. A mountain, wrinkled with fissures, rears up its crags. On a lower ledge are two hares ; higher up is a tiger. Belonging to this subject is a man aiming with a cross-bow at a flying pheasant. The tiger is many times too large ; there is no sense of diminishing planes, nor of atmosphere. The mountain is treated like the hills in some early Italian pictures. This is noteworthy, because (just as we noted in the case of the Tuan Fang picture) it is the only primitive feature in the work. It precisely bears out the observation of a Chinese critic * of the eighth century, who writes of the landscape of Ku K'ai-chih's period that the mountains were drawn stiffly " like hairpins and combs, " and that the figures were made larger than the mountains. This landscape scene, which seems to intrude so incongruously, illustrates the recurring moral. Fortune lifts us up like a mountain, but the fall comes sudden as the recoil of a cross-bow.

For the rest, it is obvious that figure-painting at least had already arrived at maturity. The figures are outlined with a brush in ink, the roundness of forms and folds of drapery suggested by light strokes of grey or red. Sometimes the spaces

* Chang Yen- Yuan, "Famous Painters of Different Dynasties."

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within the contours are left uncoloured, sometimes there is a tint of vermilion, either opaque or diluted. A tawny yellow, a dull green, and a mulberry purple have also been used ; but these colours have sunk into the silk and lost much of their original value. The general effect is of a painting in black, grey, and vermilion red on a background of golden brown.

Both types and costume are remarkable. The ladies are of a taller, statelier elegance than any we find in later Chinese art. They wear flowing robes, from which scarves or ribbons of some light and soft material float and wave in the air. In the thick masses of hair bound up on their heads are two upright ornaments of crimson colour and delicate design ; they look like cups full of springing flames. We note in the toilet scene the refined simplicity of shape prevailing in all the accessories.

In actual beauty of delicately modulated brushline, sensitively sweet, yet confident in power, no painting of later ages surpasses this. It is suave and tender, yet never soft or weak ; firm and precise, yet never dry. The calligraphic element is there, as in all Chinese painting ; but there is also unusual lifelikeness and humour. How beautifully felt is the action of the hands of the tall maiden knotting up the coil of hair in the toilet scene ! How delightfully realised the boy struggling on his nurse's knees ! How one feels pride, courage, and will in the attitude of the lady

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who faces the raging bear ! How the bearers groan and struggle under the weight of the palanquin bearing the serene Emperor ! We are made to feel all this, and at the same time we feel the painter's enjoyment of pure rhythm in following with his fine brush the wave of the light drapery that streams from the ladies' robes.

An undercurrent of humour and playfulness is perceptible in the work, revealing something of the painter's personality. As a matter of fact we know more about Ku K'ai-chih (it is odd to reflect) than we do about many an English painter of the nineteenth century.

He was a native of Wu-hsi, in Kiangsu. In 364 a Buddhist monastery wanted money. Ku put his name down for a million cash. This was thought mere boasting, and he was dunned by the priests. He asked for time, and shut himself up for a month. When the doors were opened, a resplendent full-length figure of the Buddhist saint Vimalakirti glorified the wall, and visitors flocking in wonder and admiration made up the promised sum. Many of his pictures were of Buddhist subjects, but he was especially famed for the spirituality and expressiveness of his portraits. Expression, not merely likeness, was what he aimed at. He remarked himself on the difficulty in portraiture of imparting to his subjects the air that each should have in short, of revealing personality.

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The bloom and soft modelling of a young girl's face appealed to him less than features showing character and experience. " Painting a pretty girl is like carving in silver," he said ; "it is no use trying to get a likeness by elaboration ; one must trust to a touch here and a stroke there to suggest the essence of her beauty." When he painted a certain noble character, he set him in a background of lofty " peaks and deep ravines," to harmonise with the lofty, great nature of the man. The thought might be that of our own Watts.

Ku K'ai-chih painted landscapes, though, as we have seen, these were doubtless primitive in style ; and also animals. He said of a favourite poem : ' It is easier to illustrate the verse, The hand sweeps the jive strings of the lute* than, this other verse, The eyes follow the flight of the wild goose. We may perhaps infer from this saying that Chinese art was already grappling with the study of birds in flight and animals in motion, which was to play so potent a part in the painting of the Far East.

What other subjects did he paint ? We know at least the titles of several. Among others are these : " A Hermit of Pure Fame," " Three Heavenly Beauties," " The Great Yu Draining the Empire," " An Ancient Worthy," " The Spring Dragon Rising from its Winter Sleep," " Making a Lute," " Tending Sheep," " Eleven Lions," " Tiger and Leopard

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with Vultures," " Goddesses," " A Buddhist Assembly," " Division of Buddhist Relics."

A famous critic, two centuries later, praised Ku K'ai-chih for his fineness of detail and unerring hand, but pronounced his execution to fall short of his conceptions. Some of the titles just given certainly suggest conceptions of poetic force and grandeur, such as the characteristics of the work known to us would hardly lead us to expect. But, as every student of the art of the Far East is aware, the painting of the ancient schools is singularly various in style : the style varied with the subject, for a traditional mode of treatment attached to each order of themes. Some of Ku K'ai-chih 's religious pictures may have been in a grand and monumental style, as the story of his painting of Vimalakirti suggests.

It was said of Ku that he was supreme in poetry, supreme in painting, and supreme in foolishness. We may conceive of him as an original nature, careless of the world's opinion, going his own way and rather enjoying the bewilderment of ordinary people at his behaviour. He is said to have been a believer in magic. He was noted for his way of eating sugarcane : he began at the wrong end, and entered, as he expressed it, gradually into Paradise. He had a whimsical, exaggerated manner of expressing himself.

Professor Chavannes, who has been able approxi-

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mately to fix the date of the artist's death as some year after 405, relates some instances of his skill at one of the literary games dear to the Chinese. At a party of friends it was proposed to find an image which should give the most vivid idea of a thing finished and ended. One of the company suggested this : ;< A fish thrown into deep water ; a bird let loose into the air." Ku K'ai-chih said : :< A plain entirely consumed with fire, the last flame of which has died out." On another occasion danger was the theme. One said : "To gather rice with a spear, and cook it on the sword's point." Ku K'ai-chih said : "A sightless man riding a blind horse on the brink of a fathomless lake." This was too much for the nerves of one of those present, the artist's patron, who had weak eyes, and left the room.

Do we even now seem so remote from such an atmosphere as Ku K'ai-chih breathed ? It is the atmosphere of an age of civilised grace, of leisured thought, of refined culture. The artist himself deals in critical ideas. There is a modern tone in his comments on art. He has an Epicurean strain in his nature.

The paintings we have been discussing are not all that we know of the master.

In the temple of Confucius at Ch'u-fou hsien is a figure of the sage incised upon stone in the year A.D. 1118. This was copied from a painting which

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was attributed by some to Ku K'ai-chih, by others to Wu Tao-tzu, the supreme master of the T'ang dynasty. This is of great interest as indicating the relation of these two great painters to each other, and we will return to the point when we come to the T'ang master. But of far greater importance as a document is a book of woodcuts, published during the Sung dynasty after Ku K'ai-chih's designs, called " Lives of the Heroines." It is true that the woodcuts are not very accomplished ; but despite the craftsman's intervention we recognise the same essential features which distinguish the Museum painting and the Tuan Fang painting, the same expressive draughtsmanship in the figures, the same mastery in the suggestion of movement, the same contrast of primitive character in landscape accessories. History and literature fill out the picture of the age. It was a time of revolt from convention. Artists and poets were under the spell of the teaching of Lao Tzu, who, as against the social obedience prescribed by Confucius, taught the virtues of individuality and freedom. To this epoch belongs that coterie of men of letters, afterwards so favourite a theme of painting, called " The Seven Sages of the Bamboo grove," who met by moonlight in the woods to regale on wine and song. A famous contemporary of Ku K'ai-chih's, T'ao Ch'ien, was a typical figure of the time and its ideas. He obtained an appointment as magistrate, but resigned it in three months

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because he could not bring himself to receive a superior officer with the recognised ceremonial. ' I cannot crook the hinges of my back for a salary," he said. So he retired into private life and devoted himself to poetry, music, and the culture of the chrysanthemum. The poem he wrote on his retirement and return home is a charming piece, and a celebrated classic.*

This reaction to simplicity and nature, the symptom of an advanced not of a primitive civilisation, is reflected in that intimate glimpse of the Imperial family which we have noticed in Ku K'ai-chih's picture : it is naturalness rather than homeliness which distinguishes the group from the ceremonial stiffness usual to courts ; there is no absence of dignity in the absence of pomp and parade. And now let us turn again from these scenes, this life of social charm, of modern elegance and leisured philosophy, to the cave-temple of Ajanta. We seem to step back to primitive times, certainly to an art which by comparison is primitive. The refined rhythm, the delicate power, the restrained colour of Ku K'ai-chih's brush bespeak a development of the art of painting which the artists of Ajanta with all their grace and vigour are far from having reached. Moreover, in Ku K'ai-chih there is no trace whatever of any impress from Indian or GraecoIndian art.

* See the prose translation in Giles, " Chinese Literature," p. 129.

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I wish to emphasise this point, because it has been often assumed, as I have already said, that the art of China only rose from a rudimentary stage at the vitalising touch of Buddhist inspiration from India. Buddhism doubtless proved a potent spiritual influence, but it could never have taken so firm a hold in China had the mystic ideas of Lao Tzu not prepared the Chinese mind for its acceptance. We note in Ku K'ai-chih a certain lightness of tone, far removed from the fervent religious intensity of the Ajanta frescoes ; and indeed that intensity of conviction and feeling does not seem to have prevailed in the Buddhist painting of China till the time of the T'ang dynasty, when the religion had penetrated far more deeply into the soul of the nation.

To China then, rather than to India, we must turn to find, if not the parent art of Asia, its earliest mature flower in painting. And from this early epoch onward, while the other countries of Asia yield but scattered evidence of their schools of painting, China has left a continuous record of famous artists, and an endless amount of allusion and criticism, which testify to the unrivalled vitality of its schools and their importance in the life of the nation. Religious art is naturally conservative in types and forms and mode of treatment. Hence the union of Indian conceptions and symbolism with the forms of Greek plastic art, which produced what 52

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we call the Graeco-Indian style, leaves its unmistakable trace on the Buddhist painting and sculpture of China and of Japan. But the Greek element can easily be exaggerated. I have quoted already the story, from the Persian poem of the twelfth century, of the competition between the two opposed schools of art, the Greek and the Chinese. I believe that here we have the clue to the right conception. The great original art tradition of Europe has its home in Greece ; the great original art tradition of Asia has its home in China. Each race is pre-eminent in its feeling for harmony and rhythm, the foundation of all art.

CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGINS AND EARLIEST PHASES OF PICTORIAL ART IN CHINA

CENTURIES, it is obvious, many centuries, must have gone to the moulding of an art which could produce so mature and so refined a work as this painting of Ku K'ai-chih's.

Legend, indeed, throws back the origin of Chinese painting to 2700 B.C. There is no need to doubt that the art is of great antiquity. According to native historians, it came into existence at the same time as the art of writing ; and throughout the history of China the two arts are intimately connected. A fine piece of calligraphy is valued as highly as a fine painting ; and what is most prized in a picture is that the brushwork should be as personal to the artist as his handwriting. In either case the strokes should be full of life, an immediate and direct communication of the artist's mood and thought to the paper or silk on which he paints. The typical Chinese and Japanese painting corresponds, in fact, rather to the drawings of European masters ; there is nothing in the East like the highly-finished oil-picture, in which the painting is a sort of confection, and there is no obvious revelation of the way in which the pigments got

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to be there. In the early frescoes, however, of the East and the West there is no essential difference.

Bronze vases and incense-burners dating from various periods B.C. still exist, masterpieces of this kind. The sculptural reliefs adorning a mausoleum in Shantung, built in A.D. 147, have become famous through the woodcut illustrations of a Chinese work devoted to them ; and they have been treated in an exhaustive monograph by the eminent scholar, M. Edouard Chavannes. More important sculpture seems to have been destroyed by time. But for all evidence of pictorial art anterior to Ku K'ai-chih we must rely on literary record and allusion.

Professor Giles, in his " Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art," has collected the evidence available. We find a definite mention of portraiture as early as 1326 B.C. But not till the third and second centuries B.C. do references to painting become at all frequent. Already the Dragon is a favourite subject, and pictures of animals were common, but portraiture remains predominant for many centuries. We have noted in the text of the Admonitions illustrated by Ku K'ai-chih the interesting reference to old paintings of emperors in their chariots, put into the mouth of a lady of the first century.

The encouragement of portraiture accorded indeed with the teachings of Confucius, that great and grave moralist of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.,

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whose code of ethics has sunk so deep into the mind of China. Confucius, like Plato, held that art should serve the State ; it should kindle and sustain the patriotic virtues. He attached high importance to the ballads of a nation ; and the literature he rescued from oblivion and edited for posterity was chosen and prized for its effect on character. Filial piety was a supreme virtue in his eyes ; therefore the portraits of the great men who had gone before were to furnish to each generation a stimulating and ennobling example. Music he also encouraged as promoting harmony between man and man ; for the individual was to merge his own desires in the cause of the community. In Confucian theory the empire was one vast brotherhood recognising mutual duties, and the emperor's parental authority was based on nothing but the consent and choice of the people. How far the socialistic tendencies implied in the Confucian ideas could be developed into actual practice is seen in the attempt of a usurper in the first century A.D. to carry out an equal division of land among the whole people. He had already published an edict abolishing slavery. But the outraged nobles rose, and he was killed as he sat, unresisting, in his palace.*

' Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay ! ' cries the hero of " Locksley Hall," for

* Okakura, " Ideals of the East," p. 35.

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whom, as for most Englishmen, the name of China is a symbol of stagnation. More knowledge of China's history might have made the exclamation more appropriate to the mouth of a Tory landlord.

The power of Confucius over his countrymen lay, doubtless, in the fact that he represented the national character in a noble and commanding type. He represented what we may call its orthodoxy, its eminent reasonableness, its social instinct, its aptitude for peaceful living, and its genius for order. Yet Confucius does not sum up the whole of the Chinese nature.

Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson's eloquent little book of letters, put into the mouth of " John Chinaman," has justly found many admirers. It has provoked in America the indignation of Mr. Bryan, who supposed it to be really the work of a Celestial pen, and was wroth that an Oriental should presume to indict our Western civilisation. The view adopted in these letters is that China stands for the Confucian ideal and nothing else ; and from this standpoint it is, of course, easy to contrast the ugliness and hypocrisies of Europe and America with the harmony and clearness of Chinese life. The letters hold up the success of the Chinese in embodying a sensible and practicable ideal in conduct against the failure of the West to make any reality of its professions of faith in its " idealistic

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religion." Yet this " John Chinaman," though he writes such glowing and persuasive prose, is, I think, unjust both to China and to Europe. The solution of the problems of government, the dwelling together of a people in harmony these are admirable things to attain, but they alone will never satisfy human nature. After all, it is not likely that we shall ever rival ants in this respect. Mr. Dickinson makes his Chinaman write as if all idealistic religions were a mistake, and as if no such impossible aspirations had ever disturbed the serene centuries of China. Yet listen to the voice of a Chinese sage :

" The Way that can be walked upon is not the eternal Way."

" Follow diligently the Way in your own heart, but make no display of it to the world."

" Recompense injury with kindness."

" Do nothing, and all things will be done."

These are words of Lao Tzu. How different an accent from the reasonable prose of Confucius !

Lao Tzu, the mystic, the proclaimer of paradoxes, the man of imagination, the seer, represents the other side of the Chinese genius. From this other imaginative side has flowered all that is most glowing and alive in Chinese painting and literature. And surely it is not least by her painting and her literature that China will live for the world.

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Lao Tzu, said to have been born fifty years before Confucius, inspired the reaction of the individual soul against the communistic system of the latter. The Confucian ideas, especially as interpreted by the pedantry which is the besetting weakness of the Chinese intellect, tended in time to harden and to freeze. A revolt was necessary. However, Mr. Kakuzo Okakura has suggestively observed that " in this Eastern struggle between the two forces of communism and individual reaction, the ground of contest is not economic, but intellectual and imaginative."

In all creative art there is a similar contest or dualism. For all art conveys in varying proportions, but inextricably combined, ideas of order and ideas of energy or freedom. In pictorial art we find this dualism expressed, in its rudiment and essence, through the straight lines or regular curves of man's making, and the free lines of nature ; the erect tower, the Roman road, contrast with the sinuous stream, the fretted branch, the melting edge of clouds. Perfect art holds the two elements in equilibrium ; it satisfies both our instinct for order and our instinct for freedom. At bottom, the tendencies we label Classic and Romantic are based on this antithesis, and the preponderance now of one element, now of the other.

The ideas of Lao Tzu impregnated, as may be imagined, but rare and naturally original minds.

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He is traditionally regarded as the founder of Taoism, that popular cult which is chiefly associated with magic rites and exorcisms, and especially with the chimerical pursuit of the elixir of immortality. But as in Taoism the pure authentic doctrine of the sage has been entirely submerged in a wild mass of superstition, Mr. Okakura has proposed the name Laoism as a conveniently distinctive title for the yet uncorrupted teaching of Lao Tzu. And in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries A.D. Laoism was a spirit of power.

In the third century we meet with the name of a painter, Wei Hsieh, said to have been the first artist to paint detail, who excelled in " Taoist and Buddhist subjects.'* The collocation of the names is significant. Buddhism, which by now was taking hold of China, found its adherents chiefly among the followers of Lao Tzu. They found in the Indian religion their own philosophy presented in a more developed form. The Buddhist images too were welcomed as those of one of their own gods.

Before long, it is true, rivalry was engendered, and Buddhism had to face bitter persecution. But at first the attitude of Taoism was friendly, and the Indian religion was allowed to take strong hold. Indeed, the special doctrines of the Dhyana, known in Japan as the Zen sect of Buddhism, so 60

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potent in inspiration for the art of the Sung period in China and the Ashikaga period in Japan, derived not a little from the teaching of Lao Tzu. So we come to the fourth century, and to Ku K'ai-chih.

CHAPTER V. CHINESE PAINTING FROM THE FOURTH TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY

A older contemporary of Ku K'ai-chih's is recorded to have painted a picture on white hemp paper. This, according to Professor Giles, is probably the earliest mention of that material. Paintings were usually made with a brush, upon silk, which about the first century had superseded the earlier bamboo and stylus. From now onwards to the present day both silk and paper have been used in China, as in Japan, for painting ; but silk has always been the more common material.

From the fourth century to the eighth, though there are interesting monuments in sculpture, we have no tangible monument of pictorial art. Yet history records the names and works of a long roll of painters. To fill these pages with the records, for which the student should refer to Dr. Giles's book, is not my purpose. But it may be well to say something of the various subjects which formed the content of these painters' art, since they will recur again and again in the works of later times.

First we must mention those great symbolic figures which had early taken shape and meaning 62

Plate II.

Liu Pei.

Traditionally attributed to Wu Tao-tzu.

Freer Collection.

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in the Chinese imagination the Dragon and the Tiger. Both are symbols of power. In the superstition of literal minds the Dragon was the genius ,of the element of water, producing clouds and mists ; the Tiger the genius of the mountains, whose roaring is heard in the wind that shakes the forest. But in the imagination of poets and of artists these symbols became charged with spiritual meanings, meanings which we should regard as fluid rather than fixed, and of import varying with the dominant conceptions of particular epochs. In the Dragon is made visible the power of the spirit, the power of the infinite, the power of change ; in the Tiger, the power of material forces. When the Tiger was portrayed simply as the royal beast, it was painted in the colours of nature. But when conceived as a symbolic power, it was always painted in ink only, like the Dragon. The two subjects have been painted as a pair of pictures by almost every artist of note who worked in the Chinese tradition, whether in China or Japan.

The Dragon is typical of the creative faculties of the Chinese genius, which had a singular gift for moulding into shapes of vivid and formidable reality those shadowy terrors of the unknown and the nonhuman world that survive in mankind from the infancy of the race ; not without unconscious actual memory, perhaps, of a time when the monsters of primaeval ages still existed. The earliest Chinese

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bronzes betray a power akin to that which inspired such mediaeval sculptors of Europe as those who carved the famous gargoyles of Notre Dame. And in the creation of demons and fantastic beasts and birds the Chinese genius is vividly inventive.

The Confucian ideals promoted portraiture, also the exploits of heroes and the classic stories of filial piety. Of these last there is a chosen set of Twenty-four Examples. In most of the stories they illustrate there is an element of childishness and extravagance, and this is probably one reason why these themes do not seem to have provoked masterpieces. Another reason is that imaginative artists were attracted rather by the ideas of Taoism and Buddhism.

Taoism gave to art some of its most romantic subjects. Chief among these are those themes connected with the Rishi or Wizards of the Mountains. These were human beings who had abandoned the world, who abstained from all nourishment but fruits and dew, and who by the practice of certain mystic arts had attained to an ethereal existence and the enjoyment of immortality. They form a mysterious brotherhood, who ride on storks through the air, or traverse the mountains on the backs of fabulous animals, or meet together in mountain retreats. They are pictured as beings of mystery, yet with nothing of the haggard foulness of the European conception of witch and wizard ; their

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genius is one of gaiety and world-forgetting youth. The stork, the tortoise, the pine, plum, and bamboo were their accompanying emblems. With such conceptions the Buddhist Arhats might seem at first to have a not unfraternal kinship. These were the immediate disciples of Buddha, first sixteen, afterwards eighteen, in number the Chinese call them Lohan, the Japanese, Rakan and their figures are familiar in every form of the art of the two countries. They too haunt the mountain solitudes ; but theirs is not the careless smile of the wild Rishi : they are rapt in intense meditation, they breathe a spiritual air, they are forms of grandeur and intellectual power. Yet sometimes, when represented in a company, they lose their solemn Indian aloofness ; their aspect takes on something of the genial lightness of the Flowery Land, and we see them crossing the waters of ocean to the Paradise of Mount Horai in the legendary West, where the Faerie Queen, the goddess Si Wang Mu, awaits them with the mystic peaches in her hand, the taste of which is immortality. Here we have in a single subject the blending of Buddhist and Taoist conceptions ; for Si Wang Mu belongs to the supernatural world of Taoism, though originally, as Dr. Giles has suggested, her legend may reflect Greek myth, the goddess Hera, the apples of the Hesperides, and the river of Ocean at the boundaries of the world. Yet normally the

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Arhats are pictured as single figures, each with his attendant lion, tiger, or other guardian emblem, and thus portrayed often strangely recall the hermit saints of Christian art. The first mention of the Arhats in Chinese painting dates from the sixth century.

Endless were the subjects of the Buddhist painters ; for Buddhism, as it grew and spread abroad, absorbed into itself a mass of alien conceptions, and transformed to its uses a hundred forms from the Pantheon of Indian mythology. Moreover, the personification of every varying mood of Buddha and Bodhisattva created through the multiplication of images an ever-increasing array of individual deities.

Here, since it is impossible to suggest more than the outline of so vast a subject, I will merely touch on two points. One is the absence of the dramatic instinct'. In the story of Sakyamuni there are moments of moving drama, which the artists of Europe would, one cannot doubt, have eagerly seized on for representation. There is, for instance, that moment when the young prince, brought up in luxury and ignorance of death as of pain, meets outside the gates of his city an old man leaning on a staff, withered and bent. What ails him ? Has he been so from his birth ? asked the Prince, only to learn from his attendants that this was the inevitable end of youth and glorious manhood, the end to which all must come. I can recall but one painting of this subject, by the 66

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Japanese fifteenth-century master, Montonobu, and he treats it but impassively. Think what Giotto would have made of such a theme, or Rembrandt ! Again, there is the moment when at midnight Sakyamuni, resolved to quit the world for solitude, comes to take farewell of his sleeping wife, and his boy, Rahula. He longs to take the child up in his arms ; he stretches out his hands to do so ; but he fears to wake them, and silently goes out. What a subject for Leonardo, for Correggio ! Pictures of it must exist, but I never saw nor heard of one. Yet we should not wonder at this, after all ; for human tenderness, human love, human emotion, are in that high doctrine of Buddha bound up with the rooted evil of individual existence. Therefore the Buddhist painters concentrate their power on types of intellectual peace, every line in whose calm features, in drooped eyelid, in wide forehead bent slightly forward, in unruffled fold of drapery, lays a spell upon the mind, woos it from the restless world, and draws it inward to the divine ecstasy of absolute contemplation. In all the art of the world there is nothing more impressive, nothing of more pure religious feeling, than some of those noblest creations of Buddhist genius. Yet how we miss in the religious art of Asia those consecrations of humanity which form the centre of the religious art of Europe ! Even in the East those human cravings and instincts which have

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been touched to ennobling beauty by the painters and sculptors of Christendom have not been without some outlet of expression ; and the abstraction of Love and Mercy which found form in India as Avalokitesvara, named in China, Kwan-yin, in Japan, Kwannon, is transformed * in the course of time from a male angelic figure to that of a woman. Another deity, Hariti, originally the goddess of smallpox and the devourer of little children, becomes in time (she was converted by the persuasions of Buddha) their protectress ; and her image, with a child on her lap, has been mistaken sometimes by Europeans for an Oriental borrowing of that perpetual theme of Christian art, the sublimation of Motherhood in the Madonna.

The other point I wish to notice is the element of grotesqueness which pervades the Indian mythology, and which was constantly at war with the finer instincts of the Chinese artists. Grotesqueness is not the right word perhaps, for of the true grotesque the Chinese are naturally masters. I mean those symbolic figures of deities with many heads, or eyes, or arms, which are not genuinely pictorial or plastic conceptions, but literal translations of the verbal imagery of which Indian literature is profuse an origin totally different from that which gave birth to the Chinese dragon, or

* The change appears to date, from the twelfth century. Giles " Introduction, &c.," p. 21.

FOURTH TO EIGHTH CENTURY

such European creations as " Le Stryge." Hieratic art preserves its types with little change ; but in the religious painting of China and of Japan, the early productions of which are often almost or quite impossible to distinguish between, there is a visible effort, whether conscious or unconscious, to subdue this inherited element by cunning disposition of forms into harmonious rhythm.

Rhythm, indeed, is recognised as the vital essence of art. It was in this period that the criticism of painting was formulated by a writer who was himself an artist, Hsieh Ho (Shakaku in Japanese), who flourished in the sixth century.

The Six Canons of Hsieh Ho crystallise the conceptions of art which had already long pervaded the minds of his countrymen in a less definite form, and have been unanimously accepted by posterity. First, then, comes rhythmic vitality, or, as Mr. Okakura translates it, " the life-movement of the spirit through the rhythm of things." Next comes organic structure. The creative spirit incarnates itself in a pictorial conception, which thereby takes on the organic structure of life. Third comes the law of conformity with nature ; fourth, appropriate colouring ; fifth, arrangement ; sixth, the transmission of classic models.

Throughout the course of Asian painting the \

idea that art is the imitation of nature is unknown,

or known only as a despised and fugitive heresy.

CHAPTER VI. THE T'ANG DYNASTY f | ^HE main great epochs of Chinese painting are easy to grasp and remember. After the immense tract of time from which no painting is known to survive except one or two single pictures like the roll by Ku K'ai-chih which we have described whatever may be hidden in Chinese private collections after this long period we arrive at the T'ang dynasty, extending from A.D. 618 to 905. A short period of half a century follows, known as the Five Dynasties. Then come :

The Sung Dynasty, 960-1280. The Yiian or Mongol dynasty, 1280-1368. The Ming dynasty, 1368-1644 ; and finally The Ch'ing or Manchu dynasty, overthrown but the other day.

The T'ang era stands in history for the period of China's greatest external power the period of her greatest poetry and of her grandest and most vigorous, if not, perhaps, her most perfect, art. Buddhism now took hold on the nation as it had never done before, and its ideals pervaded the imagination of the time. China was never in such close contact with India ; numbers of Indians, including three hundred Buddhist monks, actively 70

Plate III.

Kwanyin.

Artist unknown. Sung Dynasty. Perhaps after a design by Wu Tao-tzti.

Fpeer Collection.

THE T'ANG DYNASTY

preaching the faith, were to be found in the T'ang capital of Lo-yang. And Buddhist ideas permeate T'ang painting.

Until quite recently, it could not be said that we had any but the scantiest first-hand knowledge of T'ang art. But in the last few years extensive discoveries of sculpture, clay figures, and paintings have brought us a store of material on which some conception of the art of this great period may be founded. It is with the paintings that we are here concerned.

The mass of paintings brought from Tun-huang by Sir Aurel Stein and M. Pelliot have this in common, that they are all (I believe) Buddhist. But in style there is a surprising variety. This is, doubtless, partly due to differences of local schools, but also to differences of date. Actual dates occur on some of the pictures, mostly dates of the end of the dynasty. But among the undated examples are paintings which seem from internal evidence to be decidedly earlier than these : and some of the manuscripts found in the same rock-temple go back to centuries before T'ang. Many of the paintings appear to be of a provincial character ; but a number certainly belong to the central Chinese tradition of Buddhist art, which passed on to Japan, and on which the early Japanese schools were closely modelled.

As we should expect, the Indian element is very strong. But in what precisely does it consist ? It supplies the elaborate symbolism with which these

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paintings are saturated. We find it also in the ideal of the divine form, which has the slim waist and pronounced hips of Indian heroic art. The formula and prescription, the ritual, the attitudes, are Indian ; the fervent religious mood of contemplative ecstasy is of Indian inspiration. None the less, the Chinese element is also powerful. Many of these paintings have the portraits of Chinese donors below the heavenly vision which they depict. Many, too, are bordered with small paintings, in the manner of the predella pictures of an Italian altar-piece, representing various legends of the former existences of the Buddha ; and it is very noteworthy that here the Chinese element entirely prevails, for the personages, architecture, costume and accessories have become Chinese instead of Indian, just as in Brueghel's " Massacre of the Innocents " (for example) everything is taken from the life of the artist's own time and country. This alone testifies to the powerful vitality of Chinese art. But even in the pictures of the Buddhist Paradise, so frequently recurring in the series, we find an element easily recognised when we turn from them to the frescoes of Ajanta ; I mean an extraordinary feeling for the music of flowing sinuous line, and of movement in the line, a beauty as of gliding streams or the filmy wave of smoke ascending in the air ; and we are reminded of Ku K'ai-chih's forms, his love of rhythmic motion and his floating draperies. 72

THE T'ANG DYNASTY

Among those pictures which, as I have said, seem to belong to the main stream of Buddhist art in China, are some of memorable beauty. Now strangely vivid in colour, now richly smouldering, the vision of the compassionate Presences of heaven reappears before our eyes, after so many centuries of oblivion, as long ago, in the days when Charlemagne was filling Europe with his fame, these forms appeared to humble worshippers in the shadow of rock-hewn temples of further Asia with the promise of eternal peace. The Guardians of the Four Quarters of the Universe, demonic figures of fierce energy, maintain the lordship of the Enlightened One ; Kwanyin, in many forms and aspects, looks down with pity on all that suffers and is mortal ; and Amida among the concourse of the blest and the dances of angels, presides over his Western Paradise, where the lotus flowers for ever on the heavenly lake. Mere fragments though these are of the Buddhist art of T'ang, we can build up from them some conception of its grandeur.

Of the secular art, on the contrary, and even of such Buddhist art as can be associated with the great names of the period, we still remain sadly ignorant. Tantalising glimpses are all we have.

The great movement of the eighth century was fostered at the court of the emperor Ming Huang, whose tragic story has inspired endless poems and pictures in later times A born enthusiast for beauty,

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he reminds us of princes like Rene of Anjou or our own Richard II. Poetry, painting, and music were with him a passion, only exceeded by his adoration of the beautiful Yang Kuei-fei, by whom came his fall. His army revolted, and he was forced to see his lovely favourite strangled before his eyes.

Among the men of genius who gave splendour to this emperor's reign were China's greatest poet, Li Po, and the painter who by universal consent of later times ranks above all other masters of his country. Wu Tao-tzu, whom the Japanese call Godoshi, was born about the beginning of the eighth century, near the capital city of Lo-yang. He showed as a youth extraordinary powers, and the Emperor gave him a post at court. His fertility of imagination and his fiery swiftness of execution alike astounded his contemporaries. He is said to have painted over three hundred frescoes on the walls of temples alone. He was prodigal of various detail, but what chiefly impressed spectators was the overpowering reality of his creations.

In the art of T'ang there was a conscious effort to unite calligraphy with painting. By this we must understand that painters strove for expression through brush-work which had at once the lifecommunicating power of lines that suggest the living forms of reality and the rhythmical beauty inherent in the modulated sweep of a masterly writer ; for to write the Chinese characters beau-

THE T'ANG DYNASTY

tifully is to have a command of the brush such as any painter might envy. We cannot doubt that Wu Tao-tzu possessed this union of qualities in an extraordinary degree. After his death an old man attached to a certain temple used to tell how, when the great master painted the aureole of a god, all the people of the place, young and old, educated men and labourers, gathered in crowds to watch him. With a single stroke the aureole was completed, as if a whirlwind had driven the brush : his hand, all declared, must have been guided by a god. We are told that Wu Tao-tzu used a fine brush when young, but one of great thickness in middle life. But though his calligraphic mastery was so wonderful, it was his imaginative realism and his tremendous powers of conception that made him supreme. The robes of his angels moved as if the wind were in them. His dragons seemed to shake the air ; his men and women breathed, charmed, awed, ennobled. His picture of the Buddhist Purgatory affrighted thousands from their sins. He painted a great picture of Sakyamuni among ten of his disciples. But most famous of all his works was the large composition of the " Death of Buddha," of which more than one version existed.

Alas ! of all the mighty works of Wu Tao-tzu none now is known certainly to survive. Once, in a dream, I myself beheld them all, but awoke with

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the memory of them faded in a confusion of gorgeous colour, all except one, which remained with me, strangely distinct. A goddess-like form was standing between two pillars of the mountains, not less tall herself. I remember the beauty of the drawing of her hands, as their touch lingered on either summit ; for her arms were extended, and between them, as her head bent forward, the deep mass of hair was slowly slipping to her breast, half-hiding the one side of her face, which gazed downward. At her feet was a mist, hung above dim woods, and from human dwellings unseen the smoke rose faintly. The whole painting was of a rare translucent, glaucous tone. May I be permitted the impertinence of this intrusion ? since only in dream can we ever hope to see most of those lost masterpieces of one of the world 's great artists.

Yet there is something to build our dreams on. A few paintings in Japan have long been attributed to Wu Tao-tzii, though modern criticism questions them. There is a set of three pictures, representing Sakyamuni, and two Bodhisattvas, Samantabhadra, and Manjusri. If not by the master himself (and Mr. Tajima, who has published them in his " Select Relics,'* vol. i., accepts them as genuine), it may well be that these pictures reflect his style. Boldly outlined, the figures betray a latent force and impress as if by a living presence. There is a grandeur and freedom in their form and attitude which later

Plate V.

Sakyamuni.

Artist unknown ; probably T'ang dynasty. The painting has' been attributed to Wu Tao-tzti.

Freer Collection.

THE T'ANG DYNASTY

art does not attain. The types of face are rather round, with a certain open largeness of aspect, though the Buddha himself conforms more or less to the accepted type of tradition. Again, a pair of landscapes is preserved in Japan. Their authenticity is much disputed. They represent mountain scenes tall, upright designs with torrents plunging among rocks, and trees hanging on the steep crags. They are painted with more vigorous strokes and a less delicate brush than the characteristic landscapes of later times, and have a wild and simple nobleness of their own.

Of the famous " Death of Buddha,'* painted in 742, we know at least the composition, for Wu Tao-tzu's design was repeated by more than one early master of Japan, and the original is described in Chinese books. In the British Museum is a large painting of this subject, by the hand of a great artist of a school entirely modelled on the art of T'ang. Magnificent indeed is the conception. The whole of creation is wailing and lamenting around the body of Buddha, who alone lies peaceful in the midst, having entered into Nirvana, under a great tree, the leaves of which are withered where they do not cover him. Saints and disciples, kings, queens, priests and warriors, weep and beat their breasts ; angels are grieving in the air ; even the beasts of the field and the forest, the tiger, the panther, the horse, the elephant, show sorrow in all

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their limbs, rolling with moans upon the ground ; and the birds cry. An ecstasy of lamentation impassions the whole work. What must have been the effect of the original ?

In the Freer collection at Detroit is a large fulllength figure of the famous Chinese hero Liu Pei, who died early in the third century A.D. It is reproduced in this book. From an inscription on the mount of the picture, written by a great connoisseur of the eighteenth century, we learn that this was originally one of a set of three paintings portraying the three heroes Liu Pei, Kwan Yii, and Chang Fei, who formed a famous brotherhood in arms, and whose feats have been favourite motives in art.

The three figures, as painted by Wu Tao-tzu, are known to have been engraved on stone in the tenth century, and these stone engravings still existed in the eighteenth century (perhaps exist still) in an old temple in the province of Ssu-ch'uan. In the opinion of the connoisseur Wang Wen-chin, who wrote the inscription, the picture of Liu Pei, now in the Freer collection, was an undoubted original by Wu Tao-tzu. Certainly, though darkened and injured by time, the painting is of extraordinary power and massiveness of design. It is worthy of what we might expect from the master's brush. It would represent his later, broader style.

We have already seen that there exists in China

THE T'ANG DYNASTY

an engraved portrait of Confucius, made after a picture which some ascribed to Wu Tao-tzu, others to Ku K'ai-chih. It is recorded, moreover, that in the Sung period the works of these two masters were often confounded. Fenollosa, who only saw the Ku K'ai-chih in the British Museum a few days before his death, had assumed in his book that the powerful " broad-brush " style of Wu Tao-tzu was a revival of the style of the fourth-century master. But I think it is pretty c

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Painting in the Far East, by Laurence Binyon