might be characterized as the expression of spiritual serenity-Goethe's Heiterkeit—“floating above the turbulent life of the world."

Still another difference between Eastern and Western art is this, that in pictures representing many figures, the European artists set them in such a manner that they all tend to one central point; unity being one of the required elements of a work of art, this convergence is an imperative necessity. In Eastern paintings with crowded figures, this unity seems not to existat least, it is not as much accentuated as it is in the compositions of the Western masters. However, this is only apparent or rather less formal, for the unity in a work of Asian art is expressed by the mutual relation of figures and even of objects.

It is certain that to China, and not to India, the Asian people have to look, not only for the most fragrant flowers of painting, but for a startingpoint, a foundation, and even for an ideal and pattern.

Through a legend we learn that the art of China goes as far back as 4,500 years, when the Chinamen were ruled by the Yellow Emperor, from whose reign date the arts and crafts of mankind; that there lived then two inspired sages: Is'any Chieh, the inventor of writing, and Shih Huang, who originated drawing; the earliest mention of color dates from the reign of the Emperor Shun, about 500 years later. According to Shun Ching-“Book of History"-His Majesty commanded that the twelve symbols of power, which had been handed down from the most remote ages, should be embroidered, or painted, in the five colors on his sacrificial robes. According to Chinese writers, the first artist was a

4"An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art," by Herbert A. Giles, published by Messrs. Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai, 1910.

younger sister of the Emperor Shin, named Lei. This fact made a Chinese littérateur exclaim: "Alas! that this divine art should have been started by a woman!" Already in 220 B.C. Chinese art attained such a degree of perfection that it was said of an artist of the name of Lieh Yü, that he painted phoenixes and dragons without pupils in their eyes lest they should fly away; and when once, at the Emperor's command, he put the pupils into a dragon's eyes, the creature disappeared from the wall, leaving behind only a cloud of smoke.

The first Chinese dynasty, that of Han, existed from 2700 B.C. to 200 A.D., and during that period the names of fifteen artists are recorded in the history of China. Then follows an era called "The three kingdoms," during which there were six dynasties, from 200-600 A.D. The Wei dynasty, 220265 A.D., furnished only four painters, while that of the Chin, 265-420, produced twenty-two artists whose names have been handed down. Amongst those was Wang Hsi-chich, 321-379 A.D., China's greatest caligraphist, whose writing was "light as floating clouds, vigorous as a startled dragon."

We see then-although we cannot judge the artistic value of the pictures of this period, for we do not know of any till we come to the fourth century -that there was an active and vigorous artistic movement in China; for we find names of artists, art criticism, and artistic allusions. The Chinese literature refers so often to art that we are able to form a clear idea as to what kind of art flourished then. vorite subjects were the phoenix, dragon, and lion; pictures of animals were common, and portrait-painting was prevalent. This might be explained by the influence of Confucius, for according to him filial piety was the foremost virtue, and the portraits of those who were remarkable, either

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for their deeds or accomplishments, had an ennobling influence over those who look at them. Although he was a stern moralist, he said: "Let relaxation and enjoyment be found in the public arts." *

It is plain that the art that was capable of producing such a masterpiece as is the makimono painted by Ku K'aichih, entitled "Admonitions of the Instructress in the Palace," the greatest art treasure of the whole collection of the British Museum, and it would not be an exaggeration to say, of the world, was not in its infancy. This unsurpassable masterpiece was painted between 364 and 405 A.D., and it represents nine scenes, each illustrating a precept or example of conduct held up for admiration by the instructress of the ladies of the Chinese Court. It is the oldest document of Asian art in existence at least, known to Western students; what is more, it is the only one known to exist between the fourth and eighth centuries. There is nothing clumsy or awkward-common characteristics of primitive art-about the workmanship of this precious roll of paintings. On the contrary, the art of Ku K'ai-chih is so consummate that it is impossible to notice even the slightest effort; and the Chinese writer Tang Hon was justified when he said in his Hau chien, that "Ku K'ai-chih painted his pictures as a spring silkworm spins silk. At first sight his pictures seem flat, but a close inspection shows that the six canons are all observed. His ideas are like clouds floating in space, or a stream hurrying along-perfectly natural." The Chinese critic was right in praising the spontaneity and assurance of the brushwork of the great Asian artist.

Yes, six canons, but especially the first concerning rhythm, were well observed in this peerless work of art,

for in regard to beauty of sweeping yet sensitive, rhythmical and precise line, few paintings-if any in the world approach this. The painter mastered his materials to perfection, and his delight overflowed in the exquisite modulations of the brush line with which the streaming draperies are caligraphed. The composition of the groups is not inferior to the execution, especially in the sixth scene, called "Harmonious life," illustrating the following passage, written by the lady Pan-Chao, who lived and wrote in the first century A.D. thus:-"To utter a word seems an insignificant thing; but on it depends honor or shame. Think not to hide your thoughts; the heavenly mirror has no need of visible forms. Say not that you have made no noise; the Divine Ear has no need of sound.

.." While in the "Toilet-scene," illustrating the line: "All can adorn their faces, none can adorn her heart.” one notices a refined simplicity in the surroundings and accessories. The women depicted by Ku K'ai-chih are slender and exquisitely elegant in their flowing robes, ornamented with streaming ribbons.

The style of the paintings, dresses, and types of men and women, indicates that the roll was executed by a fourth century master. Then there is an intrinsic proof of its authenticity, for the landscape which is painted in one of the scenes is executed in the same manner as was described by Chang Yen-Yuan, a Chinese art critic of the eighth century. This writer saw some pictures painted by Ku K'ai-chih, and in his "Famous Painters of Different Dynasties," he said that his mountains were drawn stiffly, "like hairpins and combs," and that it was his wont to paint the figures larger than the mountains. It is exactly in that manner that the mountain is executed on the roll in the British Museum: there is no sense of proportion between a

man shooting with a cross-bow and the landscape.

Ku K'ai-chih's name appeared in the history of China in 364 A.D. in the following manner. A Buddhist monastery was appealing to the public for funds to build a church, and the artist promised one million in cash. When the monks pressed him for the money. he asked to be allowed to closet himself in one of their rooms; they granted his request, and in a few days he executed on a wall of the chamber such a wonderful figure of the Buddhist saint Vimalakirti, that the people came in enormous crowds to see the masterpiece, and soon one million in cash was deposited by the pious pilgrims. His was a whimsical mind, and it was said of him that he was supreme in painting, poetry and foolishness. Like all great Chinese painters he excelled in all kinds of pictures, but he was most renowned for his portraits, because of their deep spirituality and expression, and "as expression"-says a Chinese critic "is of an occult nature beyond anything which can be learned, of all painters I place Ku K'ai-chih first." Notwithstanding his pre-eminence in portraiture, he complains of the difficulties of this branch of pictorial art when he says: "In painting, the most troublesome subject is man. Painting the face of a pretty young girl is like carving a portrait in silver. There may be great elaboration, but no likeness will be forthcoming. It is better to put the elaboration into the young lady's clothes, and trust to a touch here and a stroke there to bring out her beauty as it really is."

At the end of this priceless roll there is an inscription made by the great Emperor Ch'ien Lung. 1710-1799: "At an odd moment in summer I came across Ku K'ai-chih's picture, 'Admonitions of the Female Historian,' and under its influence I sketched in ink a spray of epidendrum, as an expression of sym

pathy with its profound and mysterious purport. Only one who had himself reached Samadhi' could attain to such a standard as this. The picture has not lost its freshness-an achievement not to be surpassed by the after born. Of the painter's four works, this is the best."

This is a literary monument worthy of the great master!

It

Ku K'ai-chih's picture is of great consequence, not only on account of its inimitable beauty, but also as a document of importance through which two obscure questions are made clear. proves that Chinese art was not influenced by Greece, for in that priceless makimono, there is not a vestige of Greek art. It demonstrates also that Chinese art was already great, when some Indian elements were added to it. The argument in favor of this assertion rests on these facts, that the oldest Indian pictorial document, the Ajantû frescoes, were executed two centuries after Ku K'ai-chih's death, and that notwithstanding those two centuries, they look but very primitive if compared with the consummate Chinese masterpiece. The refined and subdued coloring, the elegant and artistic rhythm, the fine and nervous power of Ku K'aichih's picture prove convincingly that the achievement of Chinese art was far superior to that of India.

There is not one picture painted between the fourth and eighth centuries in existence-except perhaps somewhere in China-although history has on its roll a great many artists.

But during this long period two symbolic conceptions were constantly reproduced; these were the Tiger and the Dragon-both emblems of power. The Dragon was the genius of water, producing mists and clouds; he represented also the power of the spirit of

The highest pitch of abstract ecstatic meditation.

the infinite, of change. The Tiger was the genius of the mountains, whose roaring is heard in the wind; he represents the power of material forces. The Dragon is a product of the lurid Chinese imagination, capable of giving horrible shapes to those strange frights which are found at the bottom of the fancy of all mankind. The Tiger-Dragon pictures portrayed the ceaseless conflict of material forces with spiritual . . . the Infinite.

When the most famous Chinese pilgrim, Fa Hsien, returned from India at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Buddhism followed him, and had a great influence on Chinese art, bringing into it new motives and elements, stimulating ideals and religious imagery. The ideas of Confucius, representing the national orthodoxy and well-ordered society, interpreted by pedantry, which is a great drawback to the Chinese mind, made everything so stiff, that a reaction against convention was necessary. This was accomplished by the doctrine of Lao Tzu, the preacher of individual freedom in opposition to Confucian social obedience and slavery. Towards the fifth century Laoism, or Taoism, took a strong hold on those Chinese who embraced Buddhism, and brought a new element into life, literature, and art. Taoism has much in common with our Romanticism; one of its subjects was the Rishi or Wizards of the mountains, human beings eating only fruits and drinking only dew, and enjoying immortality; they personified hair-brained youth and everlasting joy, riding through the air on birds and animals. Rishi have a certain likeness with Buddhist Arhats, who also were supposed to live in the mountains, and personified intellectual might, combined with forms of grandeur; their sole occupation was deep meditation, whereby they remind one of Christian hermits. Both Arhats and Rishi were favorite

subjects with the Chinese painters, and inspired true masterpieces.

The introduction of Buddhism brought into Chinese art numberless deities, not only various personifications of Buddha and Budhisattva, but hundreds of other forms, borrowed from Indian mythology, from which was also derived grotesqueness; the refined Chinamen had many difficulties before they succeeded in changing those not very artistic conceptions and in subduing them to a harmonious and elegant rhythm.

Perhaps the best acquisitions that Chinese art gained from Buddhism, are the sublime personifications of Mercy, Tenderness, and Love; their figures slightly inclined forward, their broad foreheads, their regular and calm features, noble in their deep contemplation, make them worthy to be placed side by side with the ecstatic creations of the masters of the West.

Such were the state and tendency of Chinese art, when, in 618, the era of the T'ang dynasty opened; it lasted until 905, and was not only the period of China's greatest political power, but also of her most vigorous, although not most perfect art, and of important poetry. The efforts of the artists of this period were to develop and to perfect the art of line-which was the ordinary Asiatic style-to make it express not only the forms of reality but also the much-desired rhythmical beauty. This union of painting with caligraphy was best effected by Wu Tao-Tzu, who is one of the most celebrated names in the history of Chinese art. He was astonishing for his extraordinary facility and wonderful imagination, which enabled him to paint no fewer than three hundred frescoes, full of a fancy so brilliant that it was said that his picture representing the Buddhist Purgatory frightened the populace and arrested their sinful propensities. The most important, nay,

surprising specimen of his work was the "Nirvana of Buddha," a piece crowded with figures and showing a tremendous power of conception combined with a freedom and grandeur which can be found in no other works of Asian art. The original of this picture has perished, but a talented Japanese artist of the thirteenth century made a copy of it, with some variation, now in the British Museum, and this allows us to admire the masterly conception of this magnificent creation of Eastern art.

In 907 the T'ang dynasty succumbed to its destiny, and before the rise of the Sung house, which lasted from 960 to 1280, five unimportant dynasties emerged only soon to disappear. The Sung period of three hundred years is the one most splendid for art, which then reached its zenith, in spite of the dwindling power of the Empire.

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The love of Nature introduced by Lao Tzu, and developed by the Zen sect, the Conversationalists,-into doctrine of contemplation of the world, became the dominating thought of the age. This love of Nature, being of the essence of romance, prompted Chinese artists and poets not only to discuss the Abstract and Pure, the subtle beauties of Nature, but also to seek after them by leaving the commonplace life of towns for the country, in solitary Buddhist monasteries, when they could assuage their ardent craving for quiet and delicate sensations.

The Zen doctrine inspired the art of the Sung period, not only by developing a kind of religious worship of Nature, and, by a natural consequence, its representation, but also by cultivating that refined sentiment of suggestion of mind to mind through which the Asian painters attained such heights, and produced such masterpieces that it is impossible to surpass them. Nothing

mattered to them but the artist's mood or emotion; his soul was revealed and illuminated in the life of things; the reality was in his own soul and he could only suggest and never fully impress it. According to their notion, a painter expresses far more by a suggestion, by depicting only a branch of a tree, a flower, a bird, than he could do by filling his picture with many subjects. Kuo Hsi, one of the greatest of Chinese landscape painters, in whose works one finds a passionate feeling for Nature, said that "a painter must, above all things, seize essentials, and discard the trivial." One may rightly suppose that Toenmei's poems on the "purity of the dew-dropping chrysanthemum, the delicate grace of the swaying bamboo, the unconscious fragrance of plum-flowers floating on twilight water, the green serenity of the pine, whispering its silent woes to the wind, and the divine narcissus, hiding its noble soul in deep ravines, or seeking for spring in a glimpse of heaven," inspired many a painter of that period with those charmingly simple pictures, the fragrance of which may be felt but never described.

The characteristics of this period are a supreme refinement and most exquisite finish, the brush-line temperate and quiet, yet sensitive and alive; the space perfectly balanced; the coloring noble and harmonious, although subordinate to form and very often eliminated. The life of Nature and of all non-human things is regarded in itself; its character contemplated, and its beauty cherished for its own sake, not for its use and service in the life of man.