Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/124

 oped, under the influence of the Cha no Yu cult, an antiquarian taste of the most severe description. The genuine Chajin aspired to simplicity before everything. The closer he could get to nature, the more faithfully was he obeying the tenets of his philosophy. Could he have dispensed altogether with manufactured utensils without outraging refinement, he would doubtless have made the attempt. His austerity did not, however, carry him quite so far. He was content to use the closest procurable representatives of nascent art, and in these his sympathetic eye detected excellences which were doubtless present, to some extent, since the efforts of all successful pioneers show traces of original genius. To this propensity is due the preservation of many specimens which would never have survived for their own sakes. Among them are examples of blue-and-white ware dating from the Sung period. The epoch is fixed, not alone by tradition, but also by inscriptions which the specimens carry. Asa general rule year-marks are quite untrustworthy for determining the date of a keramic specimen. What they do show, however, in the case of imitators so faithful as the Chinese, is that ware of a certain description was manufactured at a certain epoch. A Chinese potter would scarcely resort to the manifest fraud of producing an intrinsically worthless specimen of blue-and-white merely for the sake of marking it with the date of a period when nothing of the kind had existed. Such deceptions might have been practised at the factories of Chien-lung, or even of Kang-hsi, to supply the demand of Japanese collectors. But some of the specimens here referred to are said to have come to Japan as long ago as the