Page:Brinkley - The Art of Japan, vol. 1.djvu/38

18 Lieh-pan; the tender glimpses of scenic gems by Liu Liang and Lu Ki, like choice stanzas from a great poem—these and many another graceful conception, delineated with such fidelity to the first canon of art that a maximum of effect is produced with a minimum of visible effort, reveal to us the gallery where Japanese painters found their inspiration from century to century. Nothing has ever been written that sums up more happily and justly the facts we are now discussing than the following extract from the work of the most accurate and discriminating student of Far-Eastern art, Dr. William Anderson:—

“There is, perhaps, no section of art that has been so completely misapprehended in Europe as the pictorial art of China. For us the Chinese painter, past or present, is but a copyist who imitates with laborious and undiscriminating exactness whatever is laid before him, rejoices in the display of as many and as brilliant colours as his subject and remuneration will permit, and is original only in the creation of monstrosities. Nothing could be more contrary to the fact than this impression, if we omit from consideration the work executed for the foreign market—work which every educated Chinese would disown. The old masters of the Middle Kingdom, who, as a body, united grandeur of conception with immense power of execution, cared little for elaboration of detail, and, except in Buddhist pictures, sought their best efforts in the simplicity of black and white, or in the most subdued of chromatic harmonies. Their art was defective, but not more so than that of Europe down to the end of the thirteenth century. Technically they did not go beyond the use of water colours, but in range and quality of pigments, as in mechanical command of pencil, they had no reasons to fear comparison with their contemporaries. They had caught only a glimpse of the laws of chiaroscuro and perspective, but the want of science was counterpoised by more essential elements of artistic excellence. In motives they lacked neither variety nor elevation. As landscape painters they anticipated their European brethren by over a score of generations, and created transcripts of scenery that for breadth, atmosphere, and picturesque beauty can scarcely be surpassed. In their studies of the human figure, although their work was often rich in vigour and expression, they certainly fell immeasurably below the Greeks; but to counterbalance this defect no other artists, except those of Japan, have ever infused into the delineations of bird life one tithe of the vitality and action to be seen in the Chinese portraitures of the crow, the sparrow, the crane, and a hundred other varieties of the feathered race. In flowers the Chinese were less successful owing to the absence of true chiaroscuro, but they were able to evolve a better picture out of a single spray of blossom than many a Western painter from all the treasures of a conservatory. If we endeavour to compare the pictorial art of China with that of Europe, we must carry ourselves back to the days when the former was in its greatness. Of the art that preceded the Tang dynasty we can say nothing. Like that of Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles, it is now represented only by