Page:Frank Owen - Rare Earth, 1931.djvu/52

 courses are directed by the music, our happiness measured by the pitch of the drums. Such was the education of Hung Long Tom.

His mother acquainted him with the history of painting, of all the great artists that had brought renown to China and Japan. She was very fond of the pictures of Wang Wei, the artist-poet, who flourished in the eighth century, especially his "Snow Clearing Up on a Mountain by a River." The gorgeous sweep of his paintings has seldom if ever been surpassed, yet he lived and died hundreds of years before the birth of Michelangelo, Raphael, Tiàtoretto or Watteau. Chinese art like Chinese poetry was old when European art was in its infancy. The mother of Hung Long Tom loved Japanese color-prints and in her collection were some of the finest works of Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige, Shunzei and Shunsho. "A picture should be hung upon a wall only for a short time," she used to say, "then if it be upon silk it should be rolled up and put safely away. This keeps it forever new. Flowers do not remain incessantly in a