Page:Peking the Beautiful.pdf/14

 The naturalistic philosophers (commonly termed Taoists), too, were against the development of the fine arts. Lao Tsū went so far as to condemn all culture as leading men away from the path of nature. To these philosophers, nature is everything, and art as anti-nature, is evil. True it is that this exaltation of nature against art has produced an art of its own kind. It has had great influence in producing the school of "nature poets" who sang the praise of the silent flowers and the eloquent brooks, of the grandeur of the mountains, and the majesty of the farmer and the weaver. And from the nature poets there arose the nature-painters,--the poetic landscape painters - who saw beauty and personality in the trees and rocks and gave expression to their own feelings and ideas through artistic presentatiou of the bits of nature that chanced to attract them, But just as the naturalistic philosopher finds himself most at home under thatched roofs and within faggot doors, so the nature artist draws his inspiration chiefly from the rugged rocks and weeping willows and majestic pine trees. Architectural beauty does not interest him and consequently architecture is not ranked as a fine art. It is merely the craft of the carpenter and the builder who cater to the vulgar pomposity of the rich and the powerful Native philosophical and artistic traditions, too, seem to conspire to ignore all architectural grandeur and splendor. And because of the attitude of indifference on the part of the artistic and intellectual classes (except in the matter of landscape planning), Chinese architecture has remained to this day the conventional craft of the building trade. Anyone who has studied the Ying Tsao Fa Shih, a compendium of architectural methods and designs first published in 1103, will realize that Chinese architecture has undergone practically no change during these centuries and has never advanced beyond the empirical tradition of the practicing craftsmen. The artists dis dainfully ignore it, and the utilitarian Confucianist scholar often regards it as an economic extravagance which smelt the blood of the people. The architectural grandeurs of Peking, to-day, are they not judged from this traditional standpoint? The Summer Palace, for instance, is remembered by many as something for which the wicked Empress Dowager once squandered the twenty-four million taels originally appropriated for the construction of the new navy. The truly splendid Pan Chan Lama Memorial, which Juliet Bredor ranks as the best example of modern stone sculpture in the vicinity of Peking (page 49 of the present collection), is regarded by the Chinese observer as nothing but a most extravagant monument of essentially foreign architecture, dedicated to the memory of the barbarian chief of a vulgar religion. And what is the Great Wallthe greatest of the Seven Wonders of the world, but the theme throughout the ages that has called forth a thousand plaintive and protesting songs that bemoan the tragic fate of its numberless and nameless slave-laboters and condemn the wars and territorial ambitions that necessitated its building and rebuilding To the Western visitor, all these artistic and moralistic prejudices ate a thing apart He, on his first arrival, falls in love with Peking. He is delighted with its red walls, its variegated shop signs, its beautiful lotus ponds, its gigantic cypresses-above all with its architectural splendors. He eagerly applies at his legation for permission to visit the