Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/428

 I once saw a magnificently embroidered stork standing on one leg, while the other leg, which was held up gracefully, passed behind a tree that stood at least ten feet beyond the bird. It may be that the Korean has always been so closely shut up by walls that he has never so much as imagined such a thing as a " vanishing point."

I am not sure but it is this love of detail that has led to the introduction of the grotesque and monstrous into the art of the whole East; a sort of protest against their limitations. The aesthetic nature having been confined so long in narrow channels was forced to find a vent for itself in some way, and did so by a violent rupture into the realm of the fantastic. So we find in every picture some dwarfed tree or curiously water-worn rock, some malformation that excites the curiosity. No picture of an ancient warrior is correct unless he has warts as big as walnuts all over his face, and eyebrows that rival his beard in length.

As to colour in art, the Koreans are still as primitive as in ancient days. Their red is the red of blood or of the peppers that lie ripening on their roofs. Their green is the vivid green of the new-sprouting rice or the dark blue-green of the pinetree. Nature's colours are in their art as nature's sounds are in their wonderfully mimetic language. As to form in art, the Korean is strictly a realist, except in so far as he has impinged upon the realm of the fantastic. There are no idealised expressions in his art, no winged cherubs, no personification of any power of nature, no Cupid with his bow and arrows; and it is just because of this lack of imaginative power that such a thing as aesthetic combination is unthought of. Imagination is the power of arranging and rearranging one's mental furniture in such a way as to produce new and pleasing, or useful, combinations; and if a man has not this power, the arrangement of his house furniture, the colours on his canvas, the notes of his music and the flowers of his garden must all suffer. It is this lack which has made Korean history