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Yes, the change was great. And yet not so great in fundamentals as appears. For in the first place the mediaval temper never took so complete a hold on the spirit of Europe that it could withstand the power of the revival of the classics. It had in it something of disease, because of its inadequate conception of the world, of its ready acceptance of ignorance.

And if this life was transient and fugitive, how all the more firmly fixed the eternal order of the other world! The conception of order, weighted and hardened by the inheritance of Roman Law, remained; only now it was transferred from this world to the next. The Middle Ages bequeathed to us the idea of a mechanically ordered universe, with man at its centre, and God outside it. That has remained with us as the popular conception. While science has been enlarging the universe for us, we have somehow managed to accept incompatible conclusions at once, dividing our minds into compartments. But in art we are always haunted by Greece and Rome, just as our education has for centuries fed upon the classics. And so the art of Europe since the Renaissance, with no very coherent spiritual ideal of life behind it, has fallen back more and more on the material world. It has been the tendency in the West, in art as in religion, to materialize the unseen, to reduce infinity to the finite. We have conceived of perfection as something that ends activity, as a completion, a state of

repose.

Take a typical altar-piece, the famous Giorgione at Castelfranco. A lovely picture, full of graciousness and peace. But how thoroughly human is the conception! There is nothing of the grossness of earth, yet the elements are all earthly. A beautiful maiden enthroned in a pleasant landscape embodies the transcendent idea of the Vir

gin-Mother. The warrior-saint stands forever armed and idle; the energies of life have ceased. It is like a coming into a fair haven after the struggle of a stormy voyage: it is an end.

Now I think it may well profit us to turn away from the art of our own Western tradition and consider an art which has grown up and flowered among races of a quite different civilization, among a different order of ideas and nourished by a different inspiration: the art of Asia. That is the only other body of creative art which can be compared with our art, the art of the Western world, on equal terms. And it is strange that it is only within the last few years that this art has come to be known in the West. Our knowledge of it can still perhaps be described more accurately as ignorance: yet we know a little about it, and we are going to learn more as years go on.

In the fourth century A.D. there lived in China an artist, who was also a poet. His name was Ku K'ai-chih. In London we have a painting, a long scroll, which for at least a thousand years has been treasured as his work; and though that cannot be proved, I believe it is in all probability a painting by his hand. But I am not now going to discuss his pictures. One day, we are told, he intrusted to a friend a chest full of paintings which he had collected. For better security he fastened the lid of the chest and sealed the fastening with a seal. The friend however coveted the paintings, and hit on the simple expedient of removing the bottom of the box and so abstracting them. When the box was restored to Ku K'ai-chih, he broke the seal and found it empty. But he suspected no theft and expressed no surprise. Beautiful paintings communicate with supernatural beings, he said; they have changed their form and flown away, like men when they join the immortals. I quote this little anecdote

because it plunges us at once and in a vivid way into the world of ideas, so different from our own, which prevailed among the Chinese.

The artist was a wonder-worker, a magician. The animating power of the universe, if he was great enough to be wholly possessed by it, seized upon him for its instrument and in his paintings created actual life. There are innumerable stories of the Chinese and Japanese masters which testify to this belief. Even when the belief became legendary it retained its hold on the imagination. Thus there are stories of horses painted with so surcharged a vitality of movement that they escaped from the bounds of the picture and galloped into space, and of dragons which, when the last finishing touch was put by the master's brush, rose crashing through the ceiling among peals of thunder. And then there is that story of the end of Wu Laotzů, the mightiest of the Chinese masters, which is at any rate a magnificent symbol. The painter in his old age had painted a great landscape on a wall and invited the Emperor to look at it. While the Emperor was lost in admiration, Wu Laotzů exclaimed, "There is more beauty behind,' and clapped his hands: a cave in a mountain opened, the artist stepped within and disappeared forever, while the fresco faded into nothing on the blank wall.

A folklorist might tell us that here was an interesting survival of belief in magic, and pass on. But I think there is more than this in such stories. For do we not feel that a painting is here conceived of as a spiritual creation, something partaking of the essential spirit of life, possessing the painter's personality and absorbing him into a life greater and more powerful than his own? The idea of imitation is not here present at all.

Chinese design. I have in my mind a painting by a Sung master. The subject is a priest, a recluse among the mountains, meeting with his disciple. How sharply the conception of design contrasts with the European altarpiece! The figures are not placed in the centre and made dominant, so as to absorb the eye. The principle of symmetry is done away with. And yet we feel that the elements of the design are held together in a subtle equilibrium. The great height and space of blank sky is employed as a positive factor, attracting the eye in equal measure with the mass and contour of the figures. Then too there is a great tree, but this is only shown in part, the stem swerving out of the picture and a branch returning into it above. If the tree were all shown it would overweight the balance that is in the artist's intention. Moreover, by half concealing it, he makes us think of it as greater than it is; he makes us understand that the picture is only a little part of nature, and that nature is not enclosed and prisoned within the frame, but that it is a kind of symbol of nature's infinite growing life ever reaching out beyond the limit of our senses and only to be apprehended by our imagination. The same principles of design run through Japanese art, and you will often hear people praising a Japanese print or painting for the happy gift of placing that it shows, the instinctive felicity with which a touch is put in the right place for a decorative effect.

But what we have to realize is that this comes not merely from a decorative instinct or intention, but is rooted in a definite conception of the world and of man's place in the world. The whole imaginative philosophy of that side of the Chinese mind which found expression in Laotzů is implicit in this picture.

We have always thought of perBut let us take a typical example of fection as something completed, and

therefore finite. But, as Mr. Okakura tells us in his charming 'Book of Tea,' Laoist thought rejects the finite, because where there is an end, where there is completion, there is death. Growth has stopped. Therefore we find a dwelling on the idea of the imperfect, the uncompleted, when the capacity for growth still remains. Taotzů praises the softness and weakness of the new-born child, so helpless yet so mighty in its potentialities, and contrasts with it the rigid strength of the grown dead man. He is full of the praises of emptiness, the emptiness of the bowl that may be filled again and again with water. We too should make ourselves empty that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath. So too in the Chinese picture there is the empty space, that our imagination may enter into and there find its freedom. Never to be stagnant, never to let the dust of the world settle on the wings of the soul, to be spiritually fluid and free-that is the ideal of Laotzů. For so we join the great stream of the cosmic life that permeates all things.

Our Western thought is so dyed and saturated with the image of man as the central fact of the universe, that it is difficult for us readily to enter the Eastern modes of thought.

The Chinese seem never to have felt the need to throw their imagination of the life-force into a human image. They kept their thoughts strangely vague and impersonal. They conceived of the Divine as Lao, the Way, that is, a movement, an energy; and they accepted the fact of perpetual change in the unchanging movement of life. How often in Chinese pictures do we meet the sage or poet contemplating the splendor of a waterfall, that symbol of life, with its countless drops never for a moment the same, yet presenting forever an unchanging aspect!

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In the sky, lo, the wild geese flying; On the highway a file of pilgrims. Yes, we are pilgrims like the wild geese that trail their flight across the clouds, but not pilgrims weary of the way and thirsting for its end, but rejoicing to belong to that movement which has no end, which is infinite and eternal.

It is characteristic of this art and poetry that the spirit in it goes out exulting to the immensities and profundities, as to its natural home.

In the decoration, as in most of the figure-painting of the West, the foundation of symmetry tends to make a concentration within the design. Our eyes are led to a central object, which holds the design together, as a keystone holds an arch. But in the typical Chinese or Japanese painting there is no one central or dominant object; it is the relation between the several objects that makes the unity of the design. And so we are led out of the picture rather than compressed within it; we are led out into the infinity of nature's freedom and variety.

I do not mean to imply that such a conception of design is unknown in European painting. One might instance Velasquez, with pictures like Las Meninas, certain compositions of Giorgione, and of artists so different in type as Piero della Francesca and Goya. But the study of relations, rather than the delineation of objects, has been practiced but tentatively in the West. And in especial the use of space as a positive element in pictorial language has been remarkably neglected. Our Western compositions tend to symmetrical grouping with a certain surplus of space between the edges of the subject and the frame, which has to be filled up

One of these Eastern poets, in one of somehow. These tendencies I speak of

are more plainly manifest in our decoration and pattern designing than in mature figure-design. For when our decoration deserts a geometrical basis it seems to lose grasp of all principle and becomes simply capricious.

And now to consider another point. The relation to the world expressed by the artist should be, or partake of, an ideal relation. We have to adjust ourselves to the world we live in: and however much we may scorn a material view of life, we cannot disregard the subtly acting but eternal laws which give life and meaning to matter. How can pictorial art or sculpture express such an ideal relation? Wherever there is life, there is movement; wherever there is natural movement, there is rhythm. Mankind delights in rhythm because it is the natural expression of life. Now the Chinese, with their haunting sense of an eternal flow of animation sweeping through all things, man included, held as the cardinal virtue of a work of art that it should be pregnant with this rhythm of life. We have all watched children dancing. Is there any sight more wholly delightful, more literally entrancing, than to see the grace and energy of youth forgetful of itself and unconsciously absorbed in giving plastic expression to the creative rhythm which moves the world? To capture in line and color something of the genius of the dance is to express pictorially a central emotion of our nature. The expression of movement by means of an art which is of necessity stationary, like painting, sounds paradoxical in theory. But we know by experience that it can be done. When we look at Chinese or Japanese paintings of dancers-I remember especially some examples of the school of Matabei-the sense of motion is irresistibly communicated to us, not only by the figures themselves but by the design which relates them to one another. We note

again the use of space, and the character of design by which the figures not only dance within the picture but lead us out and beyond into wider spheres of motion.

In Western art we have sought for relief, mass, solidity, and have correspondingly sacrificed the aerial joys of movement and all the spiritual qualities of which these are the expression.

In this Eastern art, then, we have noted three salient characteristics in which it differs from our own: the deliberate substitution of balance for symmetry in design, the use of space as a factor in pictorial language, and the expression of movement. These exist in Western art, but on the whole their use has been sporadic and intermittent; felt for instinctively against the trend of other tendencies by exceptional natures, rather than pursued and mastered so as to become a tradition and a power. Assuredly we can learn to increase the range of expressiveness in our art by enlarging and developing these means and these principles. But I have tried to show that these characteristics of Eastern art, all interwoven with each other, are the natural outcome of a certain inherent conception of the world and philosophy of life. They are not mere technical devices which can be learned and added on to our own art, from outside.

Now is it mere coincidence, that just when this great world of Oriental art is opening out before us in beauties hitherto unknown,-is it mere coincidence that we find our own conceptions of the world are changing too? For we are moving away from the old idea of a great fixity in things, which were for so many centuries rooted in the thought of Europe, when the earth was still conceived of as the centre of the universe. Inert matter is resolved into streams of energy. We begin to realize the incessant stream of change and motion that

the apparent solidity of things really means. We have submitted to a humbler, if a vaster view of the destinies of man; for our eyes are opened to the infinities and complexities of the life outside our own, and we apprehend at last the continuity of the universal life. Men of science are beginning to tell us that we may believe that in plants, in the vegetable world, there is something corresponding to what we call consciousness in ourselves. Science begins to tell us what the old Chinese seem to have understood by some felicity of intuition, two thousand years ago. Inevitably, though perhaps unconsciously, such changes in our view of the world will appear in our art, and in the very language it uses. At this moment the significant stirring in European painting is the revolt against mere representation, the research into movement, the reaction from excess of solid matter, the new inspiration in the idea of rhythm. We know how sensitively Whistler responded to the first revelation of Japanese design. And in art like that of Puvis de Chavannes we see, as in Wordsworth, who has so much affinity with Eastern thought, man allied to the great things, the great spaces of Nature, which humble his pride but at the same time exalt him.

And again I might recall how Watts, while at work on one of his equestrian statues, discovered that every good line in a work in sculpture or painting was a section of a large curve which, if continued, would find its completion far away out of the actual design; whereas a bad line was part of a small circle suggesting a form contained well within a limited space. In the former case the line suggests spring and growth: and Watts confirmed his discovery by observing the lines in vegetation, in trees. Here is a principle akin to that worked out fully and boldly by the

masters of China and Japan.

We in the West have found that the vitality of our art has been nourished chiefly by the influx of new material. The spur to our artists has been the zest of exploration. The painters of the East have remained content to repeat the same motive for century after century. And not only this, but they have remained content with the same means of expression, eschewing the representation of relief as well as of light and shadow. Our painters, on the contrary, have tried to press the utmost possible amount of matter into their medium; they have sought not only the effects of painting pure and simple, but the effects of relief as given by sculpture and of depths of space as given by architecture. They have explored the anatomy of the body, the effects of atmosphere on shape and color, they have challenged the intensest pitch of the sun's radiance. Now it is easy to envisage the history of Western painting as a progress in scientific mastery. But after all, science is science and art is art, and these are two very different things.

If there is a progress in painting, and if that progress is in scientific mastery of materials, what is the end to which painting progresses? We can but answer, the production on a flat surface of the complete illusion of appearances. Yet we know very well that the attainment of this end, which seems indeed well within our grasp, will not satisfy us. The truth is, there is no end to art till humanity comes to an end, till the hopes of humanity are over, the desires of humanity are extinguished. Shall we say, then, there is no progress? No: but the progress lies not in scientific mastery; it lies in that perpetual readjustment of life which craves an everfresh answer, a profounder, sincerer, more pregnant answer to those questions, What do I mean in the world? What does the world mean to me? It

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