Ideas of Design in East and West

I

SOME five and thirty years ago a Spanish gentleman, Señor Sautuola, owning an estate near Santander in the north of Spain, set out to explore a cave on his property, in the hope of finding remains of prehistoric man. The cave had been discovered accidentally some years before by a hunter, the narrow entrance being masked by brushwood. Señor Sautuola made repeated visits to the cave and discovered the blackened traces of a cooking-place, heaps of shells, broken bones and flint instruments. But it was only when he took his little daughter with him that the discovery was made which has given fame to the cave of Altamira. The child, with that superior vivacity of observation which grown-up people so often lose, noticed something on the ceiling of the cave. ‘Look up!’she cried, and the party, following her direction, perceived a painting, a painting of a bison strongly colored in red and black. As they examined further, more paintings were discovered, — pictures of antelopes, horses, wild boars,and above all of bisons, but in every case of animals.

This was the first discovery in Europe of paintings by prehistoric men. One would have thought that it would have made a sensation in the world. But no! With that brilliant skepticism for which the nineteenth century had so much talent, these wonderful paintings were pronounced by learned archæologists to be recent forgeries. For quite a number of years the caves of Altamira were forgotten. Then discoveries of a similar character were made in the Dordogne district of France. Altamira was remembered. Señor Sautuola, who would have added picturesqueness to the story if he had died in the mean time of a broken heart, —Señor Sautuola was vindicated; and the paintings discovered in the first instance by a little girl were made the subject of a magnificent publication.

Apart from the interest of this little story as a chapter in the long record of the blunders of incredulity, there is something that fascinates imagination in contemplating these paintings by ancestors of our race so infinitely remote in time from even the earliest art of the most ancient of civilizations. Michelangelo has told us of the agonies of discomfort he endured, as he lay on his back on a scaffold and painted the sublime figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But to similar discomforts were added, for these unknown precursors of the world’s artists, the discomfort of working in darkness. The sheltering recesses of their dwelling gave them security, but it condemned them to live in midnight gloom, lighted only by oil lamps.

The pictures are of extraordinary vitality, full of character and vigor. I do not know which to wonder at more — the astonishing boldness and truth of the drawing, or the driving power of the instinct which impelled the race of men at this remote stage.

In the dark backward and abysm of Time,’ to find an outlet for their spirits in art, even in conditions of the most painful discomfort.

What was it that made these primeval cave-dwellers devote so much time and so much toil to the portraying of these wild animals? This was art. Why did they want it? Why, when nature and life itself hold such interest and fascination, why do we want it? What was the instinct, so strong in man even hundreds of thousands of years ago, which impelled him to produce it?

Some perhaps will say, it came from a belief in magic. The cave-dwellers thought that they might more easily capture their quarry if they caught its image on the walls of their caves. Or was it a kind of religion ? Did they seek to glorify these wild beasts? Or did they seek to glorify their own prowess in hunting? Or was it merely the pleasure of imitation?

Something possibly of all of these motives was present. We cannot tell. But we can say that these prehistoric men were keenly and profoundly interested in the beasts they hunted. Mere existence for them was a tremendous struggle. And the contest with these wild animals, from which they had to get food to sustain them and the skins to clothe them, represented for them — life. They drew what, interested them in the world, and nothing else. It is probable they had no eyes for anything else.

In South Africa there are remains of remarkable paintings by Bushmen which strongly recall the prehistoric paintings. In one of these an antelope is shown browsing on the branch of a tree. But the painter was so little interested in the tree that he left out its stem and painted merely the branch, high up in the air, on which the antelope was browsing.

In all the various aspects and workings of Nature, primitive man found but one thing which interested and fascinated him so much that it possessed his imagination, and haunted his dreams, and drove him to re-create in line and color the images of his dreams.

His art expressed his relation to the world. And that I think is what at bottom art is: an intuitive expression more profound than language can articulate of man’s relation to the universe. Even now, when we are so infinitely removed from the prisoning narrowness of the primeval wrestle for mere existence; even now, when the world has come to be realized as something unimaginably complex, what else is art than this?

On the one side is the world, all the august powers, the ever-changing enchanting appearances and the mysterious terrors of Nature; on the other side is man, played upon by all those visible and invisible forces, seeking and questioning and crying, ‘What does the world mean to me? What do 1 mean in the world?’

I am not wishing to attempt a definition of art, but I want to lay stress on a fundamental characteristic, often lostsight of in the popular view.

I suppose at the present day in our Western civilization the most general notion of art is that it is a luxury and ornament of life, not a function of life, not a necessity, not part of our common need.

Well, but are we satisfied with our art? When we look back to one of the great periods of art, to Athens or to Florence in her prime, what is the difference that strikes us? There is an immense amount of talent to-day, genius even is not wanting. But surely our art fails just in the measure in which it fails to express a genuine relation to life. It has become a separate thing, not a common interest.

I remember some time ago visiting an old country house, such as we have so many of in England, with its beautiful gray walls, its ordered garden full of old-fashioned flowers, and its interior and furniture scarcely touched. And the thought came to me that the people who built and lived in this house were probably people who cared little or nothing for art as we talk of it nowadays; they certainly never conceived of anything like our exhibitions of pictures, and I dare say their interests were just those of ordinary country gentlemen to-day, country pursuits, farming, sport, politics. But they lived in a house where nothing was ugly; they had admirable taste, without perhaps knowing it; and the garden with its blended elements of order and freedom was a real work of art. I am not sure indeed that gardening is not the most living and best practiced art surviving in England. And I thought of our fine picture exhibitions and of our acres of hideous streets, and our progress made me sad. With all our wonderful inventions and conquests we have left behind the idea of harmony: and that is what civilization has somehow to regain.

In such a house and garden as I have in my mind there is at any rate a harmony between man and his surroundings.

It is true that when such a harmony is reached, something in the human spirit impels us after a time to break it. Life is a perpetual readjustment to conditions, and art is the expression of an everchanging relation of the human spirit to the world. The greatest and most splendid harmonization of life was that achieved by the Greeks; a balance of human faculties so perfect that we have seen nothing like it since. But how soon was that fine poise to be disturbed and overset! No perfection, on whatever plane, seems ever to be reached but at the cost of death; the death that is new life. Destruction and chaos succeed to order; but soon its inner necessities drive mankind to a new effort, involving yet greater conquests.

In the great Gothic cathedrals we see the symbol not of perfection, but of vast aspiration. The wants and desires of the spirit are there expressed as perhaps nowhere else in art; all the profound and inarticulate Teachings out toward the unknown and the infinite, the longings that this earth never wholly satisfies; all that the Greeks in their serene adjustment of their faculties to the world had left out or suppressed.

In these cathedrals, in Chartres, in Notre Dame, in Westminster Abbey, there is magnificent art but there is no imitation of nature. These are ideas expressed in stone that becomes almost dematerialized in the effort to soar and spring.

There is no imitation. And this leads me on to consider the notion which has been prevalent for so long in Europe, the notion that art has come into existence as a result of the imitative instinct in mankind. I believe this notion to be wholly error. There is undeniably a pleasure in the exercise of imitative skill; but imitative skill will never carry us far. Of itself it will never make a work of art.

It is true that in art we desire and need reality. But we do not need facts for their own sake. For art, as for religion, facts are nothing till they become symbol and idea. They become symbol and idea by becoming parts of ourselves, factors of our imaginative life. That the earth goes round the sun and not the sun round the earth is of no moment to us in itself; it is the stupendous change in the conception of man’s place in the universe involved in the discovery which transforms the cold fact into a living energy of idea. It has become an experience; a change has happened in our own minds, and it is this which matters. Thus the copying of the facts of nature for their own sake in the interests of objective truth, leaves those facts outside ourselves, as we know from many a conscientious bad picture. The life within man and the life outside man meet in the imaginative power which blazes forth as art.

Why do we need reality in art? We need it because the spirit of man only shows its mastery of the world by the grasp of essential truths, the significant truths, the truths that, mean something to each of us and answer therefore to something vital in ourselves. It is not the external reality that is ever the subject of art, it is the meeting of the reality with ourselves. That is why I say that art is an expression of our relation to the world.

Wants and desires are as much a part of that reality we call experience as the facts and laws of nature which are continually opposing or controlling those wants and desires. Indeed these are the strongest part of our human nature. Could we conceive ourselves to be for a moment non-human and absorbed into the energies of the world without, we should be forever meeting with a restless obstinate force striving to combat those energies and to harness them. This restless, obstinate force is the will of man.

It is the want and desire in man which has made him what he is, which has won all his hard-fought and splendid victories. I do not want to use terms like realism and idealism, because such terms as these seem expressly invented to stop us from thinking. But it is evident that in art we cannot help expressing a preference; we choose out certain things, certain aspects of life, to dwell on them with special interest and fondness. And this implies that such things partake of and belong to the world we should like to live in. We express in art something of our ideal of life. But then in art the instrument of expression is representation of real things: at least we cannot entirely get away from reality, however bold and free the convention we use.

Art therefore partakes both of ourselves, our dreams and desires, and of the world about us. It is not enough to say that art is the expression of emotion: the emotion expressed must have some vital relation to the things by means of which it is expressed.

But if art is not the result of the imitative instinct in mankind, is it perhaps decoration?

Did those prehistoric draughtsmen of Altamira paint the ceiling of the cave with pictures of wild animals to add an amenity to their struggling existence by decorating their dwelling? Well, perhaps this motive entered into their work. Certainly the instinct to decorate both houses and furniture and things of common use has been universal among human races. And at any rate we have here a principle which makes no artificial distinction between the fine arts, as they are called, and crafts of handiwork.

But what is decoration? We commonly speak of it as the filling of a surface with a design or pattern pleasing to the eye. And in our time an attempt has been made to consider this as the essence of pictorial art, and to divorce it from the matter represented. Whistler, you will remember, said that all human significance and association were nonessential, were nothing but claptrap.

The answer to this is that it is contrary to experience. We might make the parallel assertion that the essence of poetry lies in the rhythm of the verse. Why then trouble about the meaning of words? But we find that when a poet ceases to care about the meaning of words his music becomes thin and poor. And so too with the painter. When he ceases to care about the significance of what he represents, his design becomes enfeebled. You cannot make abstractions like these. The truth is that rhythmical verse is the most perfect, pregnant, and effective way of expressing poetic ideas. And so too rhythmical design is the most perfect way of expressing pictorial ideas. The resistance of the material, the difficulty of fusing the matter with the form, the effort required to subdue complex forms and masses in a picture like a group of animated figures, for instance, into a beautiful pattern which does no violence to natural gesture and movement—all this calls out the deepest powers in an artist. It keeps him ever freshly interested. But to go on weaving arabesques that have no relation to natural form becomes as tiresome very soon as writing melodious nonsense. It does not engage the deepest interests of the artist; and art, it has been said, requires the whole man.

But we may go further than this. For pattern is itself expressive. Even melodious nonsense has a certain effect; at any rate we may be moved by the rhythm of a poem in a language unknown to us, though we should easily tire of its repetition. In the same way no pattern is without meaning. Just like those related tones of music, the relation of tones and colors or of lines and spaces in a pattern appeal to something in us below the surface of ordinary consciousness, perhaps, but all the more sensitive on that account. The Greeks, you will remember, gave to music a paramount importance in education. We train the conscious intelligence, but wholly neglect the harmonizing of those deeper emotional states on which music and the elements in all the arts which are akin to music play so powerfully. Plato held that the introduction of a new kind of music might imperil the whole state, by subtly insinuating a disturbing influence into the character of the citizens. And really we have only to remember how different we feel in a room that is nobly proportioned and in a room which has been built without any care or idea of proportion, to realize how strongly we are affected by these silent influences. Think too how the pattern of a wallpaper may affect us, even though we may be quite unconscious of what it is that makes the difference. The very fact that we talk of patterns as gay, restless, depressing, or the like, shows how they respond to our moods. Colors also, as is well known, have a direct action on our senses; green soothes and red excites. I have no time to pursue this subject, but what I want to emphasize is the truth that pattern, the elementary language of pictorial art, is language, is expression, and has always meaning. And not only this, but the artist’s intuitions of life and conceptions of the world will be found expressed in the character of the design he chooses, even more surely than in the ostensible subject of his picture.

Now if this is true of an individual artist, it will be true, broadly true, of the art of a race. With all its varieties of mood and character and style, the art of Europe has some definite characteristics which we may call European. This perhaps only becomes plain when we look at the art of Asia as a whole. Whether we admire the art of the East or not, it has this great interest, that it brings into relief the salient qualities of Western art.

As we shall see, the art of the East, or at any rate of the Farther East, has different principles and a different character of design from our own art; and I shall show how these really are but the inevitable results of a different conception of the world and of man’s relation to the world.

II

The first thing that strikes one in European painting is its firm and powerful grasp of matter. For good and for evil a strong hold on and a lively interest in the material world mark the art of Europe. It is needless to point out how exactly this corresponds to the character of our civilization. It is because of this that the notion of art as an imitation of nature has been so popular and persistent. And yet that has never been the inspiring motive of the great European masters. Leonardo, Correggio, Rembrandt did not explore the mysteries of light and shade; nor did Michelangelo probe the secrets of anatomy, merely for the sake of knowledge and scientific truth of representation. They studied these things because they sought a richer and more powerful means of expression. But many a secondary artist has lost himself because he lost sight of the end in the means. And that is just the vice of much of our Western civilization. We are so engrossed in getting the means to live that we forget how to live, to use life itself.

This firm grasp of the material world shows itself in our art not only in the steady exploration of fact, the study of anatomy, perspective, atmosphere, light and shadow: it is also seen in the character of our design. Western design has a character of fullness and abundance: the symbol of the mind which desires to have all experience for its own, to press out the essence of experience, like ripe grapes, into wine. It shrinks from empty spaces, as the Western mind shrinks from solitude.

One might choose as a typical example of Western painting at its finest the world-famous picture by Titian, still best known by its traditional title, Sacred and Profane Love.

This picture, certainly among the most beautiful in the world, shows the designing faculty of Europe at its noblest. Breadth of vision still allows of exquisite detail. With a great pervading richness, both of form and color, there is no excess or crowding. The peaceful, ordered landscape is beautifully related to the human figures. We feel the presence of a nature generous in emotion and outlook, ardent but not feverish, sane but not cold; a mind equal to the problems life presents it; a spirit richly sensitive to the glory and beauty of this world, and untroubled by the thoughts of another world than this. In such a picture we feel that glow and vitality of superb health which was the foundation of the Greek ideal.

It may be said this is a picture inspired by a pagan theme and pagan in its spirit. Ought we not to lake rather a picture possessed by the Christian ideal? Certainly the change effected in men’s minds by Christianity was not without its immediate effect in European design. Greek art expresses the beauty that there is in order; it expresses a harmony of the human faculties, and a splendid consciousness of human power. Rome with her pervading sense of Law emphasized the conception of order into hardness.

How different a conception of the world came into art with the Middle Ages! The significant thing about life was its transitoriness, about man was his smallness and weakness. This world was a wilderness, the other world only was stable and secure. And so we find in mediæval art the lines of Gothic sculpture and Gothic architecture prolonging themselves as if in the infinite quest of something beyond, and ever attenuating the sense of mass and substance. Extravagant longing and aspiration embody themselves in slender pillars and in soaring arches. And with the conviction of life’s transience comes a tenderness for frail and fugitive things, for the flowers which Greek art seemed so strangely to forget but which spring and cluster so naturally in the borders of mediæval missals.

Yes, the change was great. And yet not so great in fundamentals as appears. For in the first place the mediæval 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 Virgin-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 Laotzŭ, 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 Laotzŭ 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.

But let us take a typical example of 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 Laotzŭ is implicit in this picture.

We have always thought of perfection 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. Taotzŭ 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 Laotzŭ. 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!

One of these Eastern poets, in one of those little poems which seem a mere exclamation, yet flash into our minds a wide landscape and a whole world of imaginative thought, cries,—

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 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, moreliterally entrancing, than to see thegrace 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 forrelief, 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 lies in the conquest of matter for the spirit. When we think of art in this way, how little seems to have been done! But then how vast the future! The art of the West has been like a fire, choked with the fuel which we have heaped on it so eagerly; burning fiercely but turbidly, with smoke and crackling. In the art of the East the flame has burned far clearer and purer: the danger for it is rather inanition from want of fresh fuel. How much, what a plenitude of material has our Western art to consume! how grand an inspiration remains!