The Art of Asia
I
THE art of Asia, with its revelation of so rich a world of beauty hidden so long from Western eyes, has in quite recent years assumed more and more of importance, and attracts new students and new lovers every day. It is a vast subject, as vast almost as the art of Europe. In the brief space of this paper it would be impossible to attempt more than the briefest outline; and I shall perhaps be condemned for my rashness in attempting so much as that. But even in this brief space it may, I think, be possible to indicate something of the diverse elements which have formed the character of Asiatic art; to emphasize what is typical in the genius of the art of India, of Persia, of China and Japan; and to note the relation in which the arts of these countries stand to one another.
A complete survey of the field would of course include the monumental and powerful art of Assyria and ancient Persia, as seen in the imposing sculptures still preserved. But of these I shall say nothing, partly for lack of space, partly also because these creations of antiquity have had no such direct and vital influence on the later art of Asia as the classic art of antiquity has had on European traditions. Roughly, we may take as our starting point a date corresponding to the Christian era.
What was the state of Asia in the first century A.D.?
The invasion of Alexander, who had passed through Persia and Bactria into the valley of the Indus, had been a momentous event. Indirectly it had brought about the creation of a strong central power in India, and the subsequent conversion of the great Indian Emperor Asoka to Buddhism was of vast importance for the history of the whole of Asia. Hellenic influence had been brought far into the continent. It took no vital hold, and was soon an ebbing tide. But one great result of Alexander’s conquest was the setting free of a great current of various activities between East and West. Right from China to the Mediterranean stretched the highroad by which the precious silks were brought by traders to the markets of imperial Rome. The two main ports of traffic at the Western end were Antioch and Alexandria; and from these cities the fomenting ideas of the period, the new cults and religious speculations with which it was so rife, were carried by the Jews, by whom the silk trade was maintained, into the heart of the continent. During the first Christian centuries the Central Asian region was a kind of whirlpool of religious thought. The mystical doctrines of the Gnostics, as well as Christianity proper, spread from Alexandria eastward, meeting the faith of Zoroaster in Persia and the full tide of Buddhism in its outward triumphant flow from India. Mani, a Persian, tried in the second century to form a new religion, — Manichaeism, — fusing the vital elements of Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Buddhism into a single world-religion. And with this deep stirring of religious thought arose a manifold activity in art.
Sir Aurel Stein brought back in 1908 from his last memorable expedition a set of frescoes painted about the third century A.D., on the wall of a Buddhist shrine built in the desert within the borders of Chinese Turkestan. Among these frescoes is a series of lunettes of winged angels. It is surprising how thoroughly Western these paintings are in style, in feeling, in sense of form. We are reminded at once of the few remaining relics of classical painting in Europe; we are reminded of the late Greek portraits found on mummy cases in Egypt, with their large, prominent eyes and broad, vigorous outline. And yet in this same shrine are painted groups of Buddha and his disciples, and scenes from the Buddha legend. Well, strange as it may seem, there can be little doubt that the painter of these frescoes was a citizen of the Roman empire, — a Syrian, perhaps, from Asia Minor, who had carried his art, derived from Hellenistic tradition, into the border of the Chinese empire. On one of the frescoes he has signed his name, Tita, — a variant, probably, as Stein suggests, of the Roman Titus.
Such evidence as this might lead us, and has already led some theorists, to the conclusion that Western art, penetrating so far into Asia, provided the art of that continent, not only with material to work upon, but with a dominant inspiration. Yet in truth the evidence supports no conclusion of the kind. The painter of these angel frescoes was plainly not in sympathy with the world of thought which he was commissioned to express. His treatment of the Buddha figure is entirely unimpressive. If we compare for a moment any work of the mature art of Asia with these frescoes, we can find no point of connection between them.
A like theory of Greek inspiration being at the source of Asian sculpture was propounded by various scholars when the sculpture of Gandhara was first brought to light. Gandhara is a small kingdom outside the northwest of India; and there a school of sculptors, working in a late Hellenistic tradition, attempted to create images of Buddha and his legend in response to the fervor of Buddhist faith which, arriving from India, had seized on the people of Gandhara. But here again it is the same story. Art works from within. It may borrow externals; but it is the spirit within which moulds it. Something of bodily grace, something in the folds of drapery, remains in the Buddhist art of China and Japan as a legacy from far-off Greece; but that is all. We have literary evidence that in India, as in China, the art of painting on the walls was practiced at least some centuries before Christ. There still exist in India, at Orissa, paintings on the walls of a cave which date from the second century B.C. The technique of these frescoes, with strong outline and the use of colors confined to red and black on white, reminds us of the earliest paintings known to us, — the prehistoric paintings found in Spain and Southwestern France.
II
The traditions of craftsmanship in the East are fixed and persistent. Everywhere, in India, in Turkestan, in China, in Japan, we find the same method of fresco-painting on lime, with a strong expressive outline and clear coloring. It corresponds to what is known of the earlier type of painting in Greece itself. The presumption of an Early Asiatic style of painting diffused as widely as the shores of the Mediterranean is one that is likely to win general acceptance. It was from this primitive style, we may presume, that the various countries of Asia developed each a national character of art, always however retaining a common base of character.
In the greatest series of early Indian frescoes which are still preserved, art has become mature. In a remote ravine among the mountains of Haiderabad a great scarp of precipitous rock sweeps in a horseshoe curve above a stream. It is a place of wild and solitary beauty. All along the surface of the cliff the rock has been hollowed out into what are often called caves, but are really spacious halls elaborately hewn in imitation of actual structure. There are twenty-nine of these, four being churches, the rest monastery dwellings. Many of them contain paintings, — not all of one date; the earliest are perhaps of the first century A.D., the latest and finest of the seventh century.
These paintings are all of Buddhist subjects. The types of Buddhist art with which students are most familiar are those contemplative, hieratic figures in which the sculptors and painters of China and Japan sought to embody the intense, impersonal spirit of peace and of pity. Those figures, isolated like supernatural visions on a background of darkness, are far removed from the actual world. But the frescoes of Ajanta, at least the most characteristic of them, are warm and human. They are concerned less with sublime visions of the Bodhisattvas than with the stories of the Buddha’s lives in his various incarnations on earth; and on these walls the actual life of the India of the time is portrayed before our eyes. In a palace with colored pillars a prince is seated, and girls are bringing offerings. We are astonished by the easy mastery of the attitude and movement; and how natural in their grace is the action and the pose of these supple limbs and bodies! Still more remarkable are the outdoor scenes. We are reminded of frescoes by the primitive Italian masters; but these Indian paintings show less of stiffness and struggle with materials, though they have an equal simplicity and largeness. And if not so masculine in design, and lacking in the instinct for drama and passion so characteristic of European masters like Giotto or Altichieri, they show a maturer conception of the world, in that the painters are less engrossed by man and the doings of man: their vision includes and rejoices in the world of animals and vegetation. The deer, the wild geese, above all, the elephants, are drawn with extraordinary vigor and knowledge both of form and of movement. This sympathy with, and insight into, the life outside humanity expresses the Buddhist tenderness for all created things. The Buddha himself is incarnated now in the deer, now in the wild goose, now in the elephant; and in each case teaches a lesson of magnanimity and forgiveness to men. These scenes, therefore, are very different in spirit from any European hunting scene, although one who knew nothing of the stories and their meaning might only observe the noble naturalism of the animal-drawing of which these Indian painters had the secret.
The pervading spirit of compassion and of gentleness, impressed on these animated groups of many moving figures, with their courteous grace of gesture, is concentrated in one sublime figure which is the quintessence of the art of Ajanta. This is a superhuman form standing detached among a number of smaller figures, and, lotus in hand, looking down upon the world in pity and renunciation. It is doubtful whether it is meant for the Prince Siddartha renouncing the delights of the senses, or the great Bodhisattva, the incarnation of Mercy, Avalokitesvara. Assuredly the day will come when this wonderfully expressive figure will receive recognition among the great creations of the world’s art.
The publication of the copies made on the spot by Lady Hervingham and her Indian assistants, which the Indian Society of London has undertaken, and which is shortly to take place, will increase the fame of these frescoes and make them known to a far wider circle than has hitherto been possible; for the caves themselves are difficult of access, even to the traveler in India. Yet Ajanta is not less worthy of a pilgrimage than is Assisi; and these paintings are more important in the history of the art of Asia than is any one group of Italian frescoes in the history of the art of Europe.
Indian painting here dawns in splendor. Besides Ajanta, there are a few other sites where frescoes, similar in style and inspiration, and belonging to the same period, have been found. But the destruction by Mohammedan invaders, one must surmise, has been immense, to say nothing of the ravages of time and neglect; for from the seventh century onward, so far as is known, practically nothing seems to have survived till the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the art of painting reappears in a different form and on a smaller scale. Buddhist art was to flourish exceedingly outside the borders of India, — in Turkestan, in China, in Tibet, in Japan; but in the land of its birth it died out, like the religion itself.
Most of the mediæval sculpture of India is inspired by the Hindu religion. Here the weaknesses of Indian art are, on the whole, more apparent than its excellences. While single figures and groups are often beautiful, there is a general lack of organic design. The tendency is to load and crowd, with an effect like language that is all superlatives; the forms are apt to be at once flaccid and heavy. Nevertheless, the copious mass of Indian sculpture has many interests, and deserves more study than it has yet received, though the recent works of Mr. Harell, the enthusiastic champion of Indian art, and the comprehensive history of Mr. Vincent Smith have made the subject easier to grasp.
One or two single sculptures may be mentioned as indications of what the Indian genius could achieve at its best. In the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is a torso of rare beauty. The date of this work has been disputed, but it certainly belongs to a quite early period, perhaps even dating before Christ. It represents a young hero, possibly the Prince Siddartha who was to become the Buddha. The sense of vigorous graceful youth reminds us of Greek marbles, but a kind of spiritual rather than mere bodily charm allies it, on the other hand, to the beauty of Gothic figures. It is akin to the art of Ajanta in its inspiration; noble and restrained in contour, with a delicate richness in its ornament. Assuredly this torso will hold its own with the classics of the sculptor’s art. Another memorable work is the seventh-century relief, cut deeply from the rock, of a famous sage, Kapila, in Ceylon. There is grandeur in the gesture of this boldly hewn figure seated in absorbed meditation, with one arm thrown out: the latent power and the concentration it expresses make it strangely striking. Here also there is a rare purity of form. Magnificent, too, are the colossal statues of horses and elephants at a temple in Orissa, one of which is reproduced in Harell’s Indian Sculpture and Painting, although when compared with works of equal rank we feel that they are lacking in the finest economy of style; there is something superfluous and barbaric betrayed in the lines of their contours. None the less, in their grandeur and powerful movement these sculptures are immensely impressive.
III
The Buddhist religion — which had inspired the greatest monument of Indian pictorial art, the frescoes of Ajanta, as well as some of the finest Indian sculpture, including the great series of reliefs at Borobodur in Java — the Buddhist religion died out in India, but swept northward in a triumphant movement across Asia to Japan. The advancing tide of Buddhism, carrying with it a rich store of Indian imagery, arrived at last in China. There it met a race which had already a vigorous art of its own. All representations of the Buddha legends which the Ajanta frescoes illustrate in a character so entirely Indian, were not only treated by the Chinese artists in their own manner, but with the personages portrayed as Chinese, in type and feature and in every detail of costume as well. This convention, once fixed, was adhered to and never abandoned, even in Japan. Sakyamuni has become a Chinese prince, in purely Chinese surroundings. As China became more familiar with Buddhist symbolism and with the actual images of the Indian faith brought from Khotan and Gandhara, and as the Mahayana doctrine, with its worship of the great Bodhisattvas, began to supersede the simpler primitive teaching of Buddha, Chinese artists eagerly assimilated the forms and symbols of the conquering faith. What they borrowed was, however, always subdued to the genius and idiom of their own art.
What was the character, then, and what the dominant features of native Chinese art? Apart from bronze vessels and incense-burners dating from various centuries before Christ, there is very little Chinese art surviving before the advent of Buddhism. One of the chief monuments is a series of low reliefs on a tomb in Shantung. These sculptures date from the second century of our era. We do not know precisely what the subjects mean. But we seem to be in presence of a race of great original energy and vitality. Above all we have the impression of mass. But the masses are never immobile and inert: there is a strong sense of movement, whether actual or latent. If one had to characterize this art in the briefest manner, one might say that it was especially distinguished by the feeling for volume and momentum. This power of expressing movement, and also of expressing the volume of life within the outline of a form, persists throughout Chinese art.
When we come to painting, we find another characteristic element. The Chinese write with a brush; and painting in their view is not only intimately allied with writing, but is reckoned as actually a branch of writing. We now possess letters of the first century A.D., and these indicate almost as much mastery of the brush as any later writing. In a people trained from childhood to write expressively and sensitively the strokes of the intricate Chinese characters, we should expect that their painting would, even in primitive times of art, show a high skill in the manipulation of the brush. The painting attributed to Ku K’ai-chih in the British Museum may or may not be an original work; but the fineness and subtlety of the ‘handwriting,’ to use a term quite appropriate in speaking of Chinese art, are, I think, in themselves no ground for judging it to belong to a later date. Ku K’ai-chih was a famous Chinese master of the fourth century A.D.
In the painting at the British Museum, instead of the impression of mass, proper to sculpture and its material, the fine writing line on the smooth silk is used to express human character with singular subtlety and intensity. Even thus early we arrive at the sense of intimacy and refinement which comes only to a ripe art, and we feel convinced that a long tradition must lie behind work so sensitive and mature. There is no trace whatever of Indian influence in this picture, or in the picture attributed to the same master which has lately passed from the most famous of Chinese collections into that of Mr. Freer at Detroit. Mr. Freer’s picture is of gods and goddesses, and is remarkable for its expressive rendering of swift and buoyant movement in delicate nervous line. I think it is certain that, whether these pictures are originals or early copies, they represent the style of the fourth century. Now Ku K’ai-chih, we know, painted Buddhist pictures. What these were like we cannot tell, but at any rate his art as we know it is essentially and entirely Chinese.
The native tradition of painting in China, then, had for one of its chief characteristics a beauty of handwriting, a power of modulating the strokes of the brush and making them expressive of the artist’s nature, the intensity and force of his spirit. Such an art as this readily allies itself with the instinct for communicating the sense of movement. The great draughtsmen of Europe have for the most part been distinguished by this searching grasp of structure and this power of suggesting roundness and mass. They have seconded their powers by close studies of anatomy. The Chinese recall rather exceptional artists like Botticelli, with whom the love of sinuous, rhythmical line is an inborn passion, and whose instinct for representing movement became at last a mannerism.
The love of movement, the dwelling on continuous flowing lines, which pervades Chinese art, is the outcome of a certain attitude of mind and philosophy of life. The conviction that life consists of change, that without change and without movement there is no life, — this conviction seems to be ever present in Chinese art, underlying even its chosen patterns of decoration. The decorative ornament of the West is mostly of a static character. It is made up of stable forms, and relies on the principle of symmetry. Persian and Indian ornament are not essentially different from this. But Chinese decoration, with its recurring motives of cloud and wave, and its sinuous dragons, takes the most fluid elements for its matter and imparts to its patterns a vibration as of things alive.
Indian thought — like Chinese thought — is full of the fact of change and impermanence in everything, including human personality. But while the Indian spirit accepts it with resignation, and pines always for a place of rest from the endless chain of existence, the Chinese spirit seems rather to be exhilarated by the consciousness that every life is part of the streaming, ever-changing energy of the universe. Take, for instance, the series of drawings recently published by Dr. F. R. Martin, the well-known authority on Persian art. Of these fifty drawings, ten are especially remarkable. They form a separate series, illustrating an old Chinese folk-tale about animals fighting with demons.
In these drawings, which are very likely copied from large wall-paintings of the T’ang period (seventh to tenth century), the conviction of an energy of movement as the essence of life is vividly expressed. We seem transported into a world of stream and flow, where elemental creatures move untrammeled by corporeal weight, yet endowed with superhuman force. We talk of demonic energy; and here that phrase is embodied to the life. A gust of electric storm seems to sweep through the whole design, and to carry us along with it. The same peculiar power which appears in a primitive form in the relief of the Han period is now displayed to its utmost capacity. Though only line is used, nothing could surpass the volume and momentum of these figures. And now the beasts and reptiles, carved with rude vigor by the early sculptor on the stone, are drawn with a brush of supreme mastery. Leonardo could not have surpassed them.
In comparing these with Indian drawings, we feel at once the inborn superiority of the Chinese genius for design. I mean that faculty which creates from the pictorial elements it uses an organic unity, holding the parts in equilibrium. ‘Balance is the pivot of art,’ says Rodin; and in the attainment of this balance the Chinese have not been rivaled by any other race. Through this balance of organic unity even the stormiest and most violent forms can be held as in a charmed repose; and this repose is what we miss most often in Indian design, grandiose and fecund as it is, and rich in particular beauties.
As Chinese art develops, it gradually invents a system of spacing which is quite new in the art of the world, and quite unique, though carried out with special variations by the Japanese who inherited it. Whatever China has borrowed from outside, — and probably, like most original races and original talents, she has borrowed much, — this genius for spacing remains her own and is of the indestructible essence of her art. It is the miraculous faculty of design, of pure art, that without recourse to symbol it can take the simplest of living things and convert them from fact into idea, so that we no longer see merely the object represented, but are somehow admitted with seeing eyes into the mystery of life itself, the something sacred at the heart of things which appeals to what is profoundest in ourselves. Something in us of which we were not conscious, far below the surface of our intelligence, comes up into the light.
With all the genius for design which pervades the whole of their art, the Chinese did not spend themselves on abstract problems of decoration, but kept their design animated and nourished by an intimate observation of nature. And this was not mere observation for its own sake; it was prompted by an impassioned love of all that had most power to liberate and enchant our spirits in the world without: the miracle of flowers forever springing and fading, the passage of the moon, the purity of the snow, the airy motion of birds, the endurance and the vastness of the mountains. So the landscape art of China, in all its various phases, remains, in richness and poetic depth of mood, unsurpassed even now.
We feel no veiling interval of time between the most typical Chinese paintings of a thousand years ago and ourselves. Of how much of European art can we say this? How modern in spirit are the Chinese paintings of so many centuries ago, we shall realize if we turn to Persia.
IV
For Persian painting really begins with the fall of Bagdad and its destruction by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The Mongols had conquered China in the same century. But now the invading Mongols brought in their wake Chinese artists, and China from that time exercised a constant influence on Persian painting. The Arab painting which existed before the fall of Bagdad is relatively of slight importance, being, so far as we know, but a timid and meagre flower that grew from the débris of classic art.
The real foundation of the Persian painting which began to flourish in the Middle Ages is less this Arab tradition than that tradition of art which had certainly been long established in Turkestan. Just as this ancient and traditional Asian style received a special development under the influence of the powerful Chinese genius, so on the west of Turkestan another process of development from the same or similar origin was set in motion by the genius of the Persian race. For whatever the influence of China, the creative and essential part of Persian painting is truly Persian; and the race of Ivan seems always to have been gifted with a fine sense of color, and with the instinct for design. At the back of these, however, there is nothing parallel to the atmosphere of ideas from which Indian art in its way, and Chinese art in its quite different way, were nourished and renewed. Mohammedanism condemned expressive art; and although the prohibition was not literally obeyed where the natural bent for art was strong, it acted as a sterilizing influence by restricting the artist’s subjectmatter. The themes of Persian painting are, when not portraiture, almost all taken from romance. Visions of deity, spiritual forms and presences, apparitions of power or of pity, — all these are absent from an art dominated by a doctrine which forbade imagination to play about its austere conception of the Divine Unity. Instead of these the Persian fancy seems ever intent on thoughts of an earthy paradise.
Persian painting, as we know it in its purest and finest form, is an art of miniature. It is small in scale, whether in the form of illustrations to manuscripts or of albums of single drawings. The drawings are often in outline of an exquisite quality, with perhaps a few touches of color. But while the line drawing of the Chinese is of the most varied character, now of an incredible fineness, now broad, bold, and sweeping, or again rough and jagged or violent with splintering strokes, the tone of the Persian artists is suave, smooth, and clean, rhythmically used indeed, but presenting little variety of expression.
But the most characteristic Persian painting is richly colored. And in certain qualities Persian color is unsurpassed. Most of the paintings have been preserved from exposure between the pages of books, and retain their original lustre.
The high horizon and bird’s-eyeview perspective of Persian painting are common to Asiatic art and to much of the earlier art of Europe. But in Persia there is no development, as with the Chinese and Japanese, in the direction of a landscape art. The study of atmosphere is unknown. The climate of Persia may partly account for this, and also the right instinct of artists working on the decoration of a page. None the less, the fact remains that Persian design after a certain period stagnates. The painters remain content with a prescribed convention and their efforts seem wholly absorbed in getting the utmost possible richness from their chosen materials.
Accepting these narrow limitations, they achieved wonderful things. At times a master like Bihzad, the most famous of Persian painters, could rise to dramatic invention. But no dramatic, no passionate motive ever so grips and possesses a Persian artist as to absorb his whole imagination. His sensuous love of beauty cannot resist filling in the accessories of the scene with just as much care and intention in every detail as he devotes to the central figures. In the great works of Chinese and Japanese painters, as in masters like Rembrandt, accessories are subdued or suppressed, the color is limited, and the figures which create the motive of the design are so emphasized, so dominant in the eye, that they seem to transcend the limits of the framing space, they seem alive with all the latent energies of actual men and women. No Persian painting imposes itself thus on the imagination. Everything remains within the frame, inlaid as in a lustrous mosaic. The Persian method has, it is true, its own compensations. Just as in the early pictures of Rossetti and Millais, everything is realized with a dreamlike vision; and this is always a real achievement for the painter. The freshness and glory thus brought to the eye, as of a world washed clean, with every object magically distinct and burning with clear color, make a vivid impression of strangeness. Strangeness, remoteness from the routine of every day, — that is the essence of romance; and no art in the world is more steeped in romance than the painting of Persia.
I have in my mind the page of a gorgeous manuscript, where a king and his counselor ride up to a ruined village. The original blazes with color and fine gold; and we see, as with heightened faculties, and in a rarefied air, the minutest details of the scene, the gazelles grazing in the doorway of the ruin, the detached fragments of painted tiles, the herons in their nest against a sky of dappled blue and white, the delicate single plants of red, or yellow, or purple iris that border the little stream. The splendor of articulated nature is brought, home to us with a kind of intoxicating effect.
Persian painting corresponds most nearly, I suppose, to the popular conception of the East and Eastern art, founded on the glowing pages of the Arabian Nights. In the history of the world’s art it is a kind of backwater; but it is certainly a chapter that we could ill afford to lose.
The Persian style and Persian example were carried into India by the Mogul conquerors and the descendents of Tamerlane. The great emperor, Akbar, who died at the beginning of the seventeenth century, encouraged art at his court. Though the Persian tradition by this time was enfeebled and degenerate, it was taken up by the Hindus. The great majority of the Indian paintings generally seen belong to the Mogul school thus created. The classic Persian themes of romance were handled again by the Indian artists; but the great strength of the school is in portraiture. No period in all history is more vividly illustrated for us in the persons of its prominent men than this. But after all the Mogul school represents a hybrid art. It is neither wholly Indian nor wholly Persian. And there is more living interest in the purely Indian styles which existed side by side with the Mogul school. This genuine Indian painting, the product chiefly of valleys of the Himalayas to which the Mohammedan conquerors had not penetrated, is still very little known. Yet it deserves our study. For here, after so many centuries which remain a blank, we recapture something of the early spirit of Ajanta, — the humanity, the joyousness, the tenderness, the spirituality diffused in life itself. The themes of this art are drawn from the life of a race preserving its ancient ways and its ancient legends; above all, the legends of Krishna, the Divine Cowherd, and of his beloved Radha. Untouched by Persian influence, these Indian drawings contrast strongly in their airy delicacy and intimate humanity with the extravagant, feverish effort, the loaded ornament and inchoate design, which mark so much of later Indian sculpture. These draughtsmen love to contain their figures within continuous rhythmic lines; and in this and in their feeling for the innate beauty of natural gesture and attitude they remind us of another popular art, the art of the color-print designers of Japan. To Japan we must now turn.
V
In a sense Japan owes everything to China. But it is in the same sense that the nations of the West may be said to owe everything to Judæa, Greece, and Rome. Only a race of the finest creative gift as well as the finest susceptibility could have been able to do what the Japanese have done; their art, even when most closely following Chinese example, has always in it something of native mood and fibre. That they should have kept so close to Chinese tradition for so many centuries and yet have produced a variation so alive and so continuously and freshly inventive, proves their originality as much as it proves their unique docility. It is a superficial view which sees in a painter like Ingres only an inferior imitation of Raphael; and it is a superficial view which sees in the art of Japan only an inferior imitation of the art of China.
Even in the periods in which the main aim of Japanese masters was to emulate the Chinese they adored, there is always that spontaneous difference which reveals a creative element. But for my present purpose I shall single out only those phases of Japanese art which are most purely Japanese.
A certain fastidiousness, a certain love of scrupulous and cleanly order, belongs to the Japanese character; we find it in their manners, their habits, their furniture, in all their workmanship. The word exquisite, so often vaguely misapplied, is an epithet truly applicable to the art of Japan.
The faults of this character are a tendency to the smallness that often goes with neatness. The Japanese do not work under the pressure of abundant ideas and torrential emotions; they do not fall into the excessive extravagance which sometimes besets the Chinese. But their unfailing sense of style compensates in great measure for their lack of more genial exuberance. Taste with them, as with artists like Velasquez and Whistler, becomes no mere negative avoidance, but a positive and vitalizing factor. One might well compare the Japanese genius in some aspects with the Latin genius, as it is shown in much of the poetry of the Romans and of the French, where a telling economy of words and fineness of handling are made to compensate for a slightness or even complete absence of matter.
Again, we must never forget that, while the Chinese are a pacific people, the Japanese are a martial people; and this is not without its effect even on their art. And with their high spirit goes a gay temper and a vivacity that again reminds us of France.
In the early periods it is in the themes of war and battle that the genius of Japanese painters is most effectively disengaged. No battle pictures in the world have surpassed those of the Japanese masters of the thirteenth century, of which the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is so fortunate as to possess a splendid example. The makimono or long rolls which they preferred were indeed signally adapted to the portrayal of the various incidents of warfare, with its shocks, alarms, and surprises. We watch the advance of haughty warriors, or see them making ready in their camp where the ox-drawn chariots are ranged in order; we see flights of arrows from an ambush; furious onslaughts on stockades; the burning of palaces; the confused stampede of flight, — the whole moving scene of war, in fact, pictured far more truly than when, as with us, a single scene must be contracted within the confines of a frame. And in these Japanese paintings the suppression of all but essentials is matched by the extreme intensity and energy of the figures. These do not strike heroic attitudes, but they are living, daring, desperate men.
But alongside this martial energetic design we find an extreme delicacy, as in illustrations of romances and scenes from voluptuous court life, where the color is of extraordinary richness, and where flowers are drawn with the same isolation of delicate forms that we find in Persian miniatures.
In the fifteenth century the Chinese style had captured and overwhelmed well-nigh the whole art of Japan. Sesshin and his compeers were emulating the inspired Sung masters in impassioned visions of mountains, mists, and torrents, or in figures of the great saints and sages boldly struck on to the paper by the ink-charged brush. It was a wonderful burst, a brilliant period. But I must pass over this splendid and enthusiastic revival of Chinese ideals and Chinese style, because, though it is associated with men of commanding genius, and though it is by no means to be dismissed as a mere imitation of Chinese art, I have not the space to deal with anything but what is most characteristically Japanese.
The Chinese movement lost, as it was bound to lose, in time, its strength and energy. It fell off into academic routine; it lost touch with the real genius of Japan, And yet its influence remained : art could not be as if this great revival had never taken place. The problem was now to graft the Chinese strain, the Chinese largeness and depth, on to the native principles of design. The problem was most successfully solved by a group of artists whose favorite means of expression was screenpainting. Here at any rate is no smallness, no pretty elegance, such as some people imagine to be the constant attributes of Japanese art. On the contrary a sympathetic grasp of nature, learned from Chinese example, is in these great screens united with the utmost audacity of design and with a splendor of color inherited from Japan’s own ancient schools. I do not think the world has at all yet realized what a magnificent page of art, unique in history, and of its kind incomparable, is presented by these paintings. In them perhaps more than anywhere else the peculiar genius of Japan flowers most triumphantly. And they have this special interest for us to-day, that they offer masterpiece on masterpiece created on the very lines which the latest artists of Europe tentatively, rebelliously, and as yet with little success, are trying to pursue. These artists are not preoccupied with nature, sitting down before a landscape and grappling with its structure, its atmosphere, its light and shade, its color. No; they start with their own free design, leaving themselves absolute liberty in the handling of whatever elements they choose to absorb from the visible glory of the world. But they do not turn their backs on nature; whatever natural form or appearance they seize, they seek to press out of its quintessence. And so in such a screen as Mr. Freer’s Pines on Snowy Mountains, by Yeitoken, the natural element impresses us even more vividly and powerfully than if the main elements of it were obscured by all the accident and detail involved in what is called fidelity.
Again, in the few magnificent flower screens by Koyetsu, subtle and complex in reality, how broad and bold is the design! It is as if we had a magic glimpse into the teeming breast of Earth, from which the flowers are tossed up in their force and splendor. How tame and unreal seem our flower paintings beside such work as this, superb as decoration but also full of the essential mystery of life and growth!
VI
What I have had to say in these few pages is of course the merest index to some of the predominant phases of the art of Asia. But it will serve at least to illustrate both the real relation that exists between the arts of these various countries and the inherent difference of character which has made each what it is.
The absence of the scientific spirit, which has had so potent an influence on the art of Europe since the Renaissance, — the absence of this spirit and its application to all the problems of representation, — is perhaps the source of the most obvious differences between the painting of East and West. If we take a deeper view, the essential likeness between all fine creative work becomes more apparent the more we study.
But within the art of Asia itself we note a real division. Indian art may be broadly compared with the mediæval art of Europe. It is practically anonymous. Very few names of individual artists are recorded. There are no great outstanding personalities. It is an art of popular tradition, still able, at least in architecture, to work wonders, with none of the scientific apparatus and divided labor that are necessary with us. It is also, like mediæval art, pervaded by religion and the religious spirit. That makes it immensely interesting for us in an age when the popular crafts have so much died out and have lost all touch with the expressive arts. On the other hand its limitations are very great; how great, we realize when we turn to China and Japan, where, though the crafts have remained in touch with the arts, painting has developed within itself movements, corresponding to the movements in Western painting, and where a surprising amount of work that is centuries old seems modern in feeling and contemporary with ourselves. Chinese painting touches every side of human life, every relation of the human spirit to the world of nature.
While the art of Europe has been pored over in minutest detail, we are still only at the beginning of the study of the art of Asia. Only the main outlines are apprehended, hardly even these. Indeed the special study required is so exacting and the subject has been approached from such different standpoints, that there may be a danger, in the fascinating task of detailed exploration, of losing sight of just those large relations which it has been the object of this paper to bring out.