Art. 10.-ORIENTAL ART.

1. Painting in the Far East. By Laurence Binyon. London: Arnold, 1908.

2. Manuel d'Art Musulman. By Gaston Migeon. Paris: Picard, 1907.

3. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Printed in the Norman Chapel, Broad Campden, 1908.

4. Indian Sculpture and Painting. By E. B. Havell. London: Murray, 1908.

THOSE who concern themselves with art are apt to look with a kind of admiring envy on the man of science, to think of him as continually progressing to the conquest of new worlds, urged on by a breathless anticipation of ever new and more astonishing wonders. But if the artist feels discouraged and overshadowed by the great creations of the past, the critic and student of applied aesthetics is to-day held in almost the same breathless suspense as the man of science before the new worlds of art which recent research has revealed to his wondering gaze. To almost the same extent as the man of science he finds himself out of his bearings, bewildered and amazed at the multiplicity and strangeness of the new unassimilated material. For him too it is imperative to find a new orientation, to provide himself with new charts and new guiding principles. The specialist in any particular branch of art is usually spared this effort. For him the discovery of historical data, all the quasiscientific apparatus and curiosity of the researcher, is sufficient guide and stimulus. He takes refuge in a happy prejudice which gives to his particular branch of art an indisputable pre-eminence in his own opinion. This is doubtless as it should be. Without some such fortunate illusion the work before him could never be accomplished. But the mere critic, the man who seeks, however fondly, to adjust the valuation of any and every artistic expression of the human spirit, who must for ever keep his mind and feelings alert for the acceptance of new æsthetic truth, may well feel a certain bewilderment at the vast mass of new æsthetic experience which lies open to him.

Vol. 212.-No. 422.

Especially is this true of the art of the East. Scarcely more than a hundred years ago art meant for a cultivated European, Graeco-Roman sculpture and the art of the high Renaissance, with the acceptance of a few Chinese lacquers and porcelains as curious decorative trifles. Then came the admission that Gothic art was not barbarous, that the Primitives must be reckoned with, and the discovery of early Greek art. The acceptance of Gothic and Byzantine art as great and noble expressions of human feeling, which was due in no small degree to Ruskin's teaching, made a breach in the wellarranged scheme of our æsthetics, a breach through which ever new claimants to our admiring recognition have poured.

When once we have admitted that the Graeco-Roman and high Renaissance views of art-and for our purposes we may conceive these as practically identical-are not the only right ones, we have admitted that artistic expression need not necessarily take effect through a scientifically complete representation of natural appearances, and the painting of China and Japan, the drawings of Persian potters and illuminators, the ivories, bronzes, and textiles of the early Mohammedan craftsmen, all claim a right to serious consideration. And now, finally, the claim is being brought forward on behalf of the sculptures of India, Java, and Ceylon. These claims have got to be faced; we can no longer hide behind the Elgin marbles and refuse to look; we have no longer any system of æsthetics which can rule out, a priori, even the most fantastic and unreal artistic forms. They must be judged in themselves and by their own standards.

To the European mind of to-day, saturated as it is with some centuries of representative art, there is always some initial difficulty in thus shifting the point of view to one in which likeness to natural appearances, as we understand them, can no longer be used as the chief criterion of value. The average amateur is apt to think, even before the masterpieces of primitive Italian art, before Giotto or Simone Martini, that these are very good considering the time when they were made, or at least, that they would be better if they conformed more to his own standards of representation. Such an idea implies always an imperfect grasp of the language of the early

artist, but it requires many years of study to eradicate altogether the underlying prejudice. To such a one the mere fact that the Japanese employ a different kind of perspective from ours, or as he would put it,' do not draw in perspective,' makes it impossible to give full assent to the artist's idea. On the other hand, any one who has once thoroughly mastered the methods of artistic expression employed in Byzantine and early Gothic art (say before 1400) will find that he has little or no difficulty in entering into the modes of conception of Sino-Japanese painting.

The present writer once had the opportunity to test this essential community between the art of the East and early European art. He accompanied Mr Okakura, the subtle and ingenious Japanese critic, to various galleries in London, among others to the exhibition of illuminated manuscripts at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Both there and elsewhere it was evident that the Japanese critic understood at once the meaning of an Anglo-Saxon drawing, and that he could without difficulty place it in its right relation with both earlier and later work. He understood the methods of expression, and he could appreciate exactly the changes in style that occurred in the course of centuries, but when once complete naturalistic presentment began in the fifteenth century he was altogether at a loss. Before a miniature by Simon Benink he stared with blank amazement and refused, with Oriental politeness, to express any opinion. He said that he was unfortunately unable to understand it. This of course did not mean that he failed to recognise the objects represented, but that he failed to see any artistic idea that lay behind that photographic vision.

The European mind has then been gradually prepared to accept the methods of Oriental design, and with that preparation has come an immense increase in its accessibility. In the last generation even enthusiasts like Whistler had to content themselves with blue and white porcelain of the seventeenth century, and a few Japanese prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But already the Berlin and British Museums contain a few masterpieces of Chinese and Japanese classic art, and the publication of the Kokka and of Tajima's 'Selected Masterpieces' have made possible for the first time some sort of

general understanding of the art of the Far East. Even so, however, it was possible only to a few to follow the development of the various schools, until Mr Binyon's book gave easy access at least to the general movements and conceptions of Chinese and Japanese painting.

Mr Binyon's writing, with its grave and sober eloquence, is admirably adapted to give an idea in words of the art of which he tells with such a deep sense of its poetical content. At least one great period of Chinese art, that of the Tang dynasty, has left nothing but a memory and some later copies; but even here Mr Binyon is able to hold the reader's interest by evoking vague and mysterious images of inaccessible splendours.

When, however, we come to the Sung period there is plenty of material at hand, though but few of the masterpieces have found their way to Europe. Mr Binyon well describes what must be the most surprising fact to any European who first sees, even in reproduction, a Sung landscape, namely, the extreme modernity of these painters. He shows how this note of modernity pervaded the whole South Chinese civilisation of the Sung period, and certainly the paintings show a passionate and disinterested contemplation of nature such as even our own art has never quite attained to. There is a picture by Ma Yuan of the moon rising amid piled-up cumulus clouds over a limitless expanse of storm-tossed waves, which gives a deeper, more poignant expression to all those feelings of wonder and awe at the infinity of nature than ever Turner did. There is a scene by a river in winter, by Ma Lin, which has more of the sense of mystery and romance than anything in Corot. To the contemplative spirit of the Chinese, even the slightest revelations of beauty in nature-a bird on a spray of magnolia, or a rose-mallow reflected in a stream-can become outlets for the spirit into the infinite background of phenomena. Thus it is that their flower-pieces have none of the triviality which seems to mar even the most brilliant European renderings of such subjects. But it is in the definitely religious art of artist's like Li-lungmien that we realise the full range of Chinese art, its power to adumbrate, in forms of classic severity and precision, the strangest and most mystical intimations of spiritual existence.

With Japanese art we enter a very different world, if we except, as well we may, the vast mass of fifteenth and sixteenth century imitations of Sung originals, which, even when executed by a supreme virtuoso like Sesshiu, bear upon their faces the evidence of wilful stylistic artifice. Indeed throughout Japanese art we are constantly meeting evidences of a more capricious, eccentric, and self-conscious attitude than would have been tolerated by the essentially classic principles of the great Chinese masters.

The earliest painting of Japan reflects for us in all probability something of the lost grandeur of the Tang school in China; it is profoundly religious and grandiose, but gives little indication of the specific characteristics of Japanese feeling. These come out for the first time in the great Tosa school, the Yamatoye or national school, as it was appropriately called. In Keion's long narrative scrolls we see a conception of art to which no parallel can be found in Chinese painting. They represent the violent scenes of civil strife out of which came the new feudalism. Nothing can be conceived more expressive than these of the turbulent vehemence of armed crowds, the agitation of a hundred arms and legs moving at the bidding of some infectious passion. In looking at these wonderful scenes, depicted with a line as agitated and alert as the gestures it describes, we are struck by the infallible power and the apparent ease with which Keion renders the most complex and momentary movements of the figure. How, one asks, was it possible at such a time, in the thirteenth century, with no long and slowly accumulated science behind him, such as a Goya or a Degas inherits-how was it possible for Keion to seize and render such effects? And in the answer to this we discover one of the curious paradoxes of Eastern art when compared to our own. Eastern art, and especially Japanese art, is far more visual than ours; the actual vision of appearances is clearer, more precise, more rapid, and above all, less distorted by intellectual preoccupations. It is more perceptual, less conceptual. The graphic arts would seem to result from a compromise and fusion of three elements, one the desire to symbolise concepts, one the desire to make records of appearances, and finally, modifying and controlling these, the love of