Year

1926

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (1)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1926	Fry, Roger. Some aspects of Chinese arts [ID D31550]. Almost every work of art comes to us with some letter of introduction or other. There is almost inevitably some intermediary who or which modifies the state of mind with which we approach the interview. If it is a modern work it may be by an artist whom we know and like personally, and at once we are prepared to give it the benefit of every doubt. It may be by an artist whose work has previously bored or irritated us, and the chances are a thousand to one against our giving it a patient hearing. It may come to us with the romantic thrill of intense antiquity, and we feel inclined to make every allowance for a man who took the trouble to live so very long ago and yet to be a quite recognisable human being not altogether unlike ourselves. It may belong to some exotic civilisation which has already in quite unrelated and accidental ways stirred our imagination, and we are in a hurry to find confirmation of all our past emotions. Or it may be just the contrary, the strangeness, the foreignness of the conceptions may repel us by hinting from the first at what a lot of trouble we should have to take to get sufficiently familiar with the religious or philosophical ideas which we dimly guess at behind the artist's iconography. There is no doubt that some of these accessary feel¬ings which cluster round a work of art, like the patina on an ancient bronze, may have a genuine value for our imaginative life, but it is also certain that we cannot make full contact with a work of art, cannot really come to terms of intimacy with its creator, until we have recognised and made allowance for this intervening medium. When we are considering works of Chinese art this intervening medium tends to distort our vision in various and sometimes contrary directions. There are still, I believe, many people well acquainted with some aspects of European art who yet feel that the Art of China is strange to them. They lack a clue to direct them in so unfamiliar a world. They may know but little of Christian hagiology, but at least the names of the Christian Pantheon are familiar to their ears, whereas they have no feelings at all about Avalokatesvaras, Amidhas and Arhats. Again, the whole Chinese symbolism will be unintelligible to them. They know, perhaps, that the dragon is symbolical of the heavens, but they do not feel any point in the symbol, being familiar with dragons only in quite other settings. It may well be that this remoteness of subject-matter in Chinese art makes them feel it is a closed book to them. They may feel happy enough in the presence of the trifling bibelots, the Chinoiseries of later periods, which have become ac-climatised in our drawing-rooms, but the great art, above all the early religious art, will repel them by its strangeness. Now, I believe this is a mistaken fear. Chinese art is in reality extremely accessible to the European sensibility, if one approaches it in the same mood of attentive passivity which we cultivate before an Italian masterpiece of the Renaissance, or a Gothic or Romanesque sculpture. A man need not be a Sinologist to understand the esthetic appeal of a Chinese statue. It may represent some outlandish divinity, but it is expressed according to certain principles of design and by means of a definite rhythm. And it so happens that both the principles of Chinese design and the nature of their rhythms are not half so unfamiliar to the European eye as Chinese musical rhythms are to our ears. On the contrary, they are so similar that I could point to certain much-loved-European artists who are nearer in this respect to the Chinese than they are to certain other great European artists. Chinese art is nothing like so difficult of access as Hindu art. It has, to begin with, colour schemes that are pre-eminently harmonious to the European eye; it has the same general notions of logical and clear co-ordination of the parts within the whole; it aims at a similar equilibrium, and it does not allow the elaboration of detail to destroy the general structure; whereas in much Hindu art and in some of the art of the Near East, we must, I think, abandon some of these demands and content ourselves with other and, to our feelings, less important qualities, with mere diversity, multiplicity and intricacy. The distorting influence which I have described will affect us chiefly, then, with regard to those works of sculpture in which the human figure is treated from a religious point of view, to the great period of Buddhist art of the Wei, Sui and early T'ang periods. When, on the other hand, we are confronted with that large series of early objects of ritual use of which the Chou bronzes are the central type, our attitude is likely to be distorted in other ways. Here, I think, the exotic quality of all very early art, together with the exotic quality more or less present in all Chinese objects, make a favourable appeal. These rich and elaborate bronzes are exotic certainly, but not too exotic. One thinks instinctively of the makers and owners of these bronzes as 'quaint', no doubt, but as having an Epicureanism not altogether unlike our own. These Chinese objects have an air of belonging to people who were polite, traditional and sophisticated, and that brings them near to our own ways of living and feeling, more so, I think, than is the case with those odd athletic beings who drank out of the black and red Greek vases. With them we hardly know when Epicurean habits might not suddenly give way to explosive irruptions of passion. But with the Chinese, I feel sure that even if one had been put to death at the end of a feast with a dignitary of the Chou Empire all would have been conducted with reassuring decorum to the very last, for the Chinese have something very safe and comfortable about them which even the grinning monsters’ faces on their bronzes do little to dispel. It is this, surely, that makes their objects, even those of the remotest antiquity, fit so comfortably into our own homes. There is a great delight in enjoying the exotic thrill without stirring from one's own armchair, and this being so, we have the added thrill of antiquity. The imagination of our times is, it would seem, more easily and instantly stirred by great antiquity than by any other appeal. The historical sentiment must be universal for Tutankhamen to become a music-hall favourite. So here, too, we are put into an indulgent frame of mind before these works of art, which makes a severely exact appreciation of them difficult. And the Chinese, I think, complicate the matter them-selves by their excessive love of ritual, and I mean by this, esthetic rather than religious ritual. One feels that one must be a little on one's guard with people who invented the 'tea ceremony', people who deliberately hypnotised themselves into an attitude of expectant esthetic adoration. They would say, no doubt, that this hypnotic business of walking along the garden path in silence to the tea-house only served to produce a due receptivity, only put one into a favourable attitude. But that is just it; they are always getting one into too favourable an attitude, hypnotising away one's critical common sense. They have a way of making things seem precious even before they are cunningly mounted and tastefully displayed. I know that all these remarks apply still more to the Japanese, but I feel that even with these bronze workers of 500 B.C. you can never quite catch the artist unprepared for you, never see him so completely ab¬sorbed in his idea that he does not know you are looking over his shoulder. Perhaps I am making too much of my suspicions and scruples, but there is no doubt that the impression of almost barbaric clumsiness and crudity which we feel at first before these antique bronzes very quickly yields to a sense of their conscious preciosity. That very roughness seems to be the expression of a highly trained sensibility to the quality of the material. Not but what that is an artistic merit, only it seems most expressive when it comes by accident, as it were, out of the artist's vehemence of statement rather than as the result of deliberate research. At any rate, however far back we go we still find that extraordinary feeling for style which permeates Chinese art. From the first we feel that the Chinese, so refractory to other religions, had adopted as no other race ever has the religion of culture. To culture, indeed, rather than to Philistine indifference, we must attribute, I suspect, that strange atrophy of the crea¬tive spirit which has affected Chinese art during the last few centuries. This excessive reverence for the tradition is so strong that at this day artists in Pekin execute watercolours which repeat almost unaltered the forms of certain Sung paintings. No new aspect of vision compels them to break the accepted scheme. However delicate or intense their feeling towards appearance may be it never bursts the limits of the inherited formula. The fate of modern Chinese art is, indeed, a warning against the rigour which culture may induce. One feels its force to be present from the first, but with these early artists it restrains but does not stiffen their movements. Here, indeed, its influence is felt mainly in a singular poise and moderation. Where there is so much underlying vigour as these bronze workers of the Chou dynasty evince, it only imposes a singular tact and reticence which impresses us as the most distinguished good manners. Look, for instance, at the neck of the jar and note the absence of any emphasis in the two slight ridges which mark it, the clear salience of the lip, which is exactly enough, and only just enough, to satisfy the eye and give a perfect close to the curves of the galb which lead up to it. And in those curves themselves, for all their apparent bareness and simplicity, what variety and flexibility there is! Look at the firmness and weight of the base, the audacious transition to the belly, and then the gradual and ever so subtle softening of these blunt assertions as one rises to the almost elegant neck. Or again, how subtly the artist has felt the exact relief necessary to make the monster’s head (the T'ao-t'ieh) and the two horns stand out from the flat patterning of the jar! How bluntly and firmly they are stated, and yet with only the least possible relief to enable them to dominate and give life to the whole surface! This particular specimen of Chou craftsmanship shows an impeccable feeling for proportion. It suggests the happiest equilibrium in the artist’s spirit between the vehemence with which he has grasped his idea, the blunt frankness with which he has stated it, and that controlling influence which has made him shun any undue emphasis, any flourish of the virtuoso as a piece of vulgar self-assertion. Such a complete plastic idea expressed with such perfect assurance and ease as we have here is by no means universal in these early bronzes. Not only their decoration, but the forms of the vessels themselves appear to have been often dictated by the exigencies of symbolic statement. Thus, in a vessel in Mr. Eumorfopoulos's collection the body is formed by the fore parts of two rams joined back to back. Sometimes the artist can scarcely reduce all these data to a clearly felt plastic system, and the chief beauty then resides in the richness and perfection of the surface adorn¬ment. But the vase shown in, which was formerly in the Imperial Palace at Mukden, is another example of the finest plastic feeling. It is elliptical in section and the contours are everywhere exquisitely rhythmic and free-flowing. The mouldings of base and neck show again the delicate taste and plastic sensibility of the craftsman. No less striking is the treatment here of the T'ao-t'ieh, which is no longer a linear decoration but treated as a fundamental part of the plastic volume, giving it at once greater amplitude and a more vigorous sense of relief. And then, as though all those gentle modulations of surface curvature might leave an impression of weakness, the artist has marked the sides by the almost harsh salience of two serrated ribs and by the positiveness of the knob at the top of the lid. The same idea dictates the knobby modelling of the rhinoceros heads which terminate the massive but gently curved handle. Such play of contrasting effects of rhythm as are here shown indicate a highly developed and perfectly conscious esthetic feeling. Here, if anywhere, in these Chou bronzes we may be allowed to find the indigenous and essential spirit of Chinese art, since, from Han times on, foreign influence of one kind or another has frequently impinged. It is a curious result of our newly recovered memory of all those thousands of forgotten years that we should have to regard as essentially Chinese objects like these bronzes, so very different from the peculiarly agitated flamboyant silhouettes which the eighteenth century grafted readily enough on to its own rococo. Then the Chinese flavour was as clearly marked and distinct as the smell of a Chinese cabinet. Now we are hard put to it to recognise, and still more to define, any common fundamental and persistent characteristics. It would, indeed, be surprising if one could generalise readily about the art of so vast a territory, extending through such long periods of human history, so that if I do now attempt to make certain generalisations, it is rather with a view to pointing out lines along which our attention may be profitably directed than in the hope of establishing any important general principle. The first thing, I think, that strikes one is the im¬mense part played in Chinese art by linear rhythm. The contour is always the most important part of the form. To take their painting, to begin with. No doubt European painting started on a linear basis, and no doubt it frequently returns to it, but from very early times the linear rhythm began to be influenced by other considerations, and as our knowledge of external appearance progressed, or rather as we absorbed more of it into the material of the painter's expression, the linear rhythm became more and more subordinate to other considerations. When we come to Rembrandt it is hard to say that any linear basis survives. Now, a Chinese picture, even of the later and more highly sophisticated periods—and, by the way, Chinese art seems to have been sophisticated from the remotest antiquity—never loses the evidence of the linear rhythm as the main method of expression. And this is only natural, the medium used being always some kind of water-colour, and the art of painting being always regarded as a part of the art of calligraphy. A painting was always conceived as the visible record of a rhythmic gesture. It was the graph of a dance executed by the hand. This predominance of linear rhythm is felt in all Chinese decorations and even in sculpture. In sculpture it makes itself felt in the emphatic continuity and flow of the contour and in the treatment of drapery, which is often rather inscribed on the form than modelled as a plastic element. And wherever such drapery is inscribed or however it is indicated, the direction of the folds takes on the character of a linear rhythm. Secondly, the linear rhythm of Chinese art is peculiarly continuous and flowing. It is never so flaccid as Hindu rhythms, nor is it ever so harshly staccato, jerky and broken as certain rhythms with which Europe is familiar. There is nothing in Chinese art as ungracious and literally shocking as the rhythms of fifteenth-century sculpture in Germanic lands and of contemporary painting of the Netherlands. It hardly ever attains quite the refinement and nervous subtlety of the rhythms of certain early Persian draughtsmen, but it is more closely akin to that than any other. Certainly to our eyes the linear rhythms of the Chinese artists present no difficulty. We are familiar with very similar ones in much Italian art. The contour drawing of certain pictures by Ambrogio Lorenzetti comes very close indeed to what we can divine of the painting of the great periods. Botticelli is another case of an essentially Chinese artist. He, too, relies almost entirely on linear rhythms for the organisation of his design, and his rhythm has just that flowing continuity, that melodious ease which we find in the finer examples of Chinese painting. Even Ingres has been claimed, or denounced, as the case may be, as a 'Chinese' painter; and with some reason, for he, too, holds intensely to his linear scheme, and, however plastic the result, even the plasticity is effected more by the exact planning of the linear contour than by any other means which the European can rely on. It would be a mistake to suppose that because the Chinese rely on their linear rhythms, their paintings are flat, like the works of some modern pre-Raphaelites. On the contrary, they show a keen feeling for the volumes which their contours evoke, and avoid anything in the nature of the rhythm or in the manner of drawing it, which will check the idea of plasticity, will bring us up, as it were, with a jerk on the surface of the picture. None the less, the eye is held by the contour by reason of the fact that the artist concentrated his attention on that, relied on that to reveal the plasticity of the whole volume. Chinese painters were never tempted to explore in natural appearances those hints of a continuous plastic weft to which the study of light and shade and atmospheric colour have given so great a rôle among the later Western masters. Chinese rhythm, then, tends to be continuous to avoid very sudden transitions of movement. Its basic idea, especially in early art, is that of the square with rounded angles. See, for instance, the horns of the T'ao-t'ieh and the handle of the jar, or the spiral lines which define the shoulders of the beast. The Chinese artists avoid a rigidly straight line as being incompatible with continuity of flow, but they do not like to forget it altogether. They therefore also avoid curves which are segments of a true circle as being too positive and incompatible with the more complex intermediate curves. The galb of the vase is eminently characteristic of this feeling. We pass from nearly straight lines at the base to a nearly spherical shoulder, but both are so far modified that the eye can accept it as an unbroken rhythmic phrase. This peculiarly subtle sense of rhythmic continuity is made evident in a curious way in some objects of the T'ang dynasty in which certain Alexandrine or Roman models have been followed so closely that in the case of certain silver vases one would be inclined at first sight to say that they had come from excava¬tions at Pompeii. But when we look closer we find that everywhere the Chinese feeling has subtly modified the original. It is characteristic of a great deal of later Greek design that it accepts willingly circular curvature. It is this fact that gives to these objects that peculiarly tight, mechanical elegance which was so dear to our ancestors a hundred years ago. An elegance which now appears to us to be distressingly devoid of vitality and elasticity. And so, though perhaps all unconsciously, the T'ang silversmiths must have felt, for, by innumerable minute readjustments of proportion and modifications of the galb they have given to their vases just those qualities which the Greek craftsman lacked. Again, in those T'ang dishes, which so strangely anticipate our rococo, the complex bracketed curves are always slightly flattened out as though the finer sensibilities of the artist had shunned the effect of rollicking self-confidence which, centuries later, European craftsmen gave to almost identical designs. Next with regard to the Chinese feeling for plasticity. Here, I think, there is a general tendency which distinguishes it from that of European sculpture. Plastic forms in the round are, I think, always referred, however unconsciously, to some basic mental schema. It seems to me that the Chinese keep as their basic schema and point of departure the egg, whereas the European bases himself upon the cube, or some simple polyhedron. This becomes clear by the compartation of two examples. I have chosen these from what may be considered great periods of the respective arts. The Buddhist figure of the T'ang epoch is certainly one of the grand conceptions of Chinese plastic art, and the figures from Giotto's 'Campanile', in which that artist's influence is generally admitted, are among the greatest of all European sculpture. Now, both of these are essentially plastic. I mean that in both, the artist is free of the third dimension. This, I need hardly add, is by no means universal in European sculpture, for it is always very difficult for an artist really to create in the round. The imagination grasps easily relations on a flat surface; it rapidly loses its way in trying to seize relations in three dimensions, since the number of possible movements is so immensely greater. It seems, therefore, that the artist is forced to cling to some kind of simple abstract solid form and to conceive his sculpture in terms of a deviation from that. Now, it is clear that the Italian felt solid form as being constituted of facets. It derives from the cube. Look at the torso of the seated woman, and see how the plane of the breast is felt, and how clearly the sculptor has noted where this plane, with its almost uniform direction, changes into a plane nearly at right angles to it—edge of a cube—where the breast descends to the belly. And compare this with the shoulders and breast of the Chinese figure. It scarcely departs from the abstract egg-shape which permeates almost every part of this design, even to the flower-like base on which the figure stands. Allied to this is the cylinder, another easily apprehended solid form. And, sure enough, the arms are cylindrical, while in Giotto's standing figure we can see the flat plane of the top forearm continued into the back of the hand. When we Europeans refer to plasticity we talk, naturally, in terms of planes, but I doubt if the Chinese artist has ever conceived of this method of handling plastic form. I do not know what language he uses, but I suspect he would, even in speaking, refer shapes to cylinders, spheres and ellipsoids. Again, notice the drapery. In the Chinese statue the folds scarcely have any plastic existence. They are inscribed on the surface of the figure and are used to envelope it in an exquisitely lovely system of simple linear rhythms which harmonise with and illustrate the linear scheme of the whole contour. If I am right, we touch here on some profound difference in the creative methods and in the imaginative habits of European and Chinese artists, but though they affect the creative artist profoundly, these differences hardly ever form a barrier to our ap¬preciation and understanding of the other method. In this connection it is interesting that among the many instances of Chinese influence on modern Western art we may note a tendency among contemporary sculptors to accept this ovoid schema. Brancusi is, of course, the most striking example. In his work such forms predominate almost exclusively, but even Maillol, in spite of his strong predilection for, and deep study of, Greek sculpture, seems to have admitted ovoid and cylindrical elements into his plastic themes. Maillol's widespread influence on the younger sculptors, both in France and elsewhere, seems likely to fix this character in the European tradition. In its formal aspects, then, Chinese art, though it has distinguishing characteristics, presents no serious difficulty to our European sensibility. On the other hand, much of its content is inspired by feelings which are not easily accessible to us, though the same may be said of much of our own mediaeval art. Perhaps the most striking difference in this respect concerns the habitual attitude of Chinese and Western artists to the human figure and to animal forms. We inherit from the Greek a peculiar arrogance about the species of animal to which we happen to belong. We have, therefore, devoted a quite special and intensive study to the forms of our kind; we have developed thereby many specialised sensibilities and a mass of associated ideas which we carry in our 'unconscious' ready to vibrate in response to the slightest suggestion on the part of the artist. The Chinese have never, apparently, focussed their attention so narrowly on their own species. They have never lost sight of its relative position in the scheme of nature. As a result we are likely often to feel the inadequacy, and from our point of view, the relative insignificance of their figure imagery, though the sculpture shown suffices to prove that at times they could attain to a noble impressiveness in the human form. But what may well counterbalance this defect is the relatively greater sense in the Chinese of the signifi-cance of animal and plant forms. What, I think, strikes one first is the extraordinary vitality of these creatures. These animals have a life of their own, not a life lent them by us after the patronising manner of so much occidental art, but their own odd, unique and strangely unapproachable life. Arrested by our presence in the course of their own business, they look out at us with stupid wonderment, ready to pass into that bland indifference, which we can catch in their regard, if for a mo¬ment we lay aside our inveterate habit of supposing the whole universe to be preoccupied with our affairs. Here, as in so many other of her contacts with nature, China has reaped the advantage of never entertaining that anthropocentric illusion which the greatest of all Western peoples fixed so early and so indelibly in the European mind. Indeed, one way of grasping the importance and value of the Chinese attitude is to recognise by comparison how entirely it is opposed to the Greek. The Greeks, indeed, were astute enough observers of animal forms; they could render the results of their purely external observations with clear-cut precision, and they could fit them readily enough into their decorative schemes. But we are conscious that the rhythm is preconceived and somewhat arbitrarily imposed, and that in consequence the Greek artist passed from the literal fact of natural form to the stylised result without ever touching the intimate life of the animal itself. Or, more disconcerting still, we find the animal galvanised into a semblance of human life and displaying qualities with which the artist has temporarily endowed him; he becomes proud, haughty, defiant, heroic, cunning or what not: he poses for us with self-conscious deliberation. No Greek ever took the trouble to understand the bovine simplicity of the Buffalo shown or to consider by what means the Chinese artist arrived at such a creation as the earthenware jar of the Chou period, belonging to the Cernuschi Museum. This jar is hardly modified from a form which came naturally on the wheel, but by a few touches which destroy its rigid symmetry it becomes what, with the hint of eyes and beak in the lid—and what an eye!—we can accept as a humorously convincing conception of an owl sitting, 'warming his five wits' with shoulders hunched and feathers puffed. The Chinese potter who moulded this work persuaded an owl to become a pot without ceasing for a moment to be himself, without bating a jot of his owlishness. He is not forced to serve an alien purpose nor trimmed to fit into a preconceived pattern. The decorative quality, the transposition into the realm of the imagination, here comes out of a sympathetic comprehension of the thing seen. Such a method is the exact opposite of that stylisation which reduces the variety of nature to an a priori order by an external and arbitrary act. Western art, no doubt, has not been without its moments when such a sympathetic penetration to the inner recesses of non-human life was attained. Sassanian art certainly shows a similar spirit which passes now and then into Byzantine, but far more clearly into early Mohammedan work. And something of it undoubtedly recurs in Romanesque sculpture, though Christian anthropocentrism, even more exacting than the Greek which it replaced, quickly stamped it out in all subsequent West-European art. But more than with any other source of animal de¬sign, the Chinese has its closest affinities with that Scythian and Sarmatian tradition whose widespread influence we are only beginning to understand. Indeed, again and again we are conscious of a distinct and alien influence on Chinese art emanating from this source, which after all had its origin not so very far west of China itself. But what, I think, distinguishes the Chinese animalist from others is his highly developed artistic consciousness. Probably the imaginative sympathy with the inner life of animals is a phase of all early human life; but, generally, it seems to have disappeared before men reached the full self-consciousness of civilisation. In China, on the other hand, the civilised consciousness seems to supervene so early that it does not destroy this primeval understanding with the animal world. These Chinese artists, even the earliest of them, are people more or less of our own kind. They are already fully conscious artists; they speak a language of form which presents no barrier to us. The objects which they created seem to be as clearly made for the leisured contemplation, the purely esthetic enjoyment, which we ourselves give to them, as the works of, say, the Italian Renaissance. We need not fear that they are happy accidents, the unintentional by-products of some other activity. We feel that we share the artist's own delight, that we can establish a communion with his spirit. He reports to us in our own language that dim sense of continuity with nature, the memory of which was lost so long ago by our own ancestors. In China, that spirit of detachment from the human point of view which enabled the primitive comprehension of non-human life to survive, persists under civilised conditions. The sentiment of intimacy and kinship with animals naturally grows less as the primitive feeling is at last forgotten. Here and there, from the Sung dynasty onwards, we find it replaced by a purely picturesque and external curiosity such as modern European art habitually displays. But even as late as Ming times an echo of that earlier sympathy with animal life occasionally survives. Not altogether unconnected with this attitude to animals, and at least as strange to the Western mind, is the absence in Chinese art of the Tragic spirit. Whilst their fun is sometimes almost childishly naive and exuberant, their gravity is never altogether untouched by humour. A Michelangelo is unthinkable in the atmosphere of Chinese art; still more, perhaps, an El Greco, letting himself go whithersoever the exaltation of his fevered imagination carried him. This kind of exaltation, this dramatic intensity of human feeling, seems unknown to the Chinese. Their most exalted religious feeling leads them into a more contemplative mood, one more remote from possible action than ours. It is a mood, too, which admits of a certain playful humour which we are not accustomed to associate with such states of mind. These characteristics are connected, no doubt, with that happy disinterestedness of which I have spoken. It, too, is the reward of not having fallen into the habit of human arrogance. Since, the Chinese might argue, the world does not revolve round us as its centre, we need not take either the world or ourselves too seriously. We can afford to play. We can play with the offspring of our imagination. They shall be our playthings and our delight. We need not take even them too seriously. If we like to imagine monsters, we will, but however real we make them, we need not be frightened by them. They are only being terrible in play. And so it comes about that however portentous Chinese monsters may be, they are never tragic, like the progeny of our medieval fancies. The mediaeval mind frightened itself by its own activity. No one could apply the word 'Dantesque' to a Chinese creation. Even the beasts of the Chou dynasty, like the Buffalo, do not, in spite of a certain clumsy ferocity, really belie this attitude. Everywhere I find, underlying the actual invention, this strain of sly, discreet humour. It is consistent with a grave dignity of mien and that weighty austerity of plastic rhythm which is characteristic of the great creations of art. In later times, this humour, which gives so subtle a flavour to the gravity of the early bronzes, comes more and more to the surface. Already in the work of the L'iang dynasty there is a certain conscious elegance of treatment which begins to betray the secret too much. For the most part the Tang artists hold their hands, though some examples of monsters show a great exuberance. Finally, in Ming times, the humour has lost all its sly irony, it becomes evident and bursts into a laugh, or perhaps a giggle, in many of the porcelain bibelots of the time. But though the particular mixture of fancy, ingenuity and fun which is the mark of Chinoiserie, is often rather tiresome, it is the outcome of a profound and constant feeling which gives its peculiar flavour to the graver rhythms of the great epochs. It is one aspect of a playfulness and detachment which are inherent in the Chinese spirit. The Greek who fixed the chains of anthropocentrism upon us gave us none the less its antidote in science, and modem science has perhaps, by its repeated blows at our arrogant assumptions, at last prepared the Western mind to accept the freedom and gaiety of the Chinese attitude. The influence of Chinese art seems to be continually increasing in the West, and nothing could be more fruitful to our art than to absorb something of the spirit—though it is to be hoped we shall not copy the forms—which inspires the great examples. Chinese art appealed to Western nations originally almost entirely in virtue of its technical ingenuity, its brilliant and tasteful execution, and the 'quaintness' due to its unfamiliarity. As we get to know it better, as we explore more and more the great classic periods, we are led to treat it with the same respect and the same concentrated attention which we have to devote to our own great masters if we would apprehend the nature of their states of mind.	Person: Fry, Roger

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2014	Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern	Organisation / ZHL