Now you'm litzome, now you'm cheery,

Not a care shall come anear 'ee,
And your veet shall not be weary
On the long road home.

Like the gnats in air a-whisken,
Like the lambs in field a-frisken,
You shall find your toes a-brisken
To the tune that I du tell:
For though I be old and tewly,
Yet my bow is resined newly,
And 'tis light and youthful truly,

And can lead the dancen well.
Not a zoul zo melancholic
But shall foot it and shall frolic,
While the granfers watch un rollick,
And the jolly tankards voam;
While the fiddle zounds, you'm grudgen
That a single step be budgen,
But the time will come for trudgen
On the long road home.

O, my music shall unlock it,
Zingen high as any rocket

Droo the hurly-burly fair:
When 'ee harks the fiddle handy,
Bin 'ee halt or bin 'ee bandy,
'Ee shall dance like Jack a-dandy,

'Ee shall hop like cricket there!
And it's hey-de-diddle-diddle,
Turn your partner up the middle,
And it's welcome Phil and fiddle.

Ay, from Fordingbridge to Frome But when fair and fun be ended, And the shepherd's silver spended, I must lag it unbefriended

On the long road home.

Fiddling daily, fiddling nightly,
With a music young and sprightly,
You mid think my heart beat lightly
When my elbow wags so gay;
Yet un often plims to bursten,
With a hungeren and thirsten
For the arms that I was nursed in
And the v'ice that's dumb to-day.
Yet away wi' idle mopen!
Let me zet my heart to hopen,
While the last red rays be slopen

Down the ways where I du roam:
For the dance of gnats is over,
And the dews be on the clover,
And the dimsey shadows cover
All the long road home
May Byron.

The Spectator.

The

When Commodore Perry anchored the American squadron at Uraga and broke the wilful aloofness of Japan from the outer world, the Europeans became acquainted with the Japanese, and subsequently with the Asian. art through the medium of wood-cuts and color-prints; these interested greedy dealer-collectors, democratic writers, and naturalistic artists, who caused commonplace notions concerning Asian art to be imposed on the world. dealer-collectors praised those artists whose works were rare, in order to satisfy their mercenary propensities, the writers fell into raptures over the modern democratic development of Japanese art, overlooking that which was really grand in the artistic movement of the inhabitants of the charming Isles of Nippon, and extolling Japanese prints whose chief value for the most part was that of popular, social, and anecdotal documents. As to the artists, they-being nowadays principally the makers of pictures, and only occasionally and unconsciously creatorssaw in the works of Asian artists almost exclusively the technical part, but were incapable of seizing that which constitutes the real value of pictures; accordingly they praised only that which corresponded with their own temperament and personal talent.

Thus Whistler emphasized in his pictures-and this was the best part of his artistic activity-the elegant subtlety of color-prints and the capricious way the Japanese painted their landscapes. Degas liked and imitated-although not very successfully-their fantastically easy way of forming groups, as well as their unsurpassable daring of composition.

Manet fan

cied their coloring full of freshness and life. Manet has borrowed from them his harmonious fireworks of colors,

while the French poster-makers have learned the decorative use of lines and surfaces. As to the fundamental principles-that is to say, creative power, synthesis, suggestiveness, freedom for play of fancy, and opening large views on depths difficult to be expressed-all that was passed almost unnoticed by writers on art, the fact being that from amongst numerous books-some of them very important on account of size -there is only one in the English language, that of Mr. Laurence Binyon 1— that is of true and great consequence. There is nothing of equal excellence in any other literature. The patronizing, complacent Westerners condescended to acknowledge that the art of the Eastern barbarians was possessed of certain external qualities, but decided autocratically and superficially that the Asian artists were inferior to Europeans intellectually and in creative power.

As to Chinese art, the current notion is that the Japanese have improved on, and even surpassed it. Chinese art is associated in our minds with the productions of its decadence-especially in the ceramic art-which was imposed on Europe by the manufacturers and merchants of Canton, who discovered a fount of riches in these worthless, monotonous, exhausted conventions, weak and spiritless in shape, and obnoxious because of their too bright and inharmonious colors. The consequence of all this is that the real nature of Chinese art is known only by a very few students outside of Asia.

The Japanese paintings executed on rolls of silk-called makimonos if unfolded horizontally and kakemonos if they are unrolled vertically-were almost unknown until 1881. when

I "Painting in the Far East." (London Edward Arnold. 1908.)

the British Museum purchased William Anderson's collection, the exhibition of which was held in 1888. At the beginning of last year Mrs. Olga Wegener sold to the British Museum nearly one hundred and fifty most important pictures, which she acquired during her sojourn in China. Still more recently Dr. Aurel Stein, sent on the joint initiative of the India Office and the Trustees of the British Museum to make researches in Eastern Turkestan, discovered in a vault at Tun-huang, where they were walled up at the beginning of the eleventh century, a number of Chinese pictures of Buddhist religious subjects of extraordinary interest. Those pictures, together with the collections acquired from Mrs. Wegener and Anderson, being now on exhibition in the British Museum Print Room, form the most important collection of Asian art either in Europe or in America, where the Boston Fine Arts Museum has a number of valuable Japanese paintings.

This exhibition, made not for the vulgar display of unrivalled wealth in precious masterpieces of the Far East, but for serious purposes of culture, gives an opportunity to those who are in quest of beauty to correct erroneous notions concerning Asian art; for here they can study the pictorial art of the East through a period of some fifteen hundred years, from the fourth to the present century. So perchance this exhibition will open an era for the development of a new art-with lofty aims as was that of some periods in China-and of this there is an imperative need.

The first impression one receives from looking at the Chinese pictures gathered in the Print Room concerns color, and arouses sensations which until now were considered, not only by the people at large but by the Western æsthetes as well, to be characteristic

of the emotional, feminine, and sensuous East; while the intellectual, manly, and sober West was supposed to excel in ideas of form. We all thought the West trivial, uncertain, and weak in color, while the East was eccentric, capricious, and unstable in form; and that this constituted an antithesis between Asia and Europe. Now we may convince ourselves that during the great periods of Asian art, and especially that of the Celestial Empire, color was subordinate if not entirely eliminated, and never a predominant element. Both the Chinese and Japanese developed the art of tone during the best periods of their history of painting, but almost, if not entirely, left out color.

It is true that the sensuous Easterners are full of appreciation of color, which is profusely and universally diffused in their countries; but their fondness for it is limited to inferior, if not trivial, objects, such as tiles, embroideries, carpets, silk fabrics, and articles of clothing, thus making color, in the way they employ it, not an æsthetic question, but a matter of life.

Then we can see that, although the Asian artists proceed in a different way from ours in their search for the beautiful, their art is as fully mature in its own way as is ours. The artistic pursuits of the Orientals vary from ours in this way, that theirs is an art of line rather than of color. The main tradition of art in China comes from caligraphy, combined with flat, slightly colored spaces that intensify and give charm to the harmony of line. Limited to line, the painters of Asia have concentrated centuries of study on the effort to make that line intimately expressive of form; and with mere contour they succeeded in producing the illusion of perfect modelling. The very ease with which relief can be represented by shadows, as with us, has taken away from our painters the ne2 "Edinburgh Review" 1904.

cessity for this concentration, and weakened their sense of expressive line. The painters of the East have succeeded in giving life to their figures, and that is the essential thing we demand from them.

As one can see, the means of communicating beauty in the sensuous manner employed by the Easterners is different from that used by the Westerners. To write in Chinese beautifully requires a similar command of the brush to that of a painter; the greater the degree of that accomplishment, the greater painter is the man who possesses it and can express through the brush not only the forms of reality but the rhythmical beauty innate in the formed and varied stroke of an artist-scrivener. A fine specimen of the caligraphic art is as much valued as a beautiful picture; for in both the sweep should communicate the artist's mood and thought, and therefore be intense with life.

Then the painters of the East always remember that the principal aim of a picture is not to teach, to moralize, or to tell a story, but to fill and decorate a flat surface, which means that their efforts at the development and arrangement of color harmonies are undisturbed by any other tendencies or purposes. The idea of harmonious sensation has such a hold on the Eastern painters, that they remain still and unconfused by the problems of chiaroscuro, to which the Western artists became bound by the intellectual painters of Italy. Our artists are not satisfied with the idea of organic beauty, of harmony of lines and colors, of coherence and concentration, and they try to represent the visible world by striving to equal sculpture in producing shape, by vying with architecture in creating well-arranged spaces, and by asking help from optics to simulate distances. As soon as an artist 3 Laurence Binyon. Lib. cit.

begins to think how to produce the likeness of an object, of a figure as it appears in Nature, his mind is distracted from the main purpose of the picture this is to say, harmony and decorativeness of lines and colors; his sense of that harmony grows feeble, and becomes dubious.

The painters of the Far East are not disturbed by science, the development of which is commonly assumed with us to be an advance in art; in current European criticism of painting there is almost always talk about perspective. anatomy, and optical laws, the command of which does not increase in the slightest the artistic value of a work, but simply helps artists to realize efficiently their imaginative ideas. The encroachment of science is detrimental to art, for the laws of one cannot be applied to the other, which verity was clearly expressed by one of the greatest of art critics, Goethe, when he said: "Art is not entirely subject to natural necessities, but has laws of its own." Sad experience teaches us that pictures painted several hundred years ago with pigments the production of which was not due to modern scientific chemistry are still resplendent with beautifully vivid colors, while those which were executed with scientific preparation have become black after a few years. Then how ugly are the aniline tints! Consequently one may say that chemistry has had a bad effect on our sense of color, while machinery, through which nowadays many articles are made, has ruined, degraded and vitiated our sense of form.

The aim of Asian art is not the outward semblance but the informing and inner spirit of objects represented. Throughout the whole history of Asiatic art, with the exception of the popular movement in Japan, this is the prevailing and dominating preoccupation of the Eastern artists, who re

produce only that which is essential and permanent in the painted subject; hence the deliberate elimination of shadows from their pictures.

As far back as the fifth century a Chinese æsthete, named Shakaku, formulated the criticism of painting in six canons, in which are set forth the conceptions of art that already existed in the minds of the sons of the Celestial Empire, and are still respected by all except a small number of artists of the eighteenth century who were led astray from their safe artistic road and conducted into the wilderness of realism in art by Europeans. These six canons of Chinese æsthetics are: (1) Rhythmic vitality, or the life-movement of the spirit through the rhythm of things; (2) organic structure; (3) the law of conformity with nature; (4) appropriate coloring; (5) arrangement; (6) finish. One should remember that the Chinese æsthete assigns the principal place to rhythmical beauty; for, as Mr. Laurence Binyon rightly said: “A work of art is an incarnation of the genius of rhythm, manifesting the living spirit of things with a clearer beauty and intenser power than the gross impediments of complex matter allow to be transmitted to our senses in the visible world around us. A picture is conceived as a sort of apparition from a more real world of essential life."

As the main effort of the Asian artists was to seize the inherent life of the subjects they depicted, they purposely ignored not only the accidental qualities (as is done by the Western æsthetes and better painters), but almost their whole surroundings, so dear to the Europeans, who are fond of crowding their pictures with superfluous details which mar the pure beauty of a painting. By obliterating secondary motives in their pictures, by isolating the painted subjects, which they represent in large although finely propor

tioned space, the Chinamen will give to a bird, to a tree, to a flower, to a figure, a meaning of monumental grandeur, loftiness of spirit, irresistible elegance, and charming suggestion, hinting in the meanwhile at the infinity of life.

However, the greatest praise one can bestow on Chinese art is this, that throughout the whole course of its history one does not find the grossly erroneous notion, so popular with us, that the imitation of nature is essential in art; on the contrary, they look contemptuously on such an idea as a despicable and passing heresy. This is comprehensible, at least, to a limited number of Western æsthetes, who, however, fail to understand why all the Asian artists paint in the same manner the same subjects, no matter how original the artist. This is regarded by us as a serious drawback to Eastern art, and is advanced as a weighty argument through which we try to prove that the Western artists are superior on account of the individual treatment of the subjects they paint, and that the Eastern painters are incapable of originality or progress. Such a way of looking on Eastern art is but superficial. If the water. let us say, is painted in the same way throughout Asian art, this is done consciously, for the Eastern painters, being true to their purpose of expressing always the essential character and genius of the element, leave out the accidental changes produced by different light and varying atmosphere, and represent the essence of the waves in their perpetual rhythm and the curves by which they are formed. The space given to this paper does not allow reference to several other traditional subjects painted in the same conventional, or rather symbolic, manner, each artist adding that of his individuality, which decides the value of his work. Suffice to say that this symbolic way of painting