Page 382 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

126 CHINESE ART.
art could animate through its art a race so remarkable for the purity and
power of its aesthetic instincts, is not only gratuitous but perverse. The
existence of such views about art as the six canons express would alone have
made the supposition improbable ; but with the tangible evidence of Ku
K'ai-chih's painting before one, it becomes absurd. The Indian works, like
the wall paintings of the Ajanta caves, imposing as they are, are entirely
deficient in just those essentially artistic qualities, rhythm, design, synthetic
unity, which had always distinguished the Chinese."
The clever Japanese critic Kakasu Okakura, in his Ideals of the
East, says (p. 52) :
" In the six canons of pictorial art of the fifth century the idea of the de-
picting of Nature falls into a third place, subservient to two other main
principles. The first of these is ' The Life Movement of the Spirit through
the Rhythm of Things.' For art is here the great mood of the Universe,
moving hither and thither amidst those harmonic laws of matter which are
rhythm. The second canon deals with composition and hues, and is called
' The Law of Bones and Brush-work.' The creative spirit, according to this,
in descending into a pictorial conception must take upon itself organic struc-
ture."
The idea of line and line-composition has always been deemed
the great strength of Chinese art. In calligraphy each stroke of
the brush is supposed to be instinct with its own principle of life
and death, and to combine with the other lines to accentuate the
formal beauty of an ideograph. So the excellence of a great paint-
ing rests in its expression or accentuation of outlines and contours,
each line having an abstract beauty of its own.
Lu T'an-wei, the next on our list, was the most distinguished
artist of the earlier Sung dynasty (a.d. 420-478). He excelled in
portraits, was attached to the Court, and painted emperors,
princes, and other celebrated personages of the time. He is also
recorded to have painted with vigorous brushwork " clearly de-
fined as if chiselled with an awl," groups of horses, monkeys,
fighting ducks and other birds and insects, besides boldly drawn
landscapes and figure scenes. The Hsiian ho hiia p'u, which
describes him as singularly proficient in all the six canons of art,
classes him as a painter of Taoist and Buddhist subjects, and gives
a list of the titles of ten of his pictures then in tlu' palace (12th