The wild and fantastic mode of ornamentation in the Western hemisphere, in pre-historic times, is entirely due to the aspect of nature. Man seems to have received patterns from India, Egypt and Greece, and worked them out by reflecting the impressions of an exuberant nature. Flowers, feathers, pearls, trinkets, hieroglyphs, animals, human bodies—all are mingled together in endless confusion. Here and there a symmetrical echo of times long by-gone can be traced. Though, however, the Western artists of pre-historic times sometimes attained symmetry, they continually sin against eurythmy. Of proportion and action they have no conception. They have a style, but a style of their own, devoid of all those requisites which elevate a product to artistic beauty.
CHAPTER IV.
CHINESE ART.
The Chinese undoubtedly reached a high degree of culture earlier than all the historical nations, and still they are in a state of civilised infancy. They possess reliable historical records referring to periods when branches of the Aryan group of humanity were still nomads. They knew that our globe is flattened at the poles, at a time when we thought it to be a square supported by pillars; they were acquainted with the properties of the magnet-needle; worked metal; cultivated the mulberry-tree, systematically fed the silk-worm with its leaves, weaving its product into the very best silk. In pottery they have attained the greatest perfection so far as the material is concerned. In engineering they were not less clever. They have aqueducts, executed with great daring; innumerable bridges span their rivers; they drained and irrigated the land at a time when other people assumed a universal deluge; and yet they remained babies in thoughts and customs, whilst they grew older and older in age. They have all the manners of precocious children with prematurely aged faces. This phenomenon can be explained in figures. There are 400,000,000 of Chinese, nearly all Turanians. Taking an equal number of Aryans, we shall find that they are not less than 3,400,000,000 cubic inches short of brain, of which each inch represents a certain amount of intellectual force. This deficiency in ‘brain-force’ shows itself in their totally different development, and the stationary character of their institutions. They ingeniously play in science, art, politics, and religion. 4,500 years ago they reached a high degree of civilisation, and they remained stationary in their civilised childhood, which they preserve with a pious veneration. To look back, to believe that the past was better than the present, has become the static law of China, and has checked every progress. Their language is agglutinative, only one degree higher than the savage monosyllabic, and forms a link between this and the flexible languages. The 450 monosyllables are used to form 1,230 word-sounds, out of which they compose from 40,000 to 60,000 compounds. They cannot pronounce certain consonants, resembling in this some badly-taught European children. They say: ‘Yoo-lo-pa’ instead of Europe; ‘Ya-me-li-ka’ instead of America; ‘Ma-li-ya’ instead of Maria; ‘cu-lu-su’ instead of crux; ‘Ki-li-tu-su’ for Christus. Their mode of writing has developed from pictorial signs. They preserved these; and, although arbitrary characters have supplanted picture-writing, or hieroglyphs, they still retain the clumsiness of this form, and have for every word a special sign.
Notwithstanding these drawbacks they possess an encyclopædia in 5,000 volumes, and a collection of works of fiction amounting to 180,000 volumes. They can boast of a Socrates in Confucius, of a Plato in Mem-tsu, and of a Xenophon in Tsem-tsu.
Five is with them a holy number: they had five emperors during their Golden Age; there are five great principles on which they base the possibility of a regulated social existence, viz. humanity, justice, conformity, uprightness, and sincerity. They have five holy books: the Shoo-King (political precepts); the Y-King (a philosophy of emanations based on figures); the Shi-King (a collection of didactical odes and songs about 3,000 years old); the Li-King (a record of ceremonial customs and social manners); and the Yo-King (a book on music, regulating harmony on the most discordant principles). They have five domestic principles, five elements, five primitive colours, five seasons of the year, five ruling spirits, five planets, five points of the compass, five sorts of earth, five different precious stones, five degrees of punishment, five different kinds of dresses; and their whole principle of ornamentation is based on five points
a. The continuous stem system;
b. The united fragmentary system; and
c. The interspersed fragmentary system.
In these three systems they observe the natural laws of radiation and tangential curvature.
But in all their works of art appears the spectre of childishness, with wrinkles in its withered face. Their patterns in textile art are such as some people delight in for the sake of their quaint originality. They altogether neglect the laws of ornamentation; and we never know whether in ornamenting a vase they did not intend to dress a Chinese lady for a tea party, or whether in dressing a high-standing mandarin, or a lady in stiff brocade, they did not intend to ornament one of their peculiarly-shaped tea-pots. In fact their vases are ladies in brocade dresses, whilst their gentlemen and ladies look like ambulatory vases. We often see on a lady, ‘doves as big as bustards, cooing; flowers and trees growing on plates and vases upside down, and inside out.’ We see a mandarin strutting about, adorned with an embroidered tree with fifty different foliages. One screen is decorated with fishes with feathers, another with birds with fins, or monstrous dragons creep on the ground or fly in the air. Everything in art is done as it ought not to be done. It is as if some merry and mischievous hobgoblin had instructed the Chinese to make up a kind of artistic patchwork out of all the odds and ends of ornamental fancies, distorted figures, and incomprehensible combinations.
Their towns look like large encampments of nomad hordes, ready at a moment’s notice to take up their tents and run away. Though they have constructed a huge wall, which is 25 feet thick at the base, diminishing to 15 at the platform, provided at distances of 100 yards with towers about 40 feet square at the base, diminishing to 30 at the top, and about 37–48 feet in height; though they have carried this over the ridges of lofty hills (one of them 5,000 feet above the level of the sea), and led it through the deepest valleys, or upon arches over rivers—their architecture is still in its very infancy. It is a kind of toy-architecture. The walls of their houses may be pulled down, and the houses still remain standing. For architecture with the Chinese is in no way an organic total; it is not even a chemically-united composition; but a mechanically-joined something, without any ruling and connecting idea. Contrary to all rules of good architecture, they express in their constructions the principle of the separation and independence of the active elements of the building, instead of their union and harmony. It is variety without unity. Their walls are mere screens in bricks or wood, mere frameworks for tapestry. The wall with them does not support; it appears movable and totally distinct from the roof. The scaffolding which supports the horizontal, as also the vertical enclosures, belongs more to textile than to tectonic art The Turanian is still addicted to fascine work, like the pre-historic lake-dweller, or our contemporary aboriginal New Zealander. The divisions in the interior of the house are movable; either consisting of real carpets, lattice-work, wooden-jointed leaves, or boards, ornamented to imitate carpets or movable screens. Imitations of flowered woven-stuffs, lacquered panels with impossible perspectives, bamboo tress-work, with protruding knobs, carved and turned into gaping and grinning fantastic monsters, are also among the principal characteristics of Chinese architectural ornamentation. Chinese trellis-work has a fairy-like appearance. The patterns are infinitely varied, either closely fitting or perforated, dividing and enclosing spaces, surrounding terraces as railings, running up the staircases, or forming large borders between column and column.
The trellis-work of the Chinese may be divided into three classes:—
1. The bamboo wicker-work, a close imitation of textile fabrics; in fact, woven wood-work.
2.