WHAT CHINESE ART HAS TO TEACH
By W. W. WINKWORTH WE are at present debarred from 's writing article about the Chinese Exhibition at Burlington House specifically ; but as everyone knows it is going to be opened on November 2,7th, we can hardly avoid, in any estimate of Chinese art, asking ourselves, .from our general knowledge of the subject (for inspection of the collections has not been permitted before the opening day), what we are likely to see there ; and how Chinese art, as there represented, is likely to strike us. Shall we, for instance, see really great works of art ? Are there such things as Chinese masterpieces, except in porcelain and jade ? Is it really true that if you scratch a Chinaman you find a Tartar ? But more serious and interesting questions are also likely to occur to us. We study the history of our own arts not only to help us to practise them .and enjoy pictures and music better, but also for the . purpose of getting to know ourselves. That is, we study art, and especially the more ancient arts of Europe, from the point of view of anthropology. We may not all know we are anthropologists ; but many of us who do not read the scientific journals of that study realise that our interest not only in the remains of prehistoric man, but in relics of past civilisa- tions such as that of Ur of the Chaldees'or of the Romans, is really simply an interest in man's past—in other words, anthropology, in the general sense of that word. MOst people who have heard of Chinese art knoW that it is rightly credited with great antiquity. What is known about the past of China ? For an answer, I must refer to The Way and Its Power, the most important book from a historical point of view, and quite the most fascinating for the general reader,. that has appeared in recent years. In the Introduction to this, Mr. Waley quotes two passages from the Chinese classics ; the first is from the Book. of History, describing an incident Which probably occurred about 1000 n.c. lie uses it to represent the outlook of that early phase of. human development when omens and sacrifices were some of mankind's chief pre- occupations. He then quotes a passage from Mencius, written about 225 B.C., to represent the fully-developed, civilised attitude of the philosopher. He says, of the first passage : " Into this outlook there enters no notion of actions or feelings that are good in themselves. People of the tenth century a.e. would assuredly have boon at a complete loss to understand what Mencius, in the 'second half of the third century B.C., meant by his passionate and moving plea for the theory that ..man is }V nature good."
It is unnecessary, of course, to add that there are a large number of people in Europe in the twentieth century who would also be at a complete loss to underStand it ; but that fact is not the essential. " Under the thinnest veneer of homoindustrialis, lie endless strata of barbarity;.' The scratched European may reveal something just n5 bad as the proverbial Tartar. What we are interested in is not scratching the Chinese (God forbid), but in scratching the soil of China. We have got finds th4t represent both the types of moral outlook symbolised by the passages. Mr. Walcy quotes, and we have got them in remarkable profusion. The very earliest Chinese art has been compared by Prof. Siren, in his History Of the subject, to that of the Maya people of ancient Central America. We have in both, we feel, the remains of all age of sacrifices and omens ; we look in vain for any-thing that may seem to reflect the passion and the humanity of a Mencius. Yet we need go no nearer our own day than the second century B.C. to find an entirely neW gentleness and restraint, a civilised and delicate style where the menacing and compressed thunder-pattern spirals of early art have acquired the beauty and sym- metry, the slightness and strength, of watch-springs. That real strength does not terrify is a civilised theory it is the theory of The .Way and Its Power, written about 240 B.C. The art of thiS period and the centuries which just precede and follow it is perhaps the chief focus of interest at the present not only among archaeologists, but al0 among collectors of Chinese objects, all over Europe. The collecting of Chinese things is an internationalPreoeciipa- tion.' Perhaps even now, through the medium .of early Chinese Art,' the serenity of Taoist political theory' is trating into England,-Fraftee 'and Geimany. WW'as not Dl': Kiimmel, one of the chief authorities on the. subject, Promoted to high office under the Nazi Government. Is not the Crown Prince of Sweden an adherent ? Really, such is the zeal that the subject inspires that before long we shall all be seriously recognising the Swastika as, archaeologically speaking, derived from the Yin and Yang symbols ; and perhaps Herr Hitler's !sUceessor will be referred to as The Sage The extraordinary coincidence by which the situation in China at this exciting period, about the third century B.C., reflects the state of modern Europe makes the art of the time, and still more the literature and the political Philosophy, of such unmistakably topical interest that I tun quite serious in saying that I think Early Chinese art May come to have quite a unique interest for the Germanic Peoples, as perhaps showing the first existing examples of what one branch of the Northern stream of art Could do. The same artistic impulse that produced the Oseberg ship never died out in Europe. We share here, With the Chinese, a common heritage, for we now know that. Chinese art is far more "Northern" than "Eastern "; and, as a fervent admirer of Northern, and especially German, art, I always feel that, painting apart, the best phases of European design, the most original and native to Northern Europe, have been German ; the aroque and Rococo, for instance, which we are now at last beginning to see are no more essentially frivolous than the music of Mozart, arc in the opinion of many scholars not (in their most significant developments) Latin movements at all. After all, the Latins have got l'oussin and Ct'zttnne ; they can afford to leave us some- thing !
I maintain that Chinese art can only be rightly under- ' stood in connexion with our own, and that to look at Chinese objects with eyes untrained by Dfirer, Bosch, by the Dutch draughtsmen and sketcherS of the seventeenth century, is to miss its significance. That. is why I think London' one of the traditional meeting-grounds of Latin and Nordic cultures, appropriately succeeds Berlin, another of those traditional meeting-groinids (it is un- necessary to remind our readers of Frederick and Sans 'otiei)' as 'a' centre for a Chinese exhibition. Perhaps Chinese art will end by teaching us to admire our own as never before ; perhaps these lacquer and jade will lead us to look with other eyes at the porcelain of early Meissen, With its slender human figures so reminiscent of the grace- ful Chinese of the Han period; and so unlike the pig-tailed, Moon-faced' type we have got used to thinking of. In- deed, in my own ease this has happened already ; I had begun, before the Berlin Chinese exhibition of 1929, to See in various phases of European art something to which the l'ar 'East alone would,. haYe opened my eyes ; the silver-work, fdt instanee, of Rembrandt's friend, Lutma, and its Augsburg ancestors ; the designs of Just e- Aur6le Meissonier, the metal work of Callierir Nor is OVer-elaboration," so called, the only thing the Chinese earn teach one to see into better ; truly t hey have " given Ills Simplicity to look at, given us the UncarVed' block to hold," as The Way and Its Power 'says.
We got to like the Chinese originally by laughing at them. If we had originally been forced to be solemn about them. the miracle of our present appreciation would never have occurred. When I hear of Hitler organising an exhibition for the mockery of modern German art, of the quaint Klee, for instance, when I see humorous. comments iu the daily Press on the work of English artists of the London Group whom I admire, such as Rodrigo Moynihan and Geoffrey Tibble, I console myself with remembering the phrase attributed to Frith; the painter of " Derby 1)ay " in the National Gallery : " The Pre-Raphaelites can no more be considered to be engaged in real paint ing than the Chinese."
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