The oldest Chinese embroidery in colours was perfectly plastic. The plants, flowers, animals, and even figures, formed a polychromatic relief on the flat surface of the stuff. This style is still fashionable in China, though, instead of feathers, artificially coloured threads are used, always so as to make the objects appear raised from the surface. Even at present life-size figures in relief, or whole scenes, are executed with the needle in brightly-coloured silk threads. We are here involuntarily reminded of the reliefs of Nineveh, and we may assume that they are nothing but a transformation of embroidery into stone or alabaster.
The dresses, furniture, saddles, tea-pots, shoes and boots, jackets, covers, weapons, doors, and windows of the Chinese are all ornamented with patterns which have had their origin in this kind of relief-embroidery, traces of which are found even in their lacquered and keramic products.
The roofs of their houses are curved and drawn up like their features; they are copies of lids of baskets, tea-caddies, urns, or of caps and hats. The protruding parts are richly ornamented with dragons. The dragon with the Chinese is the prototype out of which man developed; the dragon is therefore the symbol of the imperial power.
Whilst the Chinese are altogether deficient in painting, because they have no idea of perspective or shading, they certainly excel in the technical treatment of keramic works of art, especially in the paste, which they make of kaolin, a decomposed feldspathic granite. The forms of their genuine pottery are most primitive in outline; dishes, cups, plates, and bowls are cylindrically shaped, as are their bottles and jars. Our South Kensington Museum abounds in specimens illustrating this.
Sharp naturalism and an exact reproduction of the forms of nature, without any skill in the conventional treatment of flowers, creepers, leaves, stems, fruits, and animals, prevail in all Chinese and Japanese works. The artist, if he intends to work in the Chinese style, must divest himself of all considerations for the higher esthetical principles of art; he must stoop to the tastes and delights of children, must study thoroughly their every-day customs and manners, enter into their mode of thinking, try to make the quaint quainter, and the grotesque still more grotesque. A big sun with thick rays in a corner to the right; some sharply-drawn trees in the middle; a bridge up in the clouds with a dog running over it; some children with large heads playing to the left; a bright stream marked with rough waves, through which fishes are peeping; the whole excellently finished so far as the lacquered work goes—and a Chinese tray is complete. The coloured enamel on keramic works, and their lacquered or varnished ware, notwithstanding their unimaginative naturalism and monstrously fantastic delineation, surpass anything we are capable of producing in the West of Europe. Their magnificent folding-screens, trays, tubs, wash-hand basins, toilet-cases, work-tables, perfume-cases, frames for looking-glasses; their jewel-tables—full of little drawers, secret nooks and corners, puzzling openings, and hidden shuttings—are so many additional proofs of their childish nature. They use the fret, which they have in common with the Mexicans, Peruvians, and Greeks. Whilst, however, the latter arrived at a continuous system of fret ornamentation, the Chinese still use it mostly fragmentarily, either one link after the other, or one above the other, without forming a continuous ornament.
We see in the Chinese one of the most interesting phenomena in the history of mankind, whether we look upon them from a social, religious, or artistic point of view. They govern their State on paternal principle, and on the grand rule, ‘Do to another what you would he should do unto you, and do not unto another what you would not should be done unto you. Thou only needest this law alone; it is the foundation of all the rest’ (Confucius in the sixth century B.C.), and yet they have made no progress in sciences and arts. The paternal government and home-rule check every thought. A moral principle of the very highest meaning has, as with many of us, worked badly. They have done unto others what others have done unto them. They cheated because they were cheated; they told falsehoods because they were deceived by others; they were hypocritical because others were so too; and they robbed and plundered others, because they were robbed and plundered themselves. In this moral chaos they forgot to cultivate the intellectual force of reasoning; they thus further disturbed the already deranged equilibrium between morals and intellect. And though they had gunpowder before the West of Europe, it remained in the far East of Asia a mere toy to amuse young and old at festivals, whilst in the possession of Western Europe it became, next to the art of printing, the most powerful agent of civilisation. They had paper before the West of Europe; they knew how to print at least five centuries before Europe thought of re-inventing this Chinese invention. They are as polite, if not politer, than the most civilised Frenchman, and are witty and good-humoured. They have no fear of death; trade with the same skill and perseverance as we; cultivate the soil with even greater industry and ability than we; so that their territory, about equal in extent to the whole of Europe, looks like one great well-drained and irrigated garden, in which no spot which can yield some return for assiduous labour is left uncultivated. There is amongst the 400,000,000 of subjects of one single emperor not one who cannot read and write. All places in the administration are assigned after a severe competitive examination, and still they lack the capacity of self-conscious, independent reasoning both in science and art. They can paint a tiger-skin with such truthfulness that it appears a real skin, framed under glass; but in the conception and reproduction of the head of the ferocious brute, with its bloodthirsty jaws and its merciless cruelty, they altogether fail. They have an aversion to a proportionate division of space; they never attempt to counterbalance their artistic ideas, and to arrange them according to a law. They abhor spiritual, imaginary, and all higher intellectual culture to such a degree, that they concentrate all their powers on mere technicalities. Therefore they have remained stationary, whilst others, who began their self-conscious national existence thousands of years later, have left them far behind. The Chinese sacrifice everything to preconceived ideas of custom—in morals, science, and art. As our forefathers did, let us do also. The result of this principle has been that curious, grotesque, and ingenious, but above all childish art, which we must study as the link between savage and Aryan art. Whilst the Negro scarcely went beyond geometrical figures, we find the Turanian already capable of using plants and the lower kinds of animals in ornamentation, in addition to geometrical figures. As soon, however, as he approaches beings, in whom proportion, action, and expression, as the higher elements of form, prevail, he loses his power of reproduction altogether.
Matter-of-fact prose is the element of the Turanian; he is without every higher artistic feeling, because his mode of writing, speaking, and thinking, his religious, social, and political organisation, has till lately checked all expansion of the imagination, and the use of the intellectual faculties. Art with him has remained undeveloped, and however interesting his products may be, they form only a subject for our curiosity and perhaps momentary fashion, showing what humanity at large did when in its infancy.