Twenty years ago the author of these sumptuous volumes, [Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design.], in a lecture before the Yale Art School, threw upon the screen a photograph of Kano Utanosuke's "Eagle on a Pine Branch." "There," he declared, "is one of the greatest paintings by an Asiatic artist. Why do I say only this? It is the greatest painting ever produced by any artist at all!" Fenollosa's voice, while he lived, was that of one crying in the wilderness of Western complacency. As with prophets in all ages, his revelations were set down as the thick-coming fancies of a visionary. He had found a new realm of artistic representation, with ideals and canons of its own, the language of which conveyed almost no meaning to the minds of his countrymen. Some exaggeration was inevitable in the new-born enthusiasm of a man of his temperament; yet if he spoke too strongly he never spoke absurdly. He was admirably fitted by training as well as by temperament for his work as herald and historian of an unknown world of art; and the issue of his propaganda is at length manifest in the slow recognition by Westerners of the fact that the art of the Eastern "barbarians" is not inferior intellectually and in creative power to that of Europeans. Since his death in 1908, the appearance of Laurence Binyon's masterly essay on "Painting in the Far East," and the exhibition by the British Museum of the wonderful Chinese mediaeval paintings walled up since the eleventh century in a Buddhist cave at Tun Hwang and discovered by Dr. Stein, have greatly quickened interest in the pictorial art of China, and hastened, perhaps, the opening of a new era in the history of the graphic arts. For breadth of treatment, however, and appreciations based upon profound knowledge, the work before us must be recognized as the most important treatise upon the whole subject that has thus far appeared. Had its author lived longer he might have amended his studies in matters of detail, altered some ascriptions, and even reversed certain estimates; but it is a convincing measure of a conscientious life work that his final interpretation of a great exotic culture—shorn though it is of what he would have considered a necessary revision—rises above all other accounts to a position among the standard books of a generation. Merely as a tour de force of creative writing these two quarto volumes deserve a place by themselves in modern literature. Fenollosa's widow, to whom we owe their publication, tells us that they were completed in one magnificent effort in three months—the solid outcome of nearly thirty years of research and valuation devoted to one supreme purpose.

From the standpoint of the historian, Fenollosa's chief contribution to the history of art is, perhaps, his suggestion of the existence of two original centres of art-dispersion, one in the eastern Mediterranean basin and the other about the western edge of the Pacific. From this second basis he derives the underlying ideas and motives of primitive Chinese art; but, to quote his own words, "the special value of this theory of two centres lies in the striking fact that Chinese art is the only large form of world art that has combined in itself creative impulses from both. The key to early Chinese art is as follows:—its earliest motives were influenced by Pacific art, and these were later overlaid by forms of the Græco-Persian. Of course this is quite consistent with the fact that Chinese art, like all great schools, still later must have experienced ferments and achieved powerful reaches of advance from causes operating within." A generalization like this requires the work of many specialists in regions as far apart as Borneo, Alaska, and Peru before it can be accepted as anything more important than a brilliant suggestion; but it offers a working hypothesis that accounts at least for the appearance of the same motives on the earliest Chinese bronzes, on Aleutian totem poles, and on Aztec pottery. While this is not the place to examine the evidence produced to support the contention, it is worth a reference in passing to show how the historian, in studying the origins of a culture state, derives materials, sometimes of unexpected importance, from the conclusions of art critics. If the so-called "Yuëh," aborigines of China before the Chinese, are proved to have employed decorative motives common to primitive Pacific groups, it will clear the way to an understanding of the origins of that mysterious people.

Fenollosa has little to say on the highly controversial subject of the source of the group which brought a higher culture into China from the West. The history of China must have developed far upon the paths of civilization before the period ascribed to the earliest ballads of the Shih Ching. and by this time must have felt the contact of ideas from the other original centre. The subsequent intercourse with the western end of the continent seems often to have been severed; but by Alexander's time it had apparently been flowing in a stream sufficiently strong to imbue the rebellious state of Ch'in with a conception of centralized dominion upon the Achaemenid model and to effect the final overthrow of her primitive feudal system. The influences of Hellenism in the Far East, which have seized upon the imaginations of Western students in recent years, are dismissed rather coolly by Fenollosa, though a diluted and transient impulse may well have found its way thither from Greece. His cautious and sensible judgment in the matter leaves us room to conclude that all the "Hellenism" found in the Buddhistic art of China and Japan can be safely derived from what Persia and Parthia knew of the Mediterranean world.

These are, however, only preliminary and incidental matters in a book which is mainly an expose of the whole course of art development in the Far East. A superficial glance at these volumes will convey to some an impression that they are chiefly concerned with Japanese painters, but the true relations of China's position as teacher of design to the younger country are neither denied nor neglected. What is here done to reveal the glories of Chinese art is all that is possible at this time in an outline treatise. So much has been destroyed of that great output of creative genius that we are compelled to study it principally from paintings and statues preserved in Japan, or from Japanese copies. Even the promise of treasures yet to be revealed when the private collections of China are known abroad, does not offer us hope that many masterpieces of the Tang and Sung artists have survived the utter destruction of their great capitals. It is in Japan, therefore, that we must study what remains of an epoch which it is one of Fenollosa's chief merits to have first adequately revealed to the world outside. While we may regret his decision to discuss these continental artists under their Japanese rather than their own Chinese names, and thus strengthen the reader's sensation of being concerned with an iconography of the Island Empire, the truth is nowhere suppressed that she has always stood to the older empire intellectually as Rome stood to Greece. To the author's untimely death may be attributed the erratic and inconsistent spelling of certain Chinese names, as well as the occasional misprints which sully the pages of an otherwise impeccable letterpress.

It is, in fact, in correcting the current notion that the Japanese have improved upon and even surpassed the Chinese in art that Fenollosa's work will achieve one of its most important results. Only a few as yet know the real nature of Chinese art; its survival in the trivialities displayed in modern China is actually on a par with that of the plaster images of the Italian hawker to-day as exponents of the glories of Renaissance sculpture. Until lately the Western critic called the East aesthetically sensuous and capricious, given to color and extravagance. Yet we shall see from these volumes that during its great periods, Eastern Asia has, unlike ancient Egypt and Greece, subordinated if not entirely eliminated color in its buildings and pictures. Its painters have understood the art of tone; and with their appreciation of subtle harmonies of tint, rather than of color, their work surpasses in decorative value the work of all Europeans. From this has arisen a tradition, derived perhaps from Chinese caligraphy, that seeks for the beautiful not in transferring nature with its varied hues, shadows, and distances to canvas, but in interpreting nature conventionally upon a flat surface with an eye single to its intimately expressive lines. With us, the painter secures his effect by relief and shading; in their art, which is quite as mature as ours, a more difficult success is obtained by procuring the illusion of perfect modelling by contour alone. As we understand the aims of their painting better, we realize that it is primarily an effort to fill and decorate a surface undisturbed by problems of optics or chiaroscuro, in conformity with laws that regard only what seems to them permanent and essential in the painted subject. It may be long before Western painters surrender their ambition to tell stories and reproduce nature on canvas. When they cease to borrow accidental qualities and superfluous details from the laboratory and the scientific lectureroom, their art will eventually return to its true sphere—the incarnation of sensuous beauty and rhythm, the manifestation of the living spirit of things. How far we have yet to go to comprehend the accepted ideal of the Chinese may be seen from the statement of their six canons of aesthetics:—rhythmic movement, organic structure, conformity with nature, color, arrangement, and finish.

The historical periods of the twenty centuries which Fenollosa has recorded are substantially in accordance with those outlined in standard treatises on the subject. It is in his appreciations and fine interpretations of the influence of art in the various epochs that he surpasses his predecessors. What mystical Buddhism meant to the naïvely refined society of the Fujiwara can only be learned by a study of its literature and art, when the romance and spiritual enthusiasm that still vitalizes Japanese life assumed, perhaps, its most radiant phase. For the core of this wonderful life is chiefly explained by its enthusiasm, he tells us:

Recent Christian visitors to Japan have observed of this remarkable race that, in spite of modern Confucian agnosticism, they seem to be a people "on fire with religion." This passionate idealism nobly displayed itself in the sacrifices of the recent Russian war. It was the same divine flame, but reddened a thousand years ago with a stronger Buddhist tinge, that made Fujiwara lords and ladies feel even the most gorgeous human life to be only a threshold for an actual spiritual life. This intermingling of social and spiritual interests sounds a key-note. To make and administer sound laws, to effect hospital, charitable, and university organization, to play a bird-like part in the variegated paradises of court and villa, to beautify the person and flash poetry as fountains do water, was only to play naturally what the gods wished done upon the hardened circumference of heaven; for, after all, the earth is only an outlying province, and the very best of the flesh-bound souls is in touch with the central molten life of Paradise. Thus men do their most menial functions in the very eyes of the gods, and there becomes practically no difference between a palace and a temple.

This life is as far away from modern Japan as it is from us. Will the world of industrialism ever again return to Utanosuke's "Eagle on a Pine Branch"?