has been explored. The Chinese brush makes the conveyance of every type of rhythmic movement possible, and the Chinese characters, which are theoretically
square but are composed from the oddest elements, present an infinite variety of
structural problems which every writer must solve for himself. Thus, through
calligraphy, the Chinese scholar is trained to appreciate, as regards line, qualities like
force, suppleness, reserved strength, exquisite tenderness, swiftness, neatness,
massiveness, ruggedness, and restraint or freedom; and as regards form, he is taught
to appreciate harmony, proportion, contrast, balance, lengthiness, compactness, and
sometimes even beauty in slouchiness or irregularity. Thus the art of calligraphy
provides a whole set of terms of aesthetic appreciation which we may consider as the
bases of Chinese notions of beauty.
As this art has a history of well-nigh two thousand years, and as every writer tried to
distinguish himself by a new type of rhythm or structure, therefore, in calligraphy, if
in anything, we are entitled to see the last refinement of the Chinese artistic mind.
Certain types, such as the worship of beauty of irregularity or of a forever toppling
structure that yet keeps its balance, will surprise the Westerners by their finesse, all
the more so because such types are not easily seen in other fields of Chinese art.
What is of significance to the West is the fact that, not only has it provided the
aesthetic basis for Chinese art, but it represents an animistic principle which may be
most fruitful of results when properly understood and applied. As stated, Chinese
calligraphy has explored every possible style of rhythm and form, and it has done so
by deriving its artistic inspiration from nature, especially from plants and animals 梩
he branches of the plum flower, a dried vine with a few hanging leaves, the springing
body of the leopard, the massive paws of the tiger, the swift legs of the deer, the
sinewy strength of the horse, the bushiness of the bear, the slimness of the stork, or
the ruggedness of the pine branch. There is thus not one type of rhythm in nature
which has not been copied in Chinese writing and formed directly or indirectly the
inspiration for a particular "style." If a Chinese scholar sees a certain beauty in a dry
vine with its careless grace and elastic strength, the tip of the end curling upward and
a few leaves still hanging on it haphazardly and yet most appropriately, he tries to
incorporate that into his writing. If another scholar sees a pine tree that twists its trunk
and bends its branches downward instead of upward, which shows a wonderful
tenacity and force, he also tries to incorporate that into his style of writing. We have
therefore the "dry-vine" style and the "pine-branch" style of writing. A famous monk
and calligraphist had practised writing for years without result, and one day walking
on a mountain path he chanced upon two fighting snakes, each straining its neck,
which showed strength in apparent gentleness. From this inspiration he developed a
most individualistic type of writing1, called the "fighting- snakes" style, suggesting the
tension and wriggling movement of the snakes' necks. Thus Wang Hsichih (321-379),
China's "prince of calligraphists," spoke about the art of calligraphy in terms of
imagery from nature:
Every horizontal stroke is like a mass of clouds in battle formation, every hook like a bent bow of the greatest strength, every dot like a falling rock from a high peak, every
turning of the stroke like a brass hook, every drawn-out line like a dry vine of great
old age, and every swift and free stroke like a runner on his start.
One can understand Chinese calligraphy only when one's eves have been opened to
the form and rhythm inherent in every animal's body and limbs. Every animal body
has a harmony and beauty of its own, a harmony which grows directly from its vital
functions, especially the functions of movement. The hairy legs and tall body of the
draught-horse are as much a form of beauty as the more neatly formed outline of the
racing-horse. That harmony exists in the outline of the swift, springing greyhound, as
it exists also in that of the hairy Irish terrier, whose head and limbs end almost in
square formations 梥 trikingly represented in Chinese calligraphy by the blunt li-shu
style (current in the Han Dynasty and elevated into an art by Teng Shih-ju of the
Gh' ing Dynasty).
The important thing to observe is that these plant and animal forms are beautiful
because of their suggestion of movement. Consider a sprig of plum blossoms. How
carelessly beautiful and artfully irregular it is! To understand the beauty of that sprig
fully, artistically, is to understand the underlying principle of Animism and of Chinese
art. The sprig, even when deprived of its blossoms, is beautiful because it lives,
because it expresses a living impulse to grow. The outline of every tree expresses a
rhythm resulting from certain organic impulses, the impulse to grow and reach out
toward the sunshine, the impulse to maintain its equilibrium, and the necessity of
resisting the movement of the wind. Every tree is beautiful because it suggests these
impulses, and particularly because it suggests a movement toward somewhere, a
stretching toward something. It has not tried to be beautiful. It has only wanted to live.
Yet the result is something perfectly harmonious and immensely satisfying.
Nor does nature artificially invest the greyhound with an abstract beauty apart from its
functions: the high arch of the greyhound's body and the connecting line between its
bodyand its hind legs are built for swiftness, and they are beautiful because they
suggest swiftness. Yet from this harmonious function emerges a harmonious form.
The softness of the cat's movements results in the softness of its contour^ and even
the jogged squatting outline of a bulldog has a beauty of force dl its own. This is the
explanation of nature's infinite richness >f patterns, which are always harmonious>
always rhythmic.
The writing of Lin Changmin, a distinguished scholar who died a decade ago. This
writing is nearer the "pointer" style, being muscular and smooth in its rhythm. Note
that every character and every stroke is made rapidly in a controlling- rhiH-Hm iv* ti?
Tv玸 c.;T-玦;*:rr ~* _~w.~玼?.?and infinitely variable without ever exhausting
its forms. In other words, nature's beauty is a dynamic, and not a static, beauty.
It is exactly this beauty of movement which is the key to Chinese calligraphy. Its beauty is dynamic and not static, and because it expresses a dynamic beauty, a beauty
of momentum, it lives, and it, too, is infinitely variable without exhaustion. A swift,
sure stroke is appreciated because it is made swiftly and powerfully at one stroke, thus
possessing a unity of movement, defying imitation or correction, for any correction is
immediately detected as disharmonious. Incidentally, that is why calligraphy as an art
is so difficult
That the ascribing of beauty in Chinese calligraphy to the ammistic principle is not
my own fancy can be proved from Chinese references to the "meat/* "bones" and
"tendons" of strokes, although their philosophic import has never been consciously
laid bare until one comes to think of ways and means by which calligraphy can be
made intelligible to the West. Thus Madame Wei, tie talented aunt of Wang Hsichih,
said:
In the writing of those who are skilful in giving strength of stroke, the characters are
"bony"; in the writing of those who are not skilful in giving strength of strokes, the
characters are "fleshy." Writing that has a great deal of bone and very little meat is
called "sinewy writing," and writing that is foil of flesh and weak bones is called
"piggy writing." A writing that is powerful and sinewy is divine; a writing that has
neither power nor sinews is like an invalid.
The dynamic principle of movement results in a principle of structure which is
essential to an understanding of Chinese calligraphy. The mere beauty of balance and
symmetry is never regarded as the highest form. One of the principles of Chinese
writing is that a square should never be a perfect square, but should be higher on one
side than the other, and that two symmetrical parts should never be exactly similar in
size and position. This principle is called shift, or "posture," which represents a beauty
of momentum. The result is that, in the highest examples of this art, we have
structural forms which are seemingly unbalanced and yet somehow maintain the
balance. The difference between this beauty of momentum and beauty of merely static
proportions is the difference between the picture of a man standing or sitting in a
resting position and the snapshot of a man swinging his golf-stick, or of a football
player who has just sent the ball soaring through the air. Just as the picture of a lady
tossing her head is more suggestive of movement than one with her head on a straight
level, so the Chinese characters written with their tops tilted to one side are preferred
artistically to those with a symmetrical head. The best examples of this type of
structure are contained in the tomb- inscription of Chang Menglung, whose characters
give the effect of being always on the point of toppling over, and yet always remain in
balance. The best modern example of this style is to be seen in the writings of Yu
Ylijen, Chairman of the Control Yuan, who owes his present position very largely to
his renown as a calligraphist of high order.
Modern art is in search of rhythms and experimenting on new forms of structure and
patterns. It has not found them yet. It has succeeded only in giving us the impression of trying to escape from reality. Its most apparent characteristic is the effort, not to
soothe us but to jar on our senses. For this reason, a study of Chinese calligraphy and
its animistic principle, and ultimately a restudy of the rhythms of the natural world in
the light of this animistic principle or rhythmic vitality, gives promise of great
possibilities. The profuse use of straight lines, planes, and cones striking one another
at different angles can only excite us, but they can never be alive with beauty. These
planes^ cones, straight lines and wavy lines seem to have exhausted the modern
artist's ingenuity. Why not go back to nature? It remains yet for some Western artist to
strike a pioneer path by practising English calligraphy with the brush for team years,
and then, if he is talented and really understands the animistic principle, he will be
able to write for signboards on Times Square, in lines and forms truly worthy of the
name of an art.
The full significance of Chinese calligraphy as the basis of Chinese aesthetics will be
seen in a study of Chinese painting and architecture. In the lines and composition of
Chinese painting and in the forms and structures of Chinese architecture, we shall be
able to recognize the principles developed from Chinese calligraphy. These basic
ideas of rhythm, form and atmosphere give the different lines of Chinese art, like
poetry, painting, architecture, porcelain and house decorations, an essential unity of
spirit.
III. PAINTING
Chinese painting, the flower of Chinese culture, is distinguished by a spirit and an
atmosphere all its own, entirely different from Western painting. It is as different from
Western painting as Chinese poetry is different from Western poetry. That difference
is hard to grasp and express. It has a certain tone and atmosphere, visible in Western
painting, but essentially different and achieved by different means. It shows a certain
economy of material, marked by the many blank spaces, an idea of composition
determined by its own harmony and marked by a certain "rhythmic vitality/' and a
boldness and freedom of the brush which impress the onlooker in an unforgettable
manner. Somehow the picture before us has undergone an inner process of
transformation in the artist's mind, shorn of its irrelevancies, its disharmonies, and
giving us only a completely satisfying whole, so true to life and yet so different from
it. The design is more obvious, the elimination of material more rigidly carried out,
the points of contrast and concentration easier to trace, and we decidedly feel that the
artist has interfered with the material reality and presented it to us only as it appears to
him, without losing its essential likeness or intelligibility to others. It is subjective
without the violent assertions of the artist's ego in the modern Western painting, and
without the latter's unintelligibility to us common men. It manages to achieve a
decidedly subjective appearance of things without making contortions. It does not try
to paint all before one's eyes, and it leaves a great deal to the onlooker's imagination,
without degenerating into a geometric puzzle. Sometimes the concentration on the immediate object is so intensive that only the tip of a plum branch is given in the
whole picture and left there as perfect. And yet, with all this subjective interference
