22 GREEK AND CHINESE ART IDEALS 



The Art of Beautiful Writing 



The art of beautiful writing was a direct development 

 of literary scholarship in China and has had an important 

 bearing on all sections of its art. To be able to write 

 Chinese requires a rigid training in brush work drawing. 

 And this has led to the educated Chinese being born 

 draftsmen. The association of beautiful ideas expressed 

 in beautiful writing has been quite a special feature of 

 Chinese culture. The innumerable hand-written poems 

 mounted in the same way as pictures, and having an equal 

 artistic value in the Chinese eye, is peculiarly Chinese. This 

 calligraphic art does not correspond to> the illuminated 

 manuscript missals and other European religious text. The 

 Chinese characters, which may be regarded as the most 

 beautiful script in the world, lend themslves to decorative 

 variation; and this has furnished an infinite number of art 

 motives in the applied arts. Much of the extraordinary 

 fascination of decoration dependent on the use of the 

 Chinese written character is due to that subtle element of 

 symbolism which is ever present. This development of 

 Chinese writing has perhaps more than anything else given 

 Chinese art its very individual character. 



Mountain Philosophy 



The love of mountains may be regarded as universal. 

 Among the ancient Greeks Olympus was the home of the 

 gods and Parnassus sacred to Apollo and the muses. They 

 associated every striking piece of hill scenery with legend and 

 set up a shrine very much as the Chinese did and still do. 

 Taishan is the Chinese Olympus and, though mainly 

 associated with Confucius, embraces pre-confucian and 

 post-confucian ideas in the Chinese mind. The sacred hills 

 of Omeishan and the mountain islet of Putoshan are 

 associated with Buddhism. Almost any Chinese philosopher 

 might murmur with Plato 'Believing, therefore, the soul to be 

 immortal, and able to endure all extremes of good and ill, 

 let us ever hold fast the upward way. ' 



While Greek civilization resembled a comet in its 

 sudden burst from obscurity into brilliant incandescence, 

 during the century or two of its golden period, followed by 

 an equally sudden damping out, the civilization of China 

 since Confucius was lit with a lamp of pure practical reason 

 for over 2000 years. There is perhaps no other national 

 constructive political code which can compare with it in 

 massive effect. Whether it can bear the impact of modern 

 developments due to the vast and massive effect of the 



