100 
House & Garden 
R HEIMS, standing silent and defiant, 
. was raked by a punishing shellfire 
from two sides for over three years. 
Today the City is being slowly re¬ 
stored, but Europe’s most beautiful 
cathedral is to be left as it stands, 
as a memorial. 
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Bronze wine jar from 
the collection of the 
Emperor Chien-Lung 
Ancient Chinese Art for Moderns 
{Continued from page 56) 
“M is t y Mourv- 
tains”, a landscape 
of the Lung Dy¬ 
nasty. Courtesy of 
A. W. Bahr 
design was one of the things that sprang 
from it), but the great art of China 
was not imported by Europe. There 
were two reasons: First, it was zeal¬ 
ously cherished and guarded by the 
Chinese, who worshipped it much as 
they venerated their ancestors, and for 
a reason akin. Second, it would not 
have been admired or understood if it 
had found its way to Europe in the 
18th Century, any more than an Im¬ 
pressionist landscape by Monet or a 
nobly simple sculpture by Rodin would 
have been appreciated or comprehended. 
It was an obvious age, little given to 
the abstract in art, and the great Im¬ 
pressionist works of old China would 
have been thought rubbish. 
Early Evolution 
Chinest art passed through the stage 
of exact and minute pictorial repre¬ 
sentation ages and ages ago—so long, 
in fact, that the time is almost pre¬ 
historic. In its development Chinese 
art kept pace with the Chinese mind, 
which at an early date (reckoned by 
our western chronology) got through 
with the aggressive and objective phase 
of human experience, which now char¬ 
acterizes Europe and America, and set¬ 
tled down to reason with itself; in 
other words, became a subjective and 
“civilized” mind—a condition which, to 
present seeming, has made China help¬ 
less and inert, or, as cultured Chinese 
themselves assert, has made her so im¬ 
movable and mighty that she is proof 
against all outside influences. “Let the 
Japanese come and conquer us if they 
choose,” say the Chinese philosophers 
of the present 
day; “we will 
swallow up Japan, 
and, after a while, 
there will be no 
more Japanese, 
just as there are 
now none of the 
Manchu race that 
conquered us a 
few hundred years 
ago.” 
The Chinese — 
even to the coolie 
—is always rea¬ 
soning within him¬ 
self, and this habit 
of rumination 
eliminates the ne¬ 
cessity for flour¬ 
ishes in order to 
get at a thing. 
The Chinese can 
see a man’s heart 
without his body, 
and, this being the 
case, why paint 
every hair on his 
head in order to 
represent a man? 
The Uselessness 
of Details 
In illustration of 
this mental habit, 
which made it un- 
necessary and 
childish to picture 
things exactly, it 
may be called to 
(Cont. on p. 102) 
Horse's head, ex¬ 
cavated. It dates 
from the Han Dy¬ 
nasty (206 B. C.- 
24 A. D.) 
Figurine of a grave 
attendant. Han Dy¬ 
nasty. Courtesy of 
A. W. Bahr 
