A Manual of the Historical Development of Art. G. G. Zerffi
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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.
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