the beauty of the thought that inspired
it as well as the quality of the soul of him who gives it form. In
writing, as in painting, it reveals to us the character and the conception
of its author. Placed at the service of certain philosophical ideas, which
will be set forth later on, this technique was bound to lead to a special
code of Aesthetics. The painter seeks to suggest with an unbroken line the
fundamental character of a form. His endeavor, in this respect, is to
simplify the objective images of the world to the extreme, replacing them
with ideal images, which prolonged meditation shall have freed from every
non-essential. It may therefore be readily understood how the brush-stroke
becomes so personal a thing, that in itself it serves to reveal the hand
of the master. There is no Chinese book treating of painting which does
not discuss and lay stress upon the value of its aesthetic code.

II. REPRESENTATION OF FORMS

It has often been said that in Chinese painting, as in Japanese painting,
perspective is ignored. Nothing is further from the truth. This error
arises from the fact that we have confused one system of perspective with
perspective as a whole. There are as many systems of perspective as there
are conventional laws for the representation of space.

The practice of drawing and painting offers the student the following
problem in descriptive geometry: _to represent the three dimensions of
space by means of a plane surface of two dimensions_. The Egyptians and
Assyrians solved this problem by throwing down vertical objects upon one
plane, which demands a great effort of abstraction on the part of the
observer. European perspective, built up in the fifteenth century upon
the remains of the geometric knowledge of the Greeks, is based on the
monocular theory used by the latter. In this system, it is assumed that
the picture is viewed with the eye fixed on a single point. Therefore
the conditions of foreshortening--or distorting the actual dimensions
according to the angle from which they are seen--are governed by placing
in harmony the distance of the eye from the scheme of the picture, the
height of the eye in relation to the objects to be depicted, and the
relative position of these objects with reference to the surface employed.

[Illustration: PLATE II. PORTION OF A SCROLL BY KU K'AI-CHIH
British Museum, London.]

But, in assuming that the picture is viewed with the eye fixed on a single