f the T'ang
period, preserving the original character of its coloring. It is true that
there were masterpieces to the credit of the Northern School but it had by
no means kept to the style of vivid illumination which marked its
inception.[15] It had yielded to the influence of the Southern style,
was simplified by this contact and took on the austerity and proportion of
the South. It would seem as if the painters hastened to add their
testimony before the philosophy of the ancient sages should disappear.
They strove to give the world perfect images in which the great principles
of the universe could be felt vibrating. The only suitable medium for such
expression was the technique of the Southern School which they followed
with more or less fidelity.

[15] It should be borne in mind that the author uses the term
illumination in the sense of color applied within a distinct and
limiting outline. This is illustrated in the definitions of single and
double contour.--TRANSLATOR.

[Illustration: PLATE XIV. BAMBOOS IN MONOCHROME BY WU CHEN
Yuean Period. Musee Guimet.]

Southern China was at that time the scene of awakened faculties. Shaken to
its foundations by the mystic movement--both Taoist and Buddhist--of the
T'ang period, the Confucian doctrine had lost ground but had not yet
congealed into the rigid official code of a Chu Hsi. While heterodox
beliefs still prevailed, all were free to borrow their prophetic and
poetic meaning.

When the Mongols came into power, they only carried to completion the work
of conservation begun by the Sung emperors. In their contact with China
they resembled timid pupils quite as much as conquerors. Once emperor of
China, the Mongol Kublai Khan could not but remember his purely Chinese
education. Moreover it was quite the Tartar custom to extend their
conquests to administrative organization, by establishing a hierarchy of
functionaries. The conception of a supreme and autocratic State, paternal
in its absolutism, intervening even to the details of private life in
order to assure the happiness of the people,--this idea, dear to the
literary conservators of the Confucian School during the Sung period, was
also too similar to the Tartar ideal to be denied immediate adoption.
Heterodox doctrines were formally banished from schools. Rejected with
scorn as being corrupt and dangerous, there remained of these doctrines
only such residuum as might be found in the independent thought o