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1 4 o THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON
stage. The Ming picture
in the British Museum
known as The Earthly Paradise is inferior to
the best work of Botticelli, with which it is
commonly compared, but reminds us, in its
finished grace and gaiety,
Watteau. Korin, towards
of a
the
painting by
end of the
Ming period, is about as empty as Velasquez
and more brilliant than Frans Hals. The
eighteenth century, one inclines to believe,
was the same everywhere. Stylistic obsession
and the taste for material beauty ended in
mechanical prettiness, altogether inexpressive
or sentimental. In both hemispheres painting
was reduced to a formula a formula for
producing elegant furniture.
But even in the age of decay Oriental art
retained traces of primitive splendour. It
never sank into mere representation. The
men who turned out the popular Japanese
colour-prints, though they chose the same
subjects as the Dutch genre painters, were
artists enough to treat them differently and to
look for something significant beneath the
mass of irrelevant accidents. Also they preserved
a nicer sensibility to material beauty.
A cheap Japanese print has sometimes the
quality of a painting by Whistler. Indeed,
the superiority
of the Orientals is discreetly
insinuated from beginning to end of Mr.
Binyon's essay. Equal, if not superior,
to the