Chinese calligraphy : an introduction to its aesthetic and technique : with 6 plates and 155 text illustratons

ABSTRACT BEAUTY

itself. The colour and thickness of the ink enable us to detect whether any retouching has been attempted.

Individual inspiration is as necessary to the creation of brilliant calligraphy as to any of the more familiar forms of art. It is easy to copy the composition and pattern of a good style, but the movement of the strokes is not so simple to imitate. The story of the calligrapher Wang Hsien-Chih (+ |X Z), who was the son of Wang Hsi-Chih, himself a famous calligrapher, illustrates this. When Hsien-Chih was a boy he was confident that he could write as well as his father. One day he saw a piece of his father’s writing hanging on the wall and sat down to imitate it exactly. Then he secretly substituted his work for his father’s. In due course Wang Hsi-Chih came in, and noticing the inferior writing hanging on the wall, muttered to himself: ‘I must have been drunk when I wrote that abominable stuff!’ MHsien-Chih heard this and it made him feel so ashamed that he never repeated such a trick again. Another story tells how Sung Yi (4 3%), a pupil of Chung Yu, perhaps the greatest writer of the Wei period, turned all his mind to forming characters which were models of neatness and correctness, thinking thus to please his master. But Chung Yu reproved him so severely that Sung dared not show his face before him again for three years. These stories testify to the value the Chinese attach to good brushwork as compared with mere exactitude.

Movement, as I have said, is the very breath of Chinese calligraphy. Two kinds of this movement are distinguished : the first may be called ‘ activity in stillness ’, the second ‘ activity in action’. ‘The two are not strictly separable, but grow out of each other. The first manifests itself in the direction, shape,

[ 125 ]