have found that in answering our
question he had answered his own or made the asking of it superfluous.
Had Mr. Hobson been as sensitive as he is sound, we may be sure that he
would have seen this so-called T'ang Lohan in America or farther before
ever he advised the British Museum to bid a shilling for it.

The "new Chinese masterpiece in the British Museum" is a common,
pretentious thing, and that, if I must play the archaeologist, is a fair
reason for suspecting that it is not the product of a great age--and
T'ang art still seems great even after we have seen something of its
greater predecessors, Wei, Liang, Sui. This figure, though larger than
life-size, is nowise monumental; on the contrary, it is patently a
_bibelot agrandi_, reminding one oddly in this respect of Benvenuto
Cellini's _Perseus_. It is something that has been conceived on a small
scale and carried out on a large. This fact alone, had it been noted, as
it must have been by any one who looked at the figure aesthetically,
would have suggested that this was a product, not of the T'ang
dynasty--an age of monumental sculpture--but of the Ming dynasty--the
great age of choice chinoiseries and archaistic experiments.

This theory--that the figure is Ming--technical evidence supports at
least as strongly as it supports the T'ang attribution. Technique apart,
artistic consideration makes it clear that if the work is not T'ang it
must be as late as Ming. That this should be so may at first seem
strange to those who remember that the T'ang dynasty flourished between
A.D. 618 and 906, and the Ming between 1368 and 1643. Yet, in fact, it
is far easier to confuse T'ang with Ming than to confuse a work of the
intermediate Sung period (960-1279) with either. The mystery is not
profound. Throughout the T'ang and Sung periods Chinese art was
thoroughly alive; both T'ang and Sung are vital and original styles.
T'ang art expresses the inspiration of one age, Sung of another; Sung
follows and differs from T'ang as _quattrocento_ follows and differs
from Giottesque: they are different and characteristic modes of a
continuous stream of inspiration. But the Sung dynasty and the Chinese
inspiration collapsed within a hundred years or less of each other, and
for suggestion and direction the Ming artists looked, not so much into
their own hearts as to the past, and especially to the golden days of
T'ang. History is deaf to the doctrine of progressive evolution, and, if
we w