. .,

But the Ming and early Ch'ing period was the great age of causeries, treatises which precisely did impose rules on art.64 I n the foreword to the last section (18 18) of the Mustard-seed Garden, the painter's manual which epitomized the movement, the author made the fatal promise that genius could be taught, 'spirit-consonance' and 'life-movement' distilled in explanation. 'Thus can he [the reader] enter the "divine class" and the ccskilled class", and follow in the steps of painters like Ku K'ai-chih and Wu Tao-tzu.' O 5

I t was another passage in the same foreword, but from a different hand, which plainly exposed the intellectual corruption of the intuitive process. In a dialogue, a question was raised about portraiture. Why was there no manual for this most difficult form of art, when there seemed to be a manual for everything else? The answerer stated that everything else-mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, birds, beasts, fish, insects-had fixed forms. If one studied them assiduously, one could reach the point of reproducing them by rules. But the human face had most varied forms, not lending themselves to stereotyping, and it was hard to convey these forms in words.66