“You make me think of an extinguisher,” said Prothero.

“You know I am thinking of a focus,” said Benham.  “But all your thought now has become caricature. . . .  You have stopped thinking.  You are fighting after making up your mind. . . .”

Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham’s prompt endorsement of his Chinese identification.  He had hoped it would be exasperating.  He tried to barb his offence.  He amplified the indictment.  All cultures must be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had produced formalism, priggishness, humbug. . . .  No doubt its ideals had had their successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal peace and good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the world, paved the way for much beautiful art and literature and living.  “But in the end, all your stern orderliness, Benham,” said Prothero, “only leads to me.  The human spirit rebels against this everlasting armour on the soul.  After Han came T’ang.  Have you never read Ling Po?  There’s scraps of him in English in that little book you have—­what is it?—­the Lute of Jade?  He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam after the Prophet.  Life must relax at last. . . .”

“No!” cried Benham.  “If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is creative, no. . . .”

Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to closer enquiries into Chinese thought.  He tried particularly to get to mental grips with English-speaking Chinese.  “We still know nothing of China,” said Prothero.  “Most of the stuff we have been told about this country is mere middle-class tourists’ twaddle.  We send merchants from Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn’t remind them of these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked.  I admit the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they know, they have, what all the rest of the world has still to find and get.  When they begin to speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find just how much it is behind. . . .  Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not such fools as that, but life. . . .”

Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.

He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism. . . .