but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar.  In her gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot herself to give utterance to the unseemly.  There is no line in her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score.  She worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity only in the impersonal and dispassionate:  never mistook for its voice, the voices of the flesh.  She sinned much, no doubt; but not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her worship of Art and Poetry.  She was faithful to the high Gods there.  She never produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares.  But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k’ung T’us:  giants in lyricism—­one might name a hundred of them—­beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies.  Nor have we had any to compare with her masters of landscape-painting:  even the Encyclopaedia Britannica comes down flat-footed with the statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the world has seen.—­And why?—­Because it is based on a knowledge of the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things ’on the other side of the sky’; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine ‘defecate’ constantly, in Coleridge’s curious phrase, ‘to a clear transparency.’  Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of dynamite.  So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather coarse and brutal and materialistic to you.

But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare?  No Dante or Homer?  No epic—­no great drama!  Pooh! you say, where is the great creative energy?  Where is the sheer brain force?—­

It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is the highest possible type.  Well; it may be:  but the deeper you go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to become as to the absoluteness of standards.  The time to award the prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of the differences.  Warily let us go to work here!