It is recorded (for all I know) of the philanthropic Emperor Bo, that when engaged in cutting his garden lawn with a mower made of alabaster and chrysoberyl, he chanced to cut down a small flower; whereupon, being much affected, he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upon tablets of ivory the lines beginning:  “Small and unobtrusive blossom with ruby extremities.”  But this incident, touching as it is, does not shake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the daisy; and I am left with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywhere in their poetry—­and in their prose.

I have tried to convey my sympathy and admiration for Eastern art and its admirers, and if I have not conveyed them I must give it up and go on to more general considerations.  I therefore proceed to say—­with the utmost respect, that it is Cheek, a rarefied and etherealised form of Cheek, for this school to speak in this way about the mother that bore them, the great civilisation of the West.  The West also has its magic landscapes, only through our incurable materialism they look like landscapes as well as like magic.  The West also has its symbolic figures, only they look like men as well as symbols.  It will be answered (and most justly) that Oriental art ought to be free to follow its own instinct and tradition; that its artists are concerned to suggest one thing and our artists another; that both should be admired in their difference.  Profoundly true; but what is the difference?  It is certainly not as the Orientalisers assert, that we must go to the Far East for a sympathetic and transcendental interpretation of Nature.  We have paid a long enough toll of mystics and even of madmen to be quit of that disability.

Yet there is a difference, and it is just what I suggested.  The Eastern mysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy of creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise.  The latter says, like St. Francis, “My brother fire and my sister water “; the former says, “Myself fire and myself water.”  Whether you call the Eastern attitude an extension of oneself into everything or a contraction of oneself into nothing is a matter of metaphysical definition.  The effect is the same, an effect which lives and throbs throughout all the exquisite arts of the East.  This effect is the Sing called rhythm, a pulsation of pattern, or of ritual, or of colours, or of cosmic theory, but always suggesting the unification of the individual with the world.  But there is quite another kind of sympathy the sympathy with a thing because it is different.  No one will say that Rembrandt did not sympathise with an old woman; but no one will say that Rembrandt painted like an old woman.  No one will say that Reynolds did not appreciate children; but no one will say he did it childishly.  The supreme instance of this divine division is sex, and that explains (what I could never understand in