could have it. I do not think they will or should, but they could. If
another Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arc
actually bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediaeval swords shook
and blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from every
tapestry; if this were really proved to be the will of France and the
purpose of Providence—such a scene would still be the lasting and
final justification of the French Revolution.

For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI.

THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

In the very laudable and fascinating extensions of our interest in
Asiatic arts or faiths, there are two incidental injustices which we
tend nowadays to do to our own records and our own religion. The first
is a tendency to talk as if certain things were not only present in the
higher Orientals, but were peculiar to them. Thus our magazines will
fall into a habit of wondering praise of Bushido, the Japanese chivalry,
as if no Western knights had ever vowed noble vows, or as if no Eastern
knights had ever broken them. Or again, our drawing-rooms will be full
of the praises of Indian renunciation and Indian unworldliness, as if no
Christians had been saints, or as if all Buddhists had been. But if the
first injustice is to think of human virtues as peculiarly Eastern, the
other injustice is a failure to appreciate what really is peculiarly
Eastern. It is too much taken for granted that the Eastern sort of
idealism is certainly superior and convincing; whereas in truth it is
only separate and peculiar. All that is richest, deepest, and subtlest
in the East is rooted in Pantheism; but all that is richest, deepest,
and subtlest in us is concerned with denying passionately that Pantheism
is either the highest or the purest religion.

Thus, in turning over some excellent books recently written on the
spirit of Indian or Chinese art and decoration, I found it quietly and
curiously assumed that the artist must be at his best if he flows with
the full stream of Nature; and identifies himself with all things; so
that the stars are his sleepless eyes and the forests his far-flung
arms. Now in this way of talking both the two injustices will be found.
In so far as what is claimed is a strong sense of the divine in all
things, the Eastern artists have no more monopoly of it than they have
of hunger and thirst.

I have no doubt that the painters and poets of the