Far East do exhibit
this; but I rebel at being asked to admit that we must go to the Far
East to find it. Traces of such sentiments can be found, I fancy, even
in other painters and poets. I do not question that the poet Wo Wo (that
ornament of the eighth dynasty) may have written the words: "Even the
most undignified vegetable is for this person capable of producing
meditations not to be exhibited by much weeping." But, I do not
therefore admit that a Western gentleman named Wordsworth (who made
a somewhat similar remark) had plagiarised from Wo Wo, or was a mere
Occidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure. I do not deny
that Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem
entitled "Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall." But I do
not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the
cranny was not original and even sincere.

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,