al drama.
Again we stigmatise the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane
tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one
"with too much tea" in him.

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing.
What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small
after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears,
how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity,
we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind
has done worse. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too
freely; and we have even transfigured the gory image of Mars. Why not
consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm
stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within
the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of
Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni
himself.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are
apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average
Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but
another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the
quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard
Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he
calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on
Manchurian battlefields. Much comment has been given lately to the Code
of the Samurai,--the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in
self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism,
which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain
barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the
gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect
shall be paid to our art and ideals.

When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East? We
Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies
which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the
perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either
impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality
has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese
patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less
sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our ne