ook 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!

Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the
West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be
seen as _energies._ I think, through channels nearer this
material plane: nearer the plan