ich all
the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the
Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is
something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a
mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what
Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a
saint; only in that world, which ranges from the willow-pattern plate to
the Rishi in his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the soul of
Mozart, with its laughter and its wisdom, be at home. That too is the
world in which flowers and all animals are of equal import with mankind;
it is the world of dragons in which the serpent of the first act would
not seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would not
seem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautiful
landscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would not
be a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to him
would be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no change
at all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the world
where silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets are
full of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of imps and monsters,
and yet of impassioned contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlit
pavilion and smiles like a lover, and where the lovers smile like sages;
where everything is to the eye what the music of Mozart is to the ear.

In the Chinese world we could be rid of all the drawling erotics of the
modern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavy
egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may be
only an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is one
which the art of China makes real to us and with which we are familiar
in that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it, there is a gaiety
which comes from conquest rather than refusal of reality, just like the
gaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He knew sorrow well, but would not
luxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously than
himself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather than
of villains, and of imps and monsters that could be exorcized by music.
He was the Orpheus of the world who might tame the beast in all of us if
we would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left to
play out in the street. And yet his ultimate seri