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 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