Deity gives us, according to His promise, not His thoughts or His
convictions but His flesh and blood, and I believe that the elaborate
technique of the arts, seeming to create out of itself a superhuman life
has taught more men to die than oratory or the Prayer Book. We only
believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but
in the whole body. The Minoan soldier who bore upon his arm the shield
ornamented with the dove in the Museum at Crete, or had upon his head the
helmet with the winged horse, knew his role in life. When Nobuzane
painted the child Saint Kobo, Daishi kneeling full of sweet austerity
upon the flower of the lotus, he set up before our eyes exquisite life
and the acceptance of death.

I cannot imagine those young soldiers and the women they loved pleased
with the ill-breeding and theatricality of Carlyle, nor I think with the
magniloquence of Hugo. These things belong to an industrial age, a
mechanical sequence of ideas; but when I remember that curious game which
the Japanese called, with a confusion of the senses that had seemed
typical of our own age, 'listening to incense,' I know that some among
them would have understood the prose of Walter Pater, the painting or
Puvis de Chavannes, the poetry of Mallarme and Verlaine. When heroism
returned to our age it bore with it as its first gift technical
sincerity.


VIII

For some weeks now I have been elaborating my play in London where alone
I can find the help I need, Mr. Dulac's mastery of design and Mr. Ito's
genius of movement; yet it pleases me to think that I am working for my
own country. Perhaps some day a play in the form I am adapting for