in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or a
plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate
from the world and us a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to
pass for a few moments into a deep of the mind that had hitherto been too
subtle for our habitation. As a deep of the mind can only be approached
through what is most human, most delicate, we should distrust bodily
distance, mechanism and loud noise.

It may be well if we go to school in Asia, for the distance from life in
European art has come from little but difficulty with material. In half-
Asiatic Greece Kallimachos could still return to a stylistic management
of the falling folds of drapery, after the naturalistic drapery of
Phidias, and in Egypt the same age that saw the village Head-man carved
in wood for burial in some tomb with so complete a naturalism saw, set up
in public places, statues full of an august formality that implies
traditional measurements, a philosophic defence. The spiritual painting
of the 14th century passed on into Tintoretto and that of Velasquez into
modern painting with no sense of loss to weigh against the gain, while
the painting of Japan, not having our European Moon to churn the wits,
has understood that no styles that ever delighted noble imaginations have
lost their importance, and chooses the style according to the subject.
In literature also we have had the illusion of change and progress, the
art of Shakespeare passing into that of Dryden, and so into the prose
drama, by what has seemed when studied in its details unbroken progress.
Had we been Greeks, and so but half-European, an honourable mob would
have martyred though in vain the first man who set up a painted scene, or
who complained that soliloquies were unnatural, instead of repeating with
a sigh, 'we cannot return to the arts of childhood however beautiful.'
Only our lyric poetry has kept its Asiatic habit and renewed itself at
its own youth, putting off perpetually what has been called its progress