Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/508

434 Certain enchanting dialogues between mysterious figures that seem to resemble those dehumanized persons that one sees on china tea-cups, take place now and again. We will condense one of these for the reader's benefit:

"Knowledge had rambled northwards to the region of the Dark Water where he ascended the Imperceptible Slope, when it happened that he met Dumb Inaction. He addressed him, saying, 'How do we know the Tao? Where do we find our rest in the Tao? Where is the path to the Tao?' Dumb Inaction gave him no reply. Not only did he not answer; but he did not know how to answer. Knowledge then ascended the height of the End of Doubt where he saw Heedless Blurter, to whom he put his questions. Heedless Blurter replied at once, 'Ah! I know and I will tell you.' But while he was about to speak, he forgot what he wanted to say. Knowledge returned to the palace of Ti and he saw Hwang-ti, and Hwang-ti said, 'To dwell nowhere and to do nothing is the first step; to start from nowhere and pursue no path is the first step—Dumb Inaction was truly right because he did not know the thing. Heedless Blurter was nearly right because he forgot it. I and you are not nearly right because we know it.' Heedless Blurter heard of all this and considered that Hwang-ti knew how to express himself on the subject."

It is strange how, in the historic struggle for survival among human ideas, a philosophy as delicately original as that of Kwang should have fallen by the wayside. One cause of this, however, is doubtless inherent in the doctrine itself. It is not for all men, it is not for all moods, this fleeting phosphorescence of the great waters. To many modern minds the naïveté of the style, the queer twists of the humour, the smiling rigidity of the images, stiff and abrupt as figures on an archaic frieze, will be all that emanates from the writings of Kwang-tze. But to others, to a few here and there, it may well happen that out of these whispered oracles from the immense past, out of the Ailanthus groves of Mount Kwai-Khi, out of the gardens of Hwang-ti, out of the rivers of Khu-yuan, there will come a hint, a sign, a token, not altogether irrelevant, not altogether without a deep philosophic significance, even for these days, "so far retired from happy pieties"!