Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/37



, in one of his much-admired studies, The School of Giorgione, represents art as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, toward a condition which music alone completely realises; "lyrical poetry," he thinks, "approaches nearest to that condition, hence is the highest and most complete form of poetry; and," he adds, "the very perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subjects, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding"

I should like to develop Pater's literary ideal a little further through Lao Tze's canon of spiritual anarchism (it's nothing so strange to speak sometimes the names of this ancient Chinese sage and the modern English critic side by side); is it not that to mean nothing means all things; again, not to sing at all means to sing everything? Lao Tze says: "Assert 3