cal toil which develops its uses : here, apparently, a swarm of plodding utilitarians, sternly adherent to things actual and positive ; who insist that the world is the plainest of facts, and needs no explanation ; that it is purely a work- ing world, wherein a seventh-day rest would be an imperti- nence, a world where every atom is intensely real and valuable ; where domestic and social uses stand for poetry, metaphysics, and religion. As w*e pass from Indian to Chinese architecture, we find the Bubble symbol of the unreality of things giving way to a pile of dwelling- houses, perhaps tents, each provided with roof, piazza, fini- cal pictures and bells. These pagodas tell the whole story of Chinese religion. It is domestic, tangible, practical. What a chasm we have crossed from Hindu Brahmanism and Buddhism ! There was the Brain, pure Thought : here is the Muscle, pure Labor.
To do, not to think about doing ; to fashion the stuff of life, not to contemplate it ; and to do and fashion after the most obvious, commonplace, realistic, and persistent way, this is what seems legibly stamped on those square heavy features, so slightly modifiable by time or space : the downward-drawn eyelid, the flattened profile, the unin- spired air, the somewhat plump, muscular, enduring phy- sique. Contrast this Chinese mould with the clear bright eye and rapid graceful motion of the Arab ; with the dreamy languor, yet exquisite nervous 'susceptibility of the Aryan Hindu ; with the prominent features, the col- lected, self-conscious, and expectant bearing of the Teuton or the Greek. It is the unchangeable image of the per- sistent mental type which corresponds to it, so lym- phatic, so incurious, so fast-bound in things as they are and have been. The Chinese creative faculty remains within the plane of certain organic habits, failing to rise from the formalism of rules to the freedom of the idea. Its function is to maintain and multiply ; to reproduce, not
