u have--what is
it?--the LUTE OF JADE? He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
after the Prophet. Life must relax at last...."

"No!" cried Benham. "If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
creative, no...."

Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. "We still know nothing of
China," said Prothero. "Most of the stuff we have been told about this
country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find
just how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not
such fools as that, but LIFE...."

Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.

He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded
guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....

The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of
a more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
discuss the merits of opium.

For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's
sensations, why should one not use opium? It is art materialized.
It gives t