ndia, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not
know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of
religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and
what lies behind it--for the religion of a Wordsworth--they seem to be
pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others
like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the
inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is
loveliest--all goes to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills,
perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in
all the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy,
as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature?

"Great God, I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn."

That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have
been wrung from him had he been born in China.

And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of
China--"pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the
East--assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even
the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is
apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan
may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a
place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential
values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt,
incompetent, even if it were true--and it is far from being true in any
unqualified sense--would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of
inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the
superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its
foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western
civilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers,
and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity
never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It
is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood
flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous
foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless
architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen,
all the building of man harmonises with and