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It was while she was falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot herself to give utterance to the unseemly.
But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in lyricism one might name a hundred of them beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies.
As she would have come to preach Truth, you may suppose Truth needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself a charlatan. "Below with eddy and flow the white tides creep On the sands." Says Ssu-k'ung T'u, "..... in no one form may Tao abide. But changes and shifts like the wide wing-shadows asweep On the mountainside";
A great lyric comes of the escape of the consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit. The West has produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in these forms. Very likely the West is right; but I shall not think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k'ung T'u or Keats.
He would bring light to the most excellent minds; the God of Light said, "I have seen to that." He would in time waken the lute-strings of the Spirit, and set Chu Hia all a-song; the God of Music said, "I have seen to that." They foresaw Wu Taotse and Ma Yuan; they foresaw Ssu-k'ung T'u and the Banished Angel; and asked "Is it not enough?"
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