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THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON 139
ripe and highly cultivated decadence of a
movement that the growing religious spirit
was soon to displace. Slight as his acquaintance
with this early art must be, an Englishman
who visited regularly the exhibition at
Shepherd's Bush was able to gather from e ght
or ten pictures, a couple of large wooden
Bodhisattvas, and a few small figures
in bronze,
some idea of the way in which Japanese
primitives could enter and express
the world
of reality. That same power he will find in
the Byzantine mosaics of the sixth century,
which express the earliest triumphs of another
spiritual revolution over the cultured materialism
of a moribund civilization.
That new movement spread slowly across
and till the middle of the twelfth
Europe,
century there was no general decline. But
the best was over in France before the twelfth
was out. Gothic architecture is
century
juggling in stone and glass. In Italy Giotto
followed Cimabue ; and Giotto could not
always resist the temptation to state the
particular and leave the universal out. He
sometimes tells us facts instead of expressing
emotions. In the full Renaissance the coarsest
feeling sufficed to flavour a handsome, wellmade
picture.
Meanwhile, under the Ming dynasty (1368-
1644) Asiatic art had reached much the same