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192 AN EXPENSIVE "MASTERPIECE"
which a fine T'ang figure impresses us. Here
the design is petty and the forms, in them-
but the tight, realistic
selves, flaccid and poor ;
face is made to gaze most melodramatically
into eternity.
It is melodrama, I fancy, that
has taken the town by storm. Compare this
overgrown knick-knack with some really fine
T'ang piece or, better still, with one of those
Wei figures which the Museum had lately the
chance of acquiring at a very moderate price,
and you will feel the difference between form
that impresses by sheer aesthetic Tightness and
form that reminds you of the late Sir Henry
Irving. With all its elaborate quietness, this
deep-contemplative Lohan is just a piece of
rhetoric : put it beside something first-rate
and you will know what to think of it as surely
as you know what to think of
I have spread its folds o'er the dying, adrift in a
hopeless sea ;
I have hurled it swift on the slaver, and seen the slave
set free,
when you put that beside
He all their ammunition
And feats of war defeats
With plain heroic magnitude of mind. . . .
Why is it always in purchases of this sort
the nation sinks the best part of its miserable