And water is plunging and powerful; but it is only powerful downhill.
The high and human love-poetry is all about division rather than identity;
and in the great love-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her,
in the same instant, afar off; a virgin and a stranger.
For the first injustice, of which we have spoken, still recurs; and if we
grant that the East has a right to its difference, it is not realised in
what we differ. That nursery tale from nowhere about St. George and the
Dragon really expresses best the relation between the West and the East.
There were many other differences, calculated to arrest even the
superficial eye, between a saint and a dragon. But the essential
difference was simply this: that the Dragon did want to eat St. George;
whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating the Dragon.
In most of the stories he killed the Dragon. In many of the stories he
not only spared, but baptised it. But in neither case did the Christian
have any appetite for cold dragon. The Dragon, however, really has an
appetite for cold Christian--and especially for cold Christianity. This
blind intention to absorb, to change the shape of everything and digest it
in the darkness of a dragon's stomach; this is what is really meant by the
Pantheism and Cosmic Unity of the East.
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