THE SPIRIT OF MAN IN ASIAN ART: Being the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Delivered in Harvard University 1933-34 [Hardcover]

About the Book:- Every work of art is fragrant of its time. Such a voyage of exploration among the arts of the East is fascinating in itself, for the new shapes and modes of beauty brought into our ken. But also it enables us to look back on the art and ideals of the west with a freshened vision, and perhaps to see them more truly. My experience is that when one arrives in the Far East, and one’s thoughts turn back westward, all that western civilization means to us assumes by contrast a more definite form and character than when one is in the midst of it. If for a moment, then, we place ourselves outside side that civilization in which we have grown up, we can better relize the rich complexity of the mental heritage which in daily life we take for granted. Greece, Rome, Judea- it is above all from these far fountain-heads that the streams flow to mingle in the modern Western mind. From Greece most of all. it is the Greeks who determined the bent of the western mind toward science, who set it on the unending road it journeys in the pursuit of truth for its own sake the Greeks who to our vast good fortune gave us masterpieces of poetry on a grand scale such as no other early literature has approached.