Concepts come to Europe from the east. It appears that Western Europe can create no concepts of the Real, although she creates the greatest Forms for concepts.[42] Like Cézanne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoievski, Blake, Whitman, Wagner were in this sense inviters of the east; the line of nineteenth century masters was long, who in their rejection of the conceptual forms of their inheritance, filled the world once more with a clamorous hunger for fresh Ideas to make incarnate. It is this hunger that explains, in art, the vogue of El Greco, of African sculpture, of Picasso. The Idea in Picasso is the _arabesque_. The Moslem needed to harmonize his love of beauty and his fear of idols. He required a plastic form which would not, like the forms of physical nature, recall the old idolatries of the desert. The letters of his holy Arabic language served him, even as the Hebrew letters served, in the Kabbala, to make a Temple for the medieval Jews. These letters of the Arab held Allah and all the world of Islam, and yet were freed of natural associations. In Picasso, there is a similar impulse. His need also, as an artist, is to make designs; but his fear was an idolatry of another sort. The associations attached to physical forms--religion, sentiment, moral value--were already so unconvincing in the nineteenth century that Cézanne refused them, as Moses the Golden Calf. Now, even the sensory organisms formed by the eye must be rejected. To the hand of a Raphael, a woman’s body is amenable to art through its motherhood, its sanctity, its sexual appeal. These are cogent means for his æsthetic work. To Cézanne a woman’s body is still a woman’s body. Picasso rejects even the associative concept of _woman_: her body becomes a configuration of planes, densities, colors. This formal use of transfigured substances is old in Spain. Spain’s wildest excess of sculpture and ornament in the _plateresque_ holds an element of transformed abstraction that recalls Egypt. The Spanish dance resolves dramatic gesture into a formal end. And now, Picasso makes an _arabesque_ of the letters and signs of nature.