THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST

By Percival Lowell

Contents

 Chapter 1. Individuality

 Chapter 2. Family

 Chapter 3. Adoption

 Chapter 4. Language

 Chapter 5. Nature and Art

 Chapter 6. Art

 Chapter 7. Religion

 Chapter 8. Imagination

Chapter 1. Individuality. 

The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things areof necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when hefirst sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure, disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on theirheads, an attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be anecessary consequence of their geographical position, it does at leastreveal them looking at the world as if from the standpoint of thateccentric posture. For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy. Whether it be that their antipodal situation has affected their brains, or whether it is the mind of the observer himself that has hitherto beenwrong in undertaking to rectify the inverted pictures presented byhis retina, the result, at all events, is undeniable. The world standsreversed, and, taking for granted his own uprightness, the strangerunhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity of vision, a state of mindoutwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of their eyes. 

If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is nonethe less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal experience hasdefinitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that under side of ourplanet do not adhere to it head downwards, like flies on a ceiling, --hisearly a priori deduction, --they still appear quite as antipodal, mentally considered. Intellectually, at least, their attitude setsgravity at defiance. For to the mind's eye their world is one huge, comical antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one wayfrom our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametricallyopposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, readbackwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extendsdeeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter ofthought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear tobe their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handleinstead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in placeof toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, howevertrivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal butopposite. Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners andcustoms of the country, the only road to right lies in followingunswervingly that course which his inherited instincts assure him to bewrong. 

Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities theyare men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor mentallybut be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike are theythat we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own humanity insome mirth-provoking mirror of the mind, --a mirror that shows us our ownfamiliar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out. Humor holds the glass, and we become the sport of our own reflections. But is it otherwise athome? Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individuallyour lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, andcomplacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing personfrom what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, andvice versa? Yet who, when by chance he catches sight in like manner ofthe face of a friend, can keep from smiling at the caricatures which themirror's left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of thatfriend's features, --caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterlyunsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once seeourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign peoplesmight be less pronounced. 

Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply asa phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a newimportance, --the possibility of using it stereoptically. For hismind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours, andthe two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either alonecould possibly have afforded. Thus harmonized, they will help usto realize humanity. Indeed it is only by such a combination of twodifferent aspects that we ever perceive substance and distinguishreality from illusion. What our two eyes make possible for materialobjects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us to do for mentaltraits. Only the superficial never changes its expression; theappearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer. In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all isunsubstantial. 

To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of courseunnecessary; to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on theprinciple that what is a matter of common notoriety is very apt toprove a matter about which uncommonly little is known. At present wego halfway in recognition of these people by bestowing upon them ademi-diploma of mental development called semi-civilization, neglecting, however, to specify in what the fractional qualification consists. If the suggestion of a second moiety, as of something directlycomplementary to them, were not indirectly complimentary to ourselves, the expression might pass; but, as it is, the self-praise is rather tooobvious to carry conviction. For Japan's claim to culture is not basedsolely upon the exports with which she supplements our art, nor upon thepaper, china, and bric-a-brac with which she adorns our rooms; any morethan Western science is adequately represented in Japan by our popularimports there of kerosene oil, matches, and beer. Only half civilizedthe Far East presumably is, but it is so rather in an absolute than arelative sense; in the sense of what might have been, not of what is. Itis so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities ofhumanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect enoughto serve in all things as standard for the other. The light of truthhas reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own mentalcrystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways, so that nowthe rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only produce darknessto those of the other. For the Japanese civilization in the sense of notbeing savagery is the equal of our own. It is not in the polish that thereal difference lies; it is in the substance polished. In politeness, indelicacy, they have as a people no peers. Art has been their mistress, though science has never been their master. Perhaps for this very reasonthat art, not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result hasbeen all the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainmentof the few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks ofintellect rise less eminent, the plateau of general elevation standshigher. But little need be said to prove the civilization of a landwhere ordinary tea-house girls are models of refinement, and commoncoolies, when not at work, play chess for pastime. 

If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd oncloser acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding thefreer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his hat, but byremoving his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint that humanityis to be approached the wrong end to. When, after thus entering ahouse, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of its occupant, thesuspicion becomes a certainty. He discovers that this people talk, soto speak, backwards; that before he can hope to comprehend them, ormake himself understood in return, he must learn to present his thoughtsarranged in inverse order from the one in which they naturally suggestthemselves to his mind. His sentences must all be turned inside out. Hefinds himself lost in a labyrinth of language. The same seems to be trueof the thoughts it embodies. The further he goes the more obscure thewhole process becomes, until, after long groping about for some means oforienting himself, he lights at last upon the clue. This clue consistsin "the survival of the unfittest. "

In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most interestingcase of partially arrested development; or, to speak esoterically, we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular example of acompleted race-life. For though from our standpoint the evolution ofthese people seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career, looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run itscourse. Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but frompurely intrinsic inability to go on. The intellectual machine was notshattered; it simply ran down. To this fact the phenomenon owes itspeculiar interest. For we behold here in the case of man the samespectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacleof a world that has died of old age. No weak spot in their socialorganism destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape offoreign hordes, fell upon them from without. For in spite of the factthat China offers the unique example of a country that has simply livedto be conquered, mentally her masters have invariably become her pupils. Having ousted her from her throne as ruler, they proceeded to sit ather feet as disciples. Thus they have rather helped than hindered hercivilization. 

Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental historyto be the same story with variations. However unlike China, Korea, andJapan are in some respects, through the careers of all three we cantrace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan risinglike any other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fallafter a brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital forcehad spent itself more than a millennium ago. Already, then, theircivilization had in its deeper developments attained its stature, andhas simply been perfecting itself since. We may liken it to some stuntedtree, that, finding itself prevented from growth, bastes the moreluxuriantly to put forth flowers and fruit. For not the final but themedial processes were skipped. In those superficial amenities withwhich we more particularly link our idea of civilization, these peoplescontinued to grow. Their refinement, if failing to reach our standardin certain respects, surpasses ours considering the bare barbaricbasis upon which it rests. For it is as true of the Japanese as ofthe proverbial Russian, though in a more scientific sense, that if youscratch him you will find the ancestral Tartar. But it is no less truethat the descendants of this rude forefather have now taken on a polishof which their own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint reflection. Thesurface was perfected after the substance was formed. Our word finish, with its double meaning, expresses both the process and the result. 

There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in mindsthat lack originality--the spirit of imitation. Though consequent enoughupon a want of initiative, the results of this trait appear anything butnatural to people of a more progressive past. The proverbial collar andpair of spurs look none the less odd to the stranger for being a mentalinstead of a bodily habit. Something akin to such a case of unnaturalselection has there taken place. The orderly procedure of naturalevolution was disastrously supplemented by man. For the fact that inthe growth of their tree of knowledge the branches developed out of allproportion to the trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting. 

From before the time when they began to leave records of their actionsthe Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of merchandise, but ofideas. They have invariably shown the most advanced free-trade spiritin preferring to take somebody else's ready-made articles rather thanto try to produce any brand-new conceptions themselves. They continueto follow the same line of life. A hearty appreciation of the things ofothers is still one of their most winning traits. What they took theygrafted bodily upon their ancestral tree, which in consequence came topresent a most unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlikeother nations in wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter wasslightly excessive, they were peculiar in that they never assimilatedwhat they took. They simply inserted it upon the already existinggrowth. There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by thatindigenous Japanese sap, taste. But like grafts generally, the foreignboughs were not much modified by their new life-blood, nor was the treein its turn at all affected by them. Connected with it only as separableparts of its structure, the cuttings might have been lopped off againwithout influencing perceptibly the condition of the foster-parent stem. The grafts in time grew to be great branches, but the trunk remainedthrough it all the trunk of a sapling. In other words, the nation grewup to man's estate, keeping the mind of its childhood. 

What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans and ofthe Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in one longchain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea copied China, andlastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner they successivelybecame possessed of a civilization which originally was not the propertyof any one of them. In the eagerness they all evinced in purloiningwhat was not theirs, and in the perfect content with which they thenproceeded to enjoy what they had taken, they remind us forcibly ofthat happy-go-lucky class in the community which prefers to live onquestionable loans rather than work itself for a living. Like those sameindividuals, whatever interest the Far Eastern people may succeed inraising now, Nature will in the end make them pay dearly for their lackof principal. 

The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanicalmixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical compound. For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown into itscaldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no combinationresulted. The power to fuse was wanting. Capability to evolve anythingis not one of the marked characteristics of the Far East. Indeed, thetendency to spontaneous variation, Nature's mode of making experiments, would seem there to have been an enterprising faculty that was exhaustedearly. Sleepy, no doubt, from having got up betimes with the dawn, thesedwellers in the far lands of the morning began to look upon their dayas already well spent before they had reached its noon. They grew oldyoung, and have remained much the same age ever since. What they werecenturies ago, that at bottom they are to-day. Take away the Europeaninfluence of the last twenty years, and each man might almost be hisown great-grandfather. In race characteristics he is yet essentially thesame. The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have beengradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits, stagnatinginfluences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the greatquality of impersonality. 

If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of countrywhose northern and southern edges are determined by certain limitingisotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall findthat we have included in a relatively small extent of surface almostall the nations of note in the world, past or present. Now if we examinethis belt, and compare the different parts of it with one another, weshall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peoples inhabiting it growsteadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradationof spirit, that one is tempted to ascribe it to cosmic rather thanto human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the humancomplexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black atthe equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner, the sense ofself grows more intense as we follow in the wake of the setting sun, andfades steadily as we advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal than the one before. We stand at thenearer end of the scale, the Far Orientals at the other. If with us theI seems to be of the very essence of the soul, then the soul of the FarEast may be said to be Impersonality. 

Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more interestingas a factor. For what it betokens of these peoples in particular maysuggest much about man generally. It may mark a stride in theory, if astandstill in practice. Possibly it may help us to some understandingof ourselves. Not that it promises much aid to vexed metaphysicalquestions, but as a study in sociology it may not prove so vain. 

And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said tobe peculiarly opportune just now. For it lies at the bottom of the mostpressing questions of the day. Of the two great problems that stare theWestern world in the face at the present moment, both turn to it forsolution. Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of those who think, socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant cry of those who donot, alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or thefalsity of the sense of self. 

For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feelingwe call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhistswould have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes asdoes the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope, --less enduring even thanthe flitting phantasmagoria of a dream. If the ego be but the passingshadow of the material brain, at the disintegration of the gray matterwhat will become of us? Shall we simply lapse into an indistinguishablepart of the vast universe that compasses us round? At the thought weseem to stand straining our gaze, on the shore of the great sea ofknowledge, only to watch the fog roll in, and hide from our view eventhose headlands of hope that, like beseeching hands, stretch out intothe deep. 

So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, whatmotive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinarymortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for theadvancement of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long tolabor energetically for what should profit only the common weal. Takeaway the stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at once. For with most men the promptings of personal advantage only affordsufficient incentive to effort. Destroy this force, then anyconsideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified, itis raised instantly into an axiom of life. The community, in that case, becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence. Socialism, then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable sequence. That eventhe Far Oriental, with all his numbing impersonality, has not touchedthis goal may at least suggest that individuality is a fact. 

But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?

Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takesplace, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sinkinto insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicledby the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but thechild is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others. Yet to that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does itseem that the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universalis it that probably no human being has escaped its influence. Thoughsubjective purely, it has more vividness than any external event;and though strictly intrinsic to life, it is more startling than anyaccident of fate or fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once sosingular and yet so general, is nothing less than the sudden revelationto him one day of the fact of his own personality. 

Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to sensitivenessas the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by the five bodilysenses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one we call commonsense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of waking up. All atonce he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has aboutit a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter;he now first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly usheredbefore being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself. 

If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothingreassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last. For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shakeoff. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannotbut be at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he imagines itan idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not confideto any one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long afterwards, when he has learned to live as a matter of course with his ever-presentghost, does he discover that others have had like familiars themselves. 

Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight ofsoul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler natures, the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the equator, revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within. But inwhatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality, when firstrealized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, full grownin the brain. From the moment when we first remember ourselves we seemto be as old as we ever seem to others afterwards to become. We grow, indeed, in knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, as our years increase, but deep down in our heart of hearts we are still essentially the same. To be sure, people pay us more deference than they did, which suggestsa doubt at times whether we may not have changed; small boys of asucceeding generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly tosmile, as we think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it. For at bottom we are not conscious of change from that morning, longago, when first we realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as wefelt old then. We are but amused at the world's discrimination where wecan detect no difference. 

Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once asmind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind. All thehigher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have experiencedsome such realization of individual identity. However that may be, certainly to all races of men has come this revelation; only the degreein which they have felt its force has differed immensely. It is onething to the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and quite another matter to anenergetic, nervous American. Facts, fancies, faiths, all show how wideis the variance in feelings. With them no introspective [greek]cnzhiseauton overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as withthose of old possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays todistress. Too apt is it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double. Too often does it play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no one save its unfortunate victim suspects. The hauntinghorror of his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than KenelmChillingly's only too common a curse. To this companionship, paradoxicalthough it sound, is principally due the peculiar loneliness ofchildhood. For nothing is so isolating as a persistent idea which onedares not confide. 

And yet, --stranger paradox still, --was there ever any one willing toexchange his personality for another's? Who can imagine foregoing hisown self? Nay, do we not cling even to its outward appearance? Is therea man so poor in all that man holds dear that he does not keenly resentbeing accidentally mistaken for his neighbor? Surely there must besomething more than mirage in this deep-implanted, widespread instinctof human race. 

But however strong the conviction now of one's individuality, is thereaught to assure him of its continuance beyond the confines of itspresent life? Will it awake on death's morrow and know itself, orwill it, like the body that gave it lodgment, disintegrate again intoindistinguishable spirit dust? Close upon the heels of the existingconsciousness of self treads the shadow-like doubt of its hereafter. Will analogy help to answer the grewsome riddle of the Sphinx? Are thelaws we have learned to be true for matter true also for mind? Matter wenow know is indestructible; yet the form of it with which we once wereso fondly familiar vanishes never to return. Is a like fate to be thelot of the soul? That mind should be capable of annihilation is asinconceivable as that matter should cease to be. Surely the spirit wefeel existing round about us on every side now has been from ever, andwill be for ever to come. But that portion of it which we each know asself, is it not like to a drop of rain seen in its falling through theair? Indistinguishable the particle was in the cloud whence it came;indistinguishable it will become again in the ocean whither it is bound. Its personality is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on theone hand to an equally vast impersonal on the other. Thus seers preachedin the past; so modern science is hinting to-day. With us the idea seemsthe bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon asthe fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as the impioussuggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was reverenced as asacred tenet of religion. 

Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's lifeof which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly impersonalstates is the personal consciousness of which he is made aware: the onethe infantile existence that precedes his boyish discovery, the otherthe gloom that grows with years, --two twilights that fringe the twoborders of his day. But with the Far Oriental, life is all twilight. Forin Japan and China both states are found together. There, side by sidewith the present unconsciousness of the babe exists the belief in acoming unconsciousness for the man. So inseparably blended are the twothat the known truth of the one seems, for that very bond, to carrywith it the credentials of the other. Can it be that the personal, progressive West is wrong, and the impersonal, impassive East right?Surely not. Is the other side of the world in advance of us inmind-development, even as it precedes us in the time of day; or just asour noon is its night, may it not be far in our rear? Is not its seemingwisdom rather the precociousness of what is destined never to go far?

Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of along ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of thatbewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had eventuallyceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out overnight in agraveyard, on their way home, by his humorously inclined companions; andwho, on awaking alone, in a still dubious condition, looked aroundhim in surprise, rubbed his eyes two or three times to no purpose, andfinally muttered in a tone of awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'mthe first to rise, or I'm a long way behind time!"

Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution resultsin bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these people arenow, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point at which weall set out. They are still in that childish state of developmentbefore self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature. Animpersonal race seems never to have fully grown up. 

Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive featureof the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy particularattention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant thoughts aboutourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities of a civilizationwhich is the modern eighth wonder of the world. We shall see this as welook at what these people are, at what they were, and at what they hopeto become; not historically, but psychologically, as one might perceive, were he but wise enough, in an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks, that one from which it fell, and that other which from it will rise. These three states, which we may call its potential past, present, andfuture, may be observed and studied in three special outgrowths of arace's character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in itsreligion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed the spiritof its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or sciences, iswrapped up its present life; in its religion lie enfolded its dreamingsof a future. From out each of these three subjects in the Far Eastimpersonality stares us in the face. Upon this quality as a foundationrests the Far Oriental character. It is individually rather thannationally that I propose to scan it now. It is the action of aparticle in the wave of world-development I would watch, rather thanthe propagation of the wave itself. Inferences about the movement of thewhole will follow of themselves a knowledge of the motion of its parts. 

But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment atthe man as he appears in his relation to the community. Such a glancewill suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that pervades thepeople. 

However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man maybe, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much asnoticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth, his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps assufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention ofone's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to theworld of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because allmen there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the firstevent, and mention only the last two episodes, about which our nationalastuteness asserts no such effacing equality. 

Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the biographyof an average man, let us look at these three momentous occasions in thecareer of a Far Oriental. 

Chapter 2. Family. 

In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered intothis world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even accorded thedistinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead only the much lessspecial honor of a birth-year. Not that he begins his separate existenceotherwise than is the custom of mortals generally, at a definite instantof time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of thefact. On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he isspoken of as a year old, and this same age he continues to be consideredin most simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the nextcalendar year. When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he iscredited with another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's dayis a common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversaryfor his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and Korea. Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth up at leastone year and possibly two older than one really is, it lies beyond ourpresent purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident that woman has had novoice in the framing of such a chronology. One would hardly imaginethat man had either, so astronomic is the system. A communistic ageis however but an unavoidable detail of the general scheme whose mostsuggestive feature consists in the subordination of the actual birthdayof the individual to the fictitious birthday of the community. For it isnot so much the want of commemoration shown the subject as the characterof the commemoration which is significant. Some slight notice is indeedpaid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their observanceis quite secondary in importance to that of the great impersonalanniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the fifth day ofthe fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of humanityinto the world with an impersonality worthy of the French revolutionarycalendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls, andcommemorates the birth of girls generally, the advent of the universalfeminine, as one may say. The second is a corresponding anniversary forboys. Owing to its sex, the latter is the greater event of the two, andin consequence of its most conspicuous feature is styled the festival offishes. The fishes are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to sixfeet in length, tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground andtipped with a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and thetail enable the wind to inflate the body so that it floats abouthorizontally, swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line afterthe manner of a living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and areset up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born duringthe year. On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed intoeighty square miles of aquarium. 

For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particularanniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else uponeverything in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Suchsubstitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, althoughexceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce toself-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tendinevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of thecommunity. 

It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage. Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in theresult, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact, itis not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply made acat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction, enteredinto by the parent and conducted through regular marriage brokers. Init he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge for being thusbartered out of what might be the better half of his life, he takeseventually on the next succeeding generation. 

His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life. For then only can his personal existence be properly considered tobegin. By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to thesepeople of almost more consequence than living folk, and of much moreindividual distinction. Particularly is this the case in China andKorea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form, is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual receives thatrecognition which was denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuarytablet is set up to him in the house and duly worshipped; on thecontinent the ancestors are given a dwelling of their own, and evenmore devotedly reverenced. But in both places the cult is anything butfunereal. For the ancestral tombs are temples and pleasure pavilions atthe same time, consecrated not simply to rites and ceremonies, but tofamily gatherings and general jollification. And the fortunate defunctmust feel, if he is still half as sentient as his dutiful descendantssuppose, that his earthly life, like other approved comedies, has endedwell. 

Important, however, as these critical points in his career may bereckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equallyepochal to the man himself. In a community where next to no note isever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the specialsignificance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep intohis own mind. While in regard to his death, although it may be highlyflattering for him to know that he will certainly become somebody whenhe shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognitionis scarcely timely enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is soearth-tied, after all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seemimmaterial as well as be so. 

With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this wholesalemanner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in the midst ofsuch a civilization, would know himself. He certainly would derive butscanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did. Even Nirvana mightseem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal, not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might well deem his separateexistence the shadow of a shade and embrace Buddhism from mere force ofcircumstances. 

Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-orientalcareer is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points. From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal. In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life presentsitself to these races a totally different affair from what it seems tous. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of socio-biology, ifone may so express it. 

In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence, isnot the individual, but the family. 

We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our pretensions soprominently as sometimes to tread on other people's prejudices of a likenature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the inheritance. For with alogic which does us questionable credit, we are proud of our ancestorsin direct proportion to their remoteness from ourselves, thus permittingDemocracy to revenge its insignificance by smiling at our self-imposedsatire. To esteem a man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkableblood he has inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relativesto all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closelythat affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrancesnotwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take inthe members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs fromviewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our owneyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relativesrevolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaictheory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personalstandpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly torotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign toour longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, thefundamental principles upon which family consideration is based arewidely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern socialuniverse turns on a patricentric pivot. 

Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unitdepends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhatmodified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of theirless advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent. From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it isthe idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. TheEmpire is one great family; the family is a little empire. 

The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is wellknown, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nationsmay be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but mostnations outgrew it. 

Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is, not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it;that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. Itis certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern isconstantly changing as time merges one combination of its elementsinto another, that on the other side of the globe this set should haveremained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years, in spite ofthe altered conditions of existence, in spite of an immense advance incivilization, such a primitive state of society has continued there tothe present day, in all its essentials what it was when as nomads therace forefathers wandered peacefully or otherwise over the plains ofCentral Asia. The principle helped them to expand; it has simply crampedthem ever since. For, instead of dissolving like other antiquated views, it has become, what it was bound to become if it continued to last, crystallized into an institution. It had practically reached thiscondition when it received a theoretical, not to say a theologicalrecognition which gave it mundane immortality. A couple of millenniumsago Confucius consecrated filial duty by making it the basis of theChinese moral code. His hand was the finishing touch of fossilification. For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one has so much asdreamt of changing it. The idea of confuting Confucius would be anact of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit. Not thatthe inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority of thephilosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of the people. Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have consisted in diviningthe genius of the other. Confucius formulated the prevailing practice, and in so doing helped to make it perpetual. He gave expression to thenational feeling, and like expressions, generally his, served to stampthe idea all the more indelibly upon the national consciousness. 

In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highlyunnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life becamefetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of mutual advantagehardened into restrictions by which the young were hopelessly tetheredto the old. Midway in its course the race undertook to turn round andface backwards, as it journeyed on. Its subsequent advance could benothing but slow. 

The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense. Fromhim emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts. Anyother member of it is as incapable of individual expression as is thehand, or the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian doctors ofdivinity might appropriately administer psychically to the egoisticthe rebuke of the Western physician to the too self-analytic youth who, finding that, after eating, his digestion failed to give him what heconsidered its proper sensations, had come to consult the doctor as tohow it ought to feel. "Feel! young man, " he was answered, "you oughtnot to be aware that you have a digestion. " So with them, a normallyconstituted son knows not what it is to possess a spontaneity of hisown. Indeed, this very word "own, " which so long ago in our own tonguetook to itself the symbol of possession, well exemplifies his dependentstate. China furnishes the most conspicuous instance of the wantof individual rights. A Chinese son cannot properly be said to ownanything. The title to the land he tills is vested absolutely in thefamily, of which he is an undivided thirtieth, or what-not. Even theadministration of the property is not his, but resides in the family, represented by its head. The outward symbols of ownership testify to thefact. The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields bear the namesof families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is the proprietor, and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all theconstituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the Chinesefamily much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his personal stateis concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav. For he lives at home, under the immediate control of the paternal will--in the most completeof serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence becomes a communal affair. From the family mansion, or set of mansions, in which all its membersdwell, to the family mausoleum, to which they will all eventually beborne, a man makes his life journey in strict company with his kin. 

A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life. Howessentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it. 

To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event--for thehousehold, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer. Hecries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. If thebaby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl, there is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case themore impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophicevidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds make very prettyspeeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in the babe lotterythe family is considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engenderedproves how little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to itsobject. The reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sexlies of course in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of thefamily line. The unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light ofa possible progenitor. A boy is already potentially a father; whereas agirl, if she marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family intoanother, and is relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is, however, to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities ofadoption. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils. 

From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance intopublic life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shouldersof a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender merciesof a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutivenessof the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of theperformance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round withburdens half their own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby'shead seems a natural part of their childish ego. 

An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive. That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to anotherproves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturityof the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation, theconsequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow upto, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be questionedwhether it does not do so with the more haste; on the same principlethat a runner who has less distance to travel not only accomplishes hiscourse quicker, but moves with relatively greater speed, or as a smallplanet grows old not simply sooner, but comparatively faster than alarger one. Jupiter is still in his fiery youth, while the moon issenile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence beganlong before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormallyearly development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career ofinactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance ofthe evidence which her present precocity affords against her futurepossibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to hercharge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and nowon the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterestedspectator of the proceedings. 

As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministeredto and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home lifeconsists of attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bearsto that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently bythe comparative importance attached to precepts on the subject in therespective moral codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a titheof the Mosaic law, while the same injunction constitutes at least onehalf of the Confucian precepts. To the Chinese child all the parentalcommands are not simply law to the letter, they are to be anticipatedin the spirit. To do what he is told is but the merest fraction of hisduty; theoretically his only thought is how to serve his sire. The piousAeneas escaping from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes toa question of domestic precedence, --whose first care, it will beremembered, was for his father, his next for his son, and his last forhis wife. He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial pietyis the greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son isa monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly beotherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree ofpatriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically divine. This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the individual, as ithas never been outgrown by the race. 

Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly bespecified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping withthe family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic" to starton, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up incidentallywhat ideas he may. This book is followed by the "Century of Surnames, " acatalogue of all the clan names in China, studied like the last for thesake of the characters, although the suggestion of the importance of thefamily contained in it is probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Nextcomes the "Thousand Character Classic, " a wonderful epic as a feat ofskill, for of the thousand characters which it contains not a singleone is repeated, an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by theenforced reader. Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict theconsequent disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more bookssucceed these first volumes, differing from one another in form, butin substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do, of historyand ethics combined. For tales and morals are inseparably associated bypious antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with specialreference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormallyvirtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fateneeded as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Exceptfor the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part ofthe curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist ofSunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by theerudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work, for preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum ofDionysius of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching byexample" would seem there to have become modified into "history isfiliosophy teaching by example. " For in the instructive anecdotes everyother form of merit is depicted as second to that of being a dutifulson. To the practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations aresacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn of theleaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to the pitchof emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds. Portraits of thepast, possibly colored, present that estimable trait in so exalteda type that to any less filial a people they would simply detercompetition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and no doubt resolves torival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. Inone tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterityfor having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of familydestitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father. In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to pokefun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parentswhich he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation. Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a slavethat he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due honor hisanything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his neighbors andthen squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living. Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different line, theeventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the generalimmorality of the plot. 

Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A verysimilar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the twoconsisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two casesare much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little whenwe consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student isreading, in the other the Chinaman's. 

If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he isset to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but hisfather's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why shouldhe adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other businessshould he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a partof the existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father andheir therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness isrecognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of aninheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if herseverance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As forhis individual predilection in the matter, nature has consideratelyconformed to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance, because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. Heinherits the family business as a necessary part of the family name. Heis born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness forit. But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generationsof practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast dealof technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in allbranches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinitesuperiority of Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmenis world-known. On the other hand the tendency of the occupation in theabstract to swallow up the individual in the concrete is as evident totheory as it is patent in practice. Eventually the man is lost in themanner. The very names of trades express the fact. The Japanese word forcabinet-maker, for example, means literally cutting-thing-house, andis now applied as distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally aswell as practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introductionto the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera, the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie. 

If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth beborn of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if hewere so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover inthe school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, heproceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application whichis eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work tosteep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anythingelse. As might be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayingsof the past more meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of puttingthere. He becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunatefor the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for hemight disagree to his detriment with his own commentators. 

Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however, is not dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfullyflourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government abetsthe practice to its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction, for itsposts are the prizes of proficiency. Through the study of the classicslies the only entrance to political power. To become a mandarin one musthave passed a series of competitive examinations on these very subjects, and competition in this impersonal field is most keen. For while popularenthusiasm for philosophy for philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show symptoms of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where theoutcome of it is so substantial. Erudition carries there all earthlyemoluments in its train. For the man who can write the most scholasticessay on the classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor andmore wealth by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens. Chinais a student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantlyconvertible into unlimited pelf. 

In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally. It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinesebureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students, until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time ofthe Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continuallytwo beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. Thehappy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliersof Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectaclesnecessitated by the too diligent study of German text, and arrest chancedisturbers of the public peace for a miserably small salary per month. 

Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that briefMay time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by alldramatic laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the kind. Sad to say, he is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we understand theword, is a thing unknown to the Far East; fortunately, indeed, for thepossession there of the tender passion would be worse than useless. Itsindulgence would work no end of disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much misery upon its individual victim. Its exercisewould probably be classed with kleptomania and other like excesses ofpurely personal consideration. The community could never permit thepractice, for it strikes at the very root of their whole social system. 

The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of theomission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp ofman's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the lossupon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now. 

If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the worldat large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, itis assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before, the world within excludes the world without. For of all our humanpassions none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one otherbeing in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and wedo so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has aboutit a touch of the sublime. The other millions are as though they werenot, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to havegrown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judiciousdepopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewishmyth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl ofthe cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our soulsthrow aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as theyreally are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never daredbreathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems fore-destinedto understand. The long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide, and our personality, pent up from the time of its inception for verymistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable rush. For then the mostreticent becomes confiding; the most self-contained expands. Then everydetail of our past lives assumes an importance which even we had notdivined. To her we tell them all, --our boyish beliefs, our youthfulfancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty with the wise, the littlewith the great. Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seemsquite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that we plucked upon our pathway, we heap them in her lap, certain that even the poorest will not betossed aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we may when shebends her head so lovingly to each. 

As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no lessclearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we would beseems as realizable as what we were. Seen by another beside ourselves, our castles in the air take on something of the substance ofstereoscopic sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid facts for theirreality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle likea true palace of the East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyondour reach. And as we talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floatingoff into an empyrean of our own like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on into the far-away depths of the unfathomablesky. 

It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when anotherbelieves so absolutely in us. Our most secret thoughts are no longerthings to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them. Whatever doubt mayhave shadowed us as to our own imaginings disappears before the smileof her appreciation. That her appreciation may be prejudiced is not apossibility we think of then. She understands us, or seems to do so toour own better understanding of ourselves. Happy the man who is thusunderstood! Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eagerwish to comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he nevercomes to see too clearly. 

No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental. He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of hisself-illusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thusrevealing, realize. No loving appreciation urges him on toward theattainment of his own ideal. That incitement to be what he would seem tobe, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel. Custom has sofar fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate has vanished. Hehas now nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear. For she is not hislove; she is only his wife, --what is left of a romance when the romanceis left out. Worse still, she never was anything else. He has not somuch as a memory of her, for he did not marry her for love; he may notlove of his own accord, nor for the matter of that does he wish to doso. If by some mischance he should so far forget to forget himself, itwere much better for him had he not done so, for the choice of a brideis not his, nor of a bridegroom hers. Marriage to a Far Oriental isthe most important mercantile transaction of his whole life. It is, therefore, far too weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthfulindiscretion; for although the person herself is of lamentably littleaccount in the bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances ismost material to it. So she is contracted for with the same care onewould exercise in the choice of any staple business commodity. Theparticular sample is not vital to the trade, but the grade of goods is. She is selected much as the bride of the Vicar of Wakefield chose herwedding-gown, only that the one was at least cut to suit, while theother is not. It is certainly easier, if less fitting, to get a wife assome people do clothes, not to their own order, but ready made; all themore reason when the bargain is for one's son, not one's self. So theFar East, which looks at the thing from a strictly paternal standpointand ignores such trifles as personal preferences, takes its boy to thebroker's and fits him out. That the object of such parental care doesnot end by murdering his unfortunate spouse or making way with himselfsuggests how dead already is that individuality which we deem to be ofthe very essence of the thing. 

Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existingfamily for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participantsbeing only lay figures in the affair. Sometimes the father decides thematter himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco parentiscalls for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension of thesuffrage has gradually crept even into patriarchal institutions. Thefamily then assemble, sit in solemn conclave on the question, anddecide it by vote. Of course the interested parties are not asked theiropinion, as it might be prejudiced. The result of the conference mustbe highly gratifying. To have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one'srelatives cannot but be satisfactory--to the electors. The outcome ofthis ballot, like that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the bestunobjectionable mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quiteto fulfil one's ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classesof impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, theirconseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is wellknown, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form devoidof substance. It begins impressively with a dual ceremony, the civilcontract, which amounts to a contract of civility between the parties, and a religious rite to render the same perpetual, and there it is tooapt to end. 

So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect onthe race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be anything, the second must in the end be everything. For however trifling it be inthe individual instance, it goes on accumulating with each successivegeneration, like compound interest. The choosing of a wife by familysuffrage is not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, itis a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldomdevelops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is noexception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward himremains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors havebeen similarly circumscribed. 

As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps into further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity ofdemonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond ourpower. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletonsof dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the scienceof grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our ownpremises, only rising above them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye viewof our neighbor's estates. Such a survey has at least one advantage: thewhole field of view appears perfectly plain. 

Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position, we canperceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in increasingthe personality of our race: for the reason namely that psychicalsimilarity determines the selection. At first sight, indeed, sucha natural affinity would seem to have little or nothing to do withmarriage. As far as outsiders are capable of judging, unlikes appear tofancy one another quite as gratuitously as do likes. Connubial couplesare often anything but twin souls. Yet our own dual use of the word"like" bears historic witness to the contrary. For in this expressionwe have a record from early Gothic times that men liked others for beinglike themselves. Since then, our feelings have not changed materially, although our mode of showing them is slightly less intense. In thosesimple days stranger and enemy were synonymous terms, and theirobjects were received in a corresponding spirit. In our present refinedcivilization we hurl epithets instead of spears, and content ourselveswith branding as heterodox the opinions of another which do not happento coincide with our own. The instinct of self-development naturallybegets this self-sided view. We insensibly find those persons congenialwhose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond doto one another, nearer and nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then, that in the most important case of all the rule should suddenly ceaseto hold? Is it to be presumed that even Socrates chose Xantippe for herremarkable contrariety to himself?

Mere physical attraction is another matter. Corporeally considered, mennot infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the phenomenallytall with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout with thedistressingly slender. But even such inartistic juxtapositions are muchless common than we are apt at times to think. For it must never beforgotten that the exceptional character of the phenomena renders themconspicuous, the customary more consorted combinations failing to exciteattention. 

Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does nothold psychically. Nature sanctions the one while she discountenances theother. Instead of the forethought she once bestowed upon the body, itreceives at her hands now but the scantiest attention. Its developmenthas ceased to be an object with her. For some time past almost all hercare has been devoted to the evolution of the soul. The consequence isthat physically man is much less specialized than many other animals. In other words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitiveextermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of mammal. His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern, such asprevailed generally in the more youthful stages of organic life--one notspecially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it not for his cerebralconvolutions he could not compete for an instant in the struggle forexistence, and even the monkey would reign in his stead. But brainis more effective than biceps, and a being who can kill his opponentfarther off than he can see him evidently needs no great excellence ofbody to survive his foe. 

The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to mind, but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence. With thesame zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations were seized uponand perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and rendered hereditary. Now if opposites were to fancy and wed one another, such fortunateimprovements would soon be lost. They would be scattered over thecommunity at large even it they escaped entire neutralization. Toprevent so disastrous a result nature implants a desire for resemblance, which desire man instinctively acts upon. 

Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to beexpected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own endby allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement, however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of contentconsists of those qualities held to be most essential by the individualsconcerned, although not necessarily so appearing to other people. Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the larvae state ofdesires. They are none the less potent upon the man's personality onthat account, for the wish is always father to its own fulfilment. 

The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on thechild, it works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is wellrecognized, tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last thing tobe looked for in a far-eastern couple. Where custom requires a wife tofollow dutifully in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go outtogether, there is small opportunity for intercourse by the way, evenwere there the slightest inclination to it, which there is not. The appearance of the pair on an excursion is a walking satire onsociability, for the comicality of the connection is quite unperceivedby the performers. In the privacy of the domestic circle the separation, if less humorous, is no less complete. Each lives in a world of his own, largely separate in fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancyin Japan. On the continent a friend of the husband would see little ornothing of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meetan upper servant in a friend's house. Such a semi-attached relationshipdoes not conduce to much mutual understanding. 

The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no particularcomment. As soon as he has children borne him he is raised ipso factofrom the position of a common soldier to that of a subordinate officerin the family ranks. But his opportunities for the expression ofindividuality are not one whit increased. He has simply advanced a pegin a regular hierarchy of subjection. From being looked after himselfhe proceeds to look after others. Such is the extent of the change. Even should he chance to be the eldest son of the eldest son, andthus eventually end by becoming the head of the family, he cannotconsistently consider himself. There is absolutely no place in hissocial cosmos for so particular a thing as the ego. 

With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said ofhis whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after all. 

Chapter 3. Adoption. 

But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by sodoing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are certaincustoms in vogue among these peoples which would seem to indicate thateven so generic a thing as the family is too personal to serve them forultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only the idea of the familythat is really important, a case of abstraction of an abstract. Thesesuggestive customs are the far-eastern practices of adoption andabdication. 

Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keepingof any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species ofself-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves whenfortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of counteractingthe inequalities of fate. That such is the plain unglamoured view of theprocedure is shown by the age at which the object is adopted. Usuallythe future son or daughter enters the adoptive household as an infant, intentionally so on the part of the would-be parents. His ignorance ofa previous relationship largely increases his relative value; for thepossibility of his making comparisons in his own mind between a formerstate of existence and the present one unfavorable to the latter isnot pleasant for the adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquiredyoung. The amusement derived from his company is thus seen to bedistinctly paramount to all other considerations. No one cares soheartily to own a dog which has been the property of another; a fortioriof a child. It is clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe isadopted. If such were the case, if like the ancient Romans all a manwanted was the continuance of the family line, he would naturally waituntil the last practicable moment; for he would thus save both care andexpense. In the Far East adoption is quite a different affair. Thereit is a genealogical necessity--like having a father or mother. It is, indeed, of almost more importance. For the great desideratum to thesepeoples is not ancestors but descendants. Pedigrees in the land ofthe universal opposite are not matters of bequest but of posthumousreversion. A man is not beholden to the past, he looks forward to thefuture for inherited honors. No fame attaches to him for having had anillustrious grandfather. On the contrary, it is the illustrious grandsonwho reflects some of his own greatness back upon his grandfather. Ifa man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always has anotherchance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be ennobled throughthe merits of those who succeed him. Such is the immemorial law of theland. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has only one objection:it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious man who unfortunately lacksability himself has to wait too long for vicarious recognition. Theobjection is like that incident to the making of a country seat out ofa treeless plain by planting the same with saplings. About the time thetrees begin to be worth having the proprietary landscape-gardener diesof old age. However, as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestralgrowth of timber, he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own familytrees. Natural offspring are on the whole easier to get, and moresatisfactory when got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rushinto matrimony. If in despite of his precipitation fate perverselyrefuse to grant him children, he must endeavor to make good the omissionby artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct, hechooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern landshe must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance, he can onlyadopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own. But inJapan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an act as theperpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed unwise in thatprogressive land to hinder him from unconsciously bettering it by theway. He is consequently permitted to adopt anybody. As people are by nomeans averse to being adopted, the power to adopt whom he will gives himmore voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had inthe selection of a more natural one. 

The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family heenters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at thetime the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at firstsome slight confusion among his acquaintance. This would be no worse, however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, andintercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only restcontent with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatalfacility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result isbewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons astheir forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-dayto unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after. So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that theybandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fittingthat there should be some slight preparation in this world for a futuretransmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practicecan be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreignersit proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom youhave not met for some time, you can never be quite sure how to accosthim. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how goes it?" as likely as not hereplies, "Finely. But I am no longer Green; I have become Brown. I wasadopted last month by my maternal grandfather. " You of course apologizefor your unfortunate mistake, carefully note his change of hue for afuture occasion, and behold, on meeting him the next time you find hehas turned Black. Such a chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling toyour idea of his identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own. The only persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with usunhappy, individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering faceswithout recalling their accompanying names. 

Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. Aniece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of coursebe adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out of theevery-day run, as she could never be included in the household on strictbusiness principles. 

The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples. Othersmay find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament. A man maybe the father of a large and thriving family and yet be as destitutepatriarchally as if he had not a child to his name. His offspring maybe of the wrong sex; they may all be girls. In this untoward eventthe father has something more on his hands than merely a houseful ofdaughters to dispose of. In addition to securing sons-in-law, he must, unless he would have his ancestral line become extinct, providehimself with a son. The simplest procedure in such a case is to combinerelationships in a single individual, and the most self-evident personto select for the dual capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter. This is the course pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spousefor the senior sister; he is at the same time formally taken in as a sonby the family whose cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the headof the house. Strange to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honorsdoes not seem to prove inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects tomarrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel elsewhere. Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed, to "go out as ason-in-law, " as the Japanese idiom hath it, is considered demeaningto the matrimonial domestic. Like other household help he wears toopatently the badge of servitude. "If you have three koku of rice to yourname, don't do it, " is the advice of the local proverb--a proverb whosewarning against marrying for money is the more suggestive for beinglaunched in a land where marrying for love is beyond the pale ofrespectability. To barter one's name in this mercenary manner is lookedupon as derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we have seen, topart with it for any less direct remuneration is not attended with theslightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the unfortunate hadnone to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case of taking awayfrom a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a thing is custom. It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice interposes some limit to thisfictitious method of acquiring children. A trifling predilection for thereal thing in sonships is absolutely vital, even to the continuance ofthe artificial variety. For if one generation ever went in exclusivelyfor adoption, there would be no subsequent generation to adopt. 

As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system ofsociety, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with evengreater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead withoutthe necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he can cease tolive while still practically existing; for it is always open to the headof a family to abdicate. 

The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound. Weinstinctively associate the act with a king. Even the more democraticexpression resign suggests at once an office of public or quasi publiccharacter. To talk of abdicating one's private relationships soundsabsurd; one might as well talk of electing his parents, it would seem tous. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern social possibilities comes fromour having indulged in digressions from our more simple nomadic habits. If in imagination we will return to our ancestral muttons and the thenexisting order of things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; forin those early bucolic days every father was a king. Family economicswere the only political questions in existence then. The clan was theunit. Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims theonly kind of international quarrels. The patriarch was both father tohis people and king. 

As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point wherecohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency could nolonger be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up into separatebodies, each of them a family by itself. In their turn these againdivided, and so the process went on. This principle has workeduniversally, the only difference in its action among different racesbeing the greater or less degree of the evolving motion. With us thesocial system has been turning more and more rapidly with time. In theFar East its force, instead of increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its original condition to keep together as asingle mass, so that to-day a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeedin homogeneity, is swayed by a single patriarchal principle. Here, onthe contrary, so rapid has the motion become that even brethren findthemselves scattered to the four winds. 

An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longerreally correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a kingin his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in theMiddle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of state, heabdicated. So in the Far East, when the head of a family has had enoughof active life, he abdicates, and his eldest son reigns in his stead. 

From that moment he ceases to belong to the body politic in any activesense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable toits general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as itwere. He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfittingfirst step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvanabeyond. Such abdication now takes place without particular cause. Aftera certain time of life, and long before a man grows old, it is thefashion thus to make one's bow. 

Chapter 4. Language. 

A man's personal equation, as astronomers call the effect of hisindividuality, is kin, for all its complexity, to those simplealgebraical problems which so puzzled us at school. To solve either wemust begin by knowing the values of the constants that enter into itsexpression. Upon the a b c's of the one, as upon those of the other, depend the possibilities of the individual x. 

Now the constants in any man's equation are the qualities that he hasinherited from the past. What a man does follows from what he is, whichin turn is mostly dependent upon what his ancestors have been; andof all the links in the long chain of mind-evolution, few are moreimportant and more suggestive than language. Actions may at the momentspeak louder than words, but methods of expression have as tell-tale atongue for bygone times as ways of doing things. 

If it should ever fall to my lot to have to settle that exceedinglyvexed Eastern question, --not the emancipation of ancient Greece from thebondage of the modern Turk, but the emancipation of the modern collegestudent from the bond of ancient Greek, --I should propose, as a solutionof the dilemma, the addition of a course in Japanese to the college listof required studies. It might look, I admit, like begging the questionfor the sake of giving its answer, but the answer, I think, wouldjustify itself. 

It is from no desire to parade a fresh hobby-horse upon the universitycurriculum that I offer the suggestion, but because I believe that astudy of the Japanese language would prove the most valuable of poniesin the academic pursuit of philology. In the matter of literature, indeed, we should not be adding very much to our existing store, but weshould gain an insight into the genesis of speech that would put usat least one step nearer to being present at the beginnings of humanconversation. As it is now, our linguistic learning is with most of uslimited to a knowledge of Aryan tongues, and in consequence we not onlyfall into the mistake of thinking our way the only way, which is badenough, but, what is far worse, by not perceiving the other possiblepaths we quite fail to appreciate the advantages or disadvantages offollowing our own. We are the blind votaries of a species of ancestrallanguage-worship, which, with all its erudition, tends to narrow ourlinguistic scope. A study of Japanese would free us from the fetters ofany such family infatuation. The inviolable rules and regulations of ourmother-tongue would be found to be of relative application only. For weshould discover that speech is a much less categorical matter thanwe had been led to suppose. We should actually come to doubtthe fundamental necessity of some of our most sacred grammaticalconstructions; and even our reverenced Latin grammars would lose thatair of awful absoluteness which so impressed us in boyhood. 

An encouraging estimate of a certain missionary puts the amount ofstudy needed by the Western student for the learning of Japanese assufficient, if expended nearer home, to equip him with any three modernEuropean languages. It is certainly true that a completely strangevocabulary, an utter inversion of grammar, and an elaborate system ofhonorifics combine to render its acquisition anything but easy. In itsfundamental principles, however, it is alluringly simple. 

In the first place, the Japanese language is pleasingly destitute ofpersonal pronouns. Not only is the obnoxious "I" conspicuous only byits absence; the objectionable antagonistic "you" is also entirelysuppressed, while the intrusive "he" is evidently too much of a thirdperson to be wanted. Such invidious distinctions of identity apparentlynever thrust their presence upon the simple early Tartar minds. I, you, and he, not being differences due to nature, demanded, to theirthinking, no recognition of man. 

There is about this vagueness of expression a freedom not without itscharm. It is certainly delightful to be able to speak of yourself as ifyou were somebody else, choosing mentally for the occasion any oneyou may happen to fancy, or, it you prefer, the possibility of soaringboldly forth into the realms of the unconditioned. 

To us, at first sight, however, such a lack of specification appearswofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. Socommunistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the tuum--tosay nothing of the claims of a possible third party--would seem to beas fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves destructive to thetrafficking in commodities. Such, nevertheless, is not the result. Onthe contrary, Japanese is as easy and as certain of comprehension as isEnglish. On ninety occasions out of a hundred, the context at once makesclear the person meant. 

In the very few really ambiguous cases, or those in which, for the sakeof emphasis, a pronoun is wanted, certain consecrated expressions areintroduced for the purpose. For eventually the more complex socialrelations of increasing civilization compelled some sort of distantrecognition. Accordingly, compromises with objectionable personalitywere effected by circumlocutions promoted to a pronoun's office, becoming thus pro-pronouns, as it were. Very noncommittal expressionsthey are, most of them, such as: "the augustness, " meaning you; "thathonorable side, " or "that corner, " denoting some third person, the exactterm employed in any given instance scrupulously betokening the relativerespect in which the individual spoken of is held; while with a candor, an indefiniteness, or a humility worthy so polite a people, the I isknown as "selfishness, " or "a certain person, " or "the clumsy one. "

Pronominal adjectives are manufactured in the same way. "The stupidfather, " "the awkward son, " "the broken-down firm, " are "mine. " Werethey "yours, " they would instantly become "the august, venerablefather, " "the honorable son, " "the exalted firm. " [1]

Even these lame substitutes for pronouns are paraded as sparingly aspossible. To the Western student, who brings to the subject a brainthrobbing with personality, hunting in a Japanese sentence for personalreferences is dishearteningly like "searching in the dark for a blackhat which is n't there;" for the brevet pronouns are commonly not onduty. To employ them with the reckless prodigality that characterizesour conversation would strike the Tartar mind like interspersing histalk with unmeaning italics. He would regard such discourse much as wedo those effusive epistles of a certain type of young woman to hermost intimate girl friends, in which every other word is emphaticallyunderlined. 

For the most part, the absolutely necessary personal references areintroduced by honorifics; that is, by honorary or humble expressions. Such is a portion of the latter's duty. They do a great deal ofunnecessary work besides. 

These honorifics are, taken as a whole, one of the most interestingpeculiarities of Japanese, as also of Korean, just as, taken in detail, they are one of its most dangerous pitfalls. For silence is indeedgolden compared with the chagrin of discovering that a speech which youhad meant for a compliment was, in fact, an insult, or the vexation oflearning that you have been industriously treating your servant with thedeference due a superior, --two catastrophes sure to follow the attemptsof even the most cautious of beginners. The language is so thoroughlyimbued with the honorific spirit that the exposure of truth in all itsnaked simplicity is highly improper. Every idea requires to be more orless clothed in courtesy before it is presentable; and the garb demandedby etiquette is complex beyond conception. To begin with, there arecertain preliminary particles which are simply honorific, serving noother purpose whatsoever. In addition to these there are for everyaction a small infinity of verbs, each sacred to a different degreeof respect. For instance, to our verb "to give" corresponds a completesocial scale of Japanese verbs, each conveying the idea a shade morepolitely than its predecessor; only the very lowest meaning anythingso plebeian as simply "to give. " Sets of laudatory or depreciatoryadjectives are employed in the same way. Lastly, the word for "is, "which strictly means "exists, " expresses this existence under threedifferent forms, --in a matter-of-fact, a flowing, or an inflated style;the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of conversation, so to speak, tosuit the person addressed. But three forms being far too few for theneeds of so elaborate a politeness, these are supplemented by manyinterpolated grades. 

Terms of respect are applied not only to those mortals who are held inestimation higher than their fellows, but to all men indiscriminately aswell. The grammatical attitude of the individual toward the speaker isof as much importance as his social standing, I being beneath contempt, and you above criticism. 

Honorifics are used not only on all possible occasions for courtesy, butat times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some instances themost subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a relevancy to anybody. That the commonest objects should bear titles because of theirconnection with some particular person is comprehensible, but whatexcuse can be made for a phrase like the following, "It respectfullydoes that the august seat exists, " all of which simply means "is, " andmay be applied to anything, being the common word--in Japanese it is allone word now--for that apparently simple idea. It would seem a sadwaste of valuable material. The real reason why so much distinguishedconsideration is shown the article in question lies in the fact thatit is treated as existing with reference to the person addressed, andtherefore becomes ipso facto august. 

Here is a still subtler example. You are, we will suppose, at atea-house, and you wish for sugar. The following almost stereotypedconversation is pretty sure to take place. I translate it literally, simply prefacing that every tea-house girl, usually in the firstblush of youth, is generically addressed as "elder sister, "--anotherhonorific, at least so considered in Japan. 

 You clap your hands. (Enter tea-house maiden. )

 You. Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar?

 The T. H. M. The honorable sugar, augustly is it?

 You. So, augustly. 

 The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent). (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar. )

Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugarhonorable? Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to you. But she would have spoken of it by precisely the same respectful title, if she had been obliged to inform you that there was none, in which caseit never could have become yours. Such is politeness. We may note, in passing, that all her remarks and all yours, barring your initialquestion, meant absolutely nothing. She understood you perfectly fromthe first, and you knew she did; but then, if all of us were to say onlywhat were necessary, the delightful art of conversation would soon benothing but a science. 

The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as hisWestern cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces personalities. With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present regard for others issubstituted in its stead. 

A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of thiscourtesy; it is also its cause. 

That politeness should be one of the most marked results ofimpersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will showit to be a fact. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the onetrait exists the other is most developed, while an absence of the secondseems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both ingeneral and in detail. Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward roundthe world, coincidently with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia ismore courteous than Europe, Europe than America. Particular races showthe same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most impersonalnation of Europe, is at the same time the most polite. 

Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces oneto take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man asolitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonalthe people, the more will the community supplant the individual in thepopular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, asit always is to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness, being the means to their enjoyment, develops also. 

A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That wordsshould be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seemto a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike himas actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomaticof a much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as theirlanguage bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctanceto recognizing sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was heldsufficient for a given species, and did duty collectively for bothsexes. Only where a consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyondthe possibility of evasion, did they employ for the male and the femaledistinctive expressions. The more intimate the relation of the objectto man, the more imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beingspossessed a fair number of such special appellatives; for a man isa palpably different sort of person from his grandmother, and amother-in-law from a wife. But it is noteworthy that the artificialaffinities of society were as carefully differentiated as thedistinctions due to sex, while ancestral relationships were deemed moreimportant than either. 

Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed butscant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both sexes share onecommon name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well enough. Inthose few instances where sex enters into the question in a manner notto be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female" are prefixed to thegeneral term. How comparatively rare is the need of such specificationcan be seen from the way in which, with us, in many species, the name ofone sex alone does duty indifferently for both. That of the male is theone usually selected, as in the case of the dog or horse. If, however, it be the female with which man has most to do, she is allowed to bestowher name upon her male partner. Examples of the latter description occurin the use of "cows" for "cattle, " and "hens" for "fowls. " A Japanesecan say only "fowl, " defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or"she-fowl. "

Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human action, sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a pronouncedmisogynism on the part of these people, but to a much more effectiveneglect, a great underlying impersonality. Indifference to woman isbut included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The factbecomes all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. ThatFather Ocean does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the genderof the nouns hints without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesyin the Far Oriental speaker, but to the essential impersonality ofhis mind, embodied now in the very character of the words he uses. AJapanese noun is a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged fromthe childhood of the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does itrepresent that it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but ratherthe outcome of a first vague generality. The word "man, " for instance, means to them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefiniteidea which struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant. Itrepresents not a person, but a thing, a material fact quite innocentof gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the Japanese neveroutgrew. The world continued to present itself to their minds as acollection of things. Nor did their subsequent Chinese education changetheir view. Buddhism simply infused all things with the one universalspirit. 

As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is noteven life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far Eastern mind. 

Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by theirvery impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fetteredfancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lielatent in the sex with which his forefathers humanized their words, never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetryof nature as much as, indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetryunassociated with man. And this, too, curiously enough, in spite of thefact that to explain the cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps onlyadapted, a singularly sexual philosophy. For possibly, like some otherportions of their intellectual wealth, they stole it from India. TheChinese conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea ofsex. According to their notions the earth was begotten. It is truethat with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, whichself-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained, mattersproceeded after the analogy of mankind. The two principles at work werethemselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most unimpassioned ofphilosophers. They were simply a positive essence and a negative one, correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also correlated to male andfemale forces. Through their mutual action were born the earth and theair and the water; from these, in turn, was begotten man. The cosmicalmodus operandi was not creative nor evolutionary, but sexual. The wholescheme suggests an attempt to wed abstract philosophy with primitiveconcrete mythology. 

The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here thephysical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we findallegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensityto appear in pairs. 

This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatiblewith an uninterested disregard of sex where it really exists. It isone thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quiteanother to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs. 

How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen froma glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination of defunctancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first halfrequired little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made;while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed evenless originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. Thegods whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customarysuperhuman strength. If these demigods differed from others of theirclass, it was only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling muchwith man. Even such personification of natural forces, simple enoughto be self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compellingphenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphicnoumena they had begotten. For instance, the sun-goddess, we areinformed, was one day lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking inconsequence of the provoking behavior of her younger brother, by hercuriosity at the sight of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placedbefore the entrance for the purpose. But no Japanese would dream now ofcasting any such reflections, however flattering, upon the face of theorb of day. The sun has become not only quite sexless to him, butas devoid of personality as it is to any Western materialist. Lesserdeities suffered a like unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god, with his belt of drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until heis black in the face, is no longer even indirectly associated with thestorm. As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabitedEastern Asia. Anthropoid foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in thoseengaging qualities that beget love, and through love remembrance, taketheir place. Even Benten, the naturalized Venus, who, like her Hellenicsister, is said to have risen from the sea, is a person quite incapableof inspiring a reckless infatuation. 

Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, thepersonifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling naturewith half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clodsgrew sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and thebeings its own poesy had begotten made merry companionship for man. Thena change crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for wantof facts to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burntthemselves out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old beliefwas consumed. But though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, anunsubstantial presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling atthe touch of science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelikesemblance of what once had been. The dead gods still live in ourlanguage and our art. Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconsciousto the soul, for the memories they have left. 

But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fellin love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmedtheir memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had noclaims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal asif it had never been born. 

The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically, number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as pluralforms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreignstudent, were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fellinto the fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quiteas difficult to memorize, and even more cumbrous to express. Insteadof inflecting the noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noununchanged and add two numerals; thus at times actually employing morewords to express the objects than there are objects to express. Oneof these numerals is a simple number; the other is what is known as anauxiliary numeral, a word as singular in form as in function. Thus, forinstance, "two men" become amplified verbally into "man two individual, "or, as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man. " For inthis respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else, and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of theChinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such elaboratequalification arises from the excessive simplicity of the Japanesenouns. As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a generality thatsimply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly produce any definiteresult. No exact counterpart of these nouns exists in English, butsome idea of the impossibility of the process may be got from ourword "cattle, " which, prolific though it may prove in fact, remainsobstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All Japanese nouns beingof this indefinite description, all require auxiliary numerals. Butas each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a mistake isunpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the etiquetteof these handles to the names of things. 

Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions, which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion, instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, forany lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, enrevanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are aslong as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, theindefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the twolast being conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses, to say nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposedon another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times itsoriginal length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb, according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to makenouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a journalisticepithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copulacombined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a real copula doesnot exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to the prejudices of theold school of logicians, it must be confessed that the Tartars get onvery well without any such couplings to their trains of thought. Butthen we should remember that in their sentences the cart is always putbefore the horse, and so needs only to be pushed, not pulled along. 

The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character ofthe tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a qualityis predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in appositionwith the noun. 

That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sensea copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a naturalstate, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. Inthe first place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. AJapanese does not say, "The scenery is fine, " but simply, "Scenery, fine. " Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such amanner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "Sheis beautiful, " but "She exists beautifully, " would be the Japanese way ofexpressing his admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copulaturns out to be merely an impersonal intransitive verb. 

A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, justas a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a directcontradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, itmust be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammaticallyquite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much iscommon to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further. Not only has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronounsnor pronominal adjectives, --those convenient keepers of places forthe absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary, because the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, notearth-begotten concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at thingsfrom the point of view of nature, not of man, negation takes anotherform. Usually it is introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for themost part, relate to human actions, and it is man, not nature, who isresponsible for the omission in question. After all, it does seem morefitting to say, "I am ignorant of everything, " than "I know nothing. " Itis indeed you who are wanting, not the thing. 

The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subjectof impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a Japanesesentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearlythe inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of Japanese syntax is, thatqualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea iselaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practiceplaces the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch asthe story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about;but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obligedto fashion his whole sentence complete in his brain before he startsto speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartaretymology. There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporalconjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events. The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts. Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives areperformed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being madeto precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, notunlike those experienced by Alice in her looking-glass journey, areoccasioned by this practice. For example, "The merry monarch who endedby falling a victim to profound melancholia" becomes "To profoundmelancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch, " andthe sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, whenchronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite. 

A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absenceof temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added, actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat, " but not "dressed and came. "Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects thatexist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thusto connect consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japaneseidiom. To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities. For aJapanese sentence is a single rounded whole, not a bunch of factsloosely tied together. It is as much a unit in its composition asa novel or a drama is with us. Such artistic periods, however, areanything but convenient. In their nicely contrived involution theystrikingly resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, whereentire shells lie closely packed one within another, --a very marvelof ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must beantipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the ideaentertains us. 

On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence, and are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequenceis that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day thatthey not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are muchgiven to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well toadopt. Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action, as considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In thisprecedence accorded the impersonal element in language over thepersonal, we observe again the comparative importance assigned the two. In Japanese estimation, the first place belongs to nature, the secondonly to man. 

As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man playsin their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is acommon practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea, isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (whichmeans "as to, " the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out fordistinction is far more likely to be the object of the sentence thanits subject. The habit is analogous to the use of our phrase "speakingof, "--that is, simply an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought;only that with them, the practice being the rule and not the exception, no correspondingly abrupt effect is produced by it. Ousted thus fromthe post of honor, the subject is not even permitted the second place. Indeed, it usually fails to put in an appearance anywhere. You maysearch through sentence after sentence without meeting with theslightest suggestion of such a thing. When so unusual an anomaly as amotive cause is directly adduced, it owes its mention, not to the factof being the subject, but because for other reasons it happens to be theimportant word of the thought. The truth is, the Japanese conception ofevents is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon moreas happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather thanpersonally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything butphilosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childishconceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Itsconsideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The languagereflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now possess arenot represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by importedChinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from theirforeign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time. 

Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanesespeech, the word for "man, " "hito, " is identical with, and probablyoriginally the same word as "hito, " the numeral "one;" a noun and anumeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonalpronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" onthe other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal tothe oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied, without the faintest implication of insult, to men. 

Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learnto cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon theirsubsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know. With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the lastgeneration, there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longerto fit the childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. Howgreat the wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felttoo keenly ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefswhich, dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part ofour very selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of ourboyish first love, all our early associations send down roots so deepthat long after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to givethem up. Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs atthe voids they necessarily have left. 

In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated byreligion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions ofthe past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age, that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in thelands where it is always morning, and where man has never passed tohis prosaic noon. Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As itslanguage so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal stateto which we all awake first before we become aware of that something welater know so well as self. 

Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reasonthat also lends it additional interest to us, --because it is their own. Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has causedthe nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of thepresent speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatismhas kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how eachman starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the racehad reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. Theman's mind has done likewise. 

[1] Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language. 

Chapter 5. Nature and Art. 

We have seen how impersonal is the form which Far Eastern thoughtassumes when it crystallizes into words. Let us turn now to aconsideration of the thoughts themselves before they are thusstereotyped for transmission to others, and scan them as they findexpression unconsciously in the man's doings, or seek it consciously inhis deeds. 

To the Far Oriental there is one subject which so permeates and pervadeshis whole being as to be to him, not so much a conscious matter ofthought as an unconscious mode of thinking. For it is a thing whichshapes all his thoughts instead of constituting the substance of oneparticular set of them. That subject is art. To it he is born as toa birthright. Artistic perception is with him an instinct to which heintuitively conforms, and for which he inherits the skill of countlessgenerations. From the tips of his fingers to the tips of his toes, inwhose use he is surprisingly proficient, he is the artist all over. Admirable, however, as is his manual dexterity, his mental altitudeis still more to be admired; for it is artistic to perfection. Hisperception of beauty is as keen as his comprehension of the cosmos iscrude; for while with science he has not even a speaking acquaintance, with art he is on terms of the most affectionate intimacy. 

To the whole Far Eastern world science is a stranger. Such nescience ispatent even in matters seemingly scientific. For although the Chinesecivilization, even in the so-called modern inventions, was already oldwhile ours lay still in the cradle, it was to no scientific spirit thatits discoveries were due. Notwithstanding the fact that Cathay was thehappy possessor of gunpowder, movable type, and the compass beforesuch things were dreamt of in Europe, she owed them to no knowledge ofphysics, chemistry, or mechanics. It was as arts, not as sciences, theywere invented. And it speaks volumes for her civilization that she burnther powder for fireworks, not for firearms. To the West alone belongsthe credit of manufacturing that article for the sake of killing peopleinstead of merely killing time. 

The scientific is not the Far Oriental point of view. To wish to knowthe reasons of things, that irrepressible yearning of the Westernspirit, is no characteristic of the Chinaman's mind, nor is it a Tartartrait. Metaphysics, a species of speculation that has usually provedpeculiarly attractive to mankind, probably from its not requiring anyscientific capital whatever, would seem the most likely place to seekit. But upon such matters he has expended no imagination of his own, having quietly taken on trust from India what he now professes. As forscience proper, it has reached at his hands only the quasimorphologicstage; that is, it consists of catalogues concocted according to theingenuity of the individual and resembles the real thing about as muchas a haphazard arrangement of human bones might be expected to resemblea man. Not only is the spirit of the subject left out altogether, but the mere outward semblance is misleading. For pseudo-scientificcollections of facts which never rise to be classifications of phenomenaforms to his idea the acme of erudition. His mathematics, for example, consists of a set of empiric rules, of which no explanation is evervouchsafed the taught for the simple reason that it is quite unknown tothe teacher. It is not even easy to decide how much of what there isis Jesuitical. Of more recent sciences he has still less notion, particularly of the natural ones. Physics, chemistry, geology, and thelike are matters that have never entered his head. Even in studies moreimmediately connected with obvious everyday life, such as language, history, customs, it is truly remarkable how little he possesses thepower of generalization and inference. His elaborate lists of facts areimposing typographically, but are not even formally important, while hisreasoning about them is as exquisite a bit of scientific satire as couldwell be imagined. 

But with the arts it is quite another matter. While you will search invain, in his civilization, for explanations of even the most simpleof nature's laws, you will meet at every turn with devices for thebeautifying of life, which may stand not unworthily beside the productsof nature's own skill. Whatever these people fashion, from the toy ofan hour to the triumphs of all time, is touched by a taste unknownelsewhere. To stroll down the Broadway of Tokio of an evening is aliberal education in everyday art. As you enter it there opens out infront of you a fairy-like vista of illumination. Two long lines of gaylylighted shops, stretching off into the distance, look out across twoequally endless rows of torch-lit booths, the decorous yellow gleamof the one contrasting strangely with the demoniacal red flare of theother. This perspective of pleasure fulfils its promise. As your feetfollow your eyes you find yourself in a veritable shoppers' paradise, the galaxy of twinkle resolving into worlds of delight. Nor do you longremain a mere spectator; for the shops open their arms to you. Nocold glass reveals their charms only to shut you off. Their wares lieinvitingly exposed to the public, seeming to you already half your own. At the very first you come to you stop involuntarily, lost in admirationover what you take to be bric-a-brac. It is only afterwards you learnthat the object of your ecstasy was the commonest of kitchen crockery. Next door you halt again, this time in front of some leathernpocket-books, stamped with designs in color to tempt you instantly toempty your wallet for more new ones than you will ever have the means tofill. If you do succeed in tearing yourself away purse-whole, it isonly to fall a victim to some painted fans of so exquisite a make anddecoration that escape short of possession is impossible. Opposed asstubbornly as you may be to idle purchase at home, here you will findyourself the prey of an acute case of shopping fever before you know it. Nor will it be much consolation subsequently to discover that you havesquandered your patrimony upon the most ordinary articles of every-dayuse. If in despair you turn for refuge to the booths, you will buthave delivered yourself into the embrace of still more irresistiblefascinations. For the nocturnal squatters are there for the expresspurpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly attractivefrom their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at you, andwith telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The luridsmurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figureof the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiendhimself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some newconceit. Here the latest thing in inventions, a gutta-percha rat, which, for reasons best known to the vender, scampers about squeaking with amimicry to shame the original, holds an admiring crowd spellbound withmingled trepidation and delight. There a native zoetrope, indefatigableround of pleasure, whose top fashioned after the type of a turbine wheelenables a candle at the centre ingeniously to supply both illuminationand motive power at the same time, affords to as many as can find roomon its circumference a peep at the composite antics of a consecutivelypictured monkey in the act of jumping a box. Beyond this "wheel of life"lies spread out on a mat a most happy family of curios, the whole ofwhich you are quite prepared to purchase en bloc. While a little fartheron stands a flower show which seems to be coyly beckoning to you as theblossoms nod their heads to an imperceptible breeze. So one attractionfairly jostles its neighbor for recognition from the gay thousands thatlike yourself stroll past in holiday delight. Chattering children inbrilliant colors, voluble women and talkative men in quieter but no lesspicturesque costumes, stream on in kaleidoscopic continuity. And you, carried along by the current, wander thus for miles with the tide ofpleasure-seekers, till, late at night, when at last you turn reluctantlyhomeward, you feel as one does when wakened from some too delightfuldream. 

Or instead of night, suppose it day and the place a temple. With thosewho are entering you enter too through the outer gateway into thecourtyard. At the farther end rises a building the like of which forrichness of effect you have probably never beheld or even imagined. Infront of you a flight of white stone steps leads up to a terracewhose parapet, also of stone, is diapered for half its height and openlatticework the rest. This piazza gives entrance to a building or setof buildings whose every detail challenges the eye. Twelve pillars ofsnow-white wood sheathed in part with bronze, arranged in four rows, make, as it were, the bones of the structure. The space between thecentre columns lies open. The other triplets are webbed in the middleand connected, on the sides and front, by grilles of wood and bronzeforming on the outside a couple of embrasures on either hand theentrance in which stand the guardian Nio, two colossal demons, Gogand Magog. Instead of capitals, a frieze bristling with Chinese lionsprotects the top of the pillars. Above this in place of entablaturerises tier upon tier of decoration, each tier projecting beyond the onebeneath, and the topmost of all terminating in a balcony which encirclesthe whole second story. The parapet of this balcony is one mass ofornament, and its cornice another row of lions, brown instead of white. The second story is no less crowded with carving. Twelve pillars makeits ribs, the spaces between being filled with elaborate woodwork, whileon top rest more friezes, more cornices, clustered with excrescences ofall colors and kinds, and guarded by lions innumerable. To begin to tellthe details of so multi-faceted a gem were artistically impossible. Itis a jewel of a thousand rays, yet whose beauties blend into one as theprismatic tints combine to white. And then, after the first dazzle ofadmiration, when the spirit of curiosity urges you to penetrate thecentre aisle, lo and behold it is but a gate! The dupe of unexpectedsplendor, you have been paying court to the means of approach. It isonly a portal after all. For as you pass through, you catch a glimpseof a building beyond more gorgeous still. Like in general to the first, unlike it in detail, resembling it only as the mistress may the maid. But who shall convince of charm by enumerating the features of a face!From the tiles of its terrace to the encrusted gables that drape it aswith some rich bejewelled mantle falling about it in the most gracefulof folds, it is the very eastern princess of a building standing in themajesty of her court to give you audience. 

A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your shoeswithout the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence upon themoss-like mats within. The richness of its outer ornament, so impressiveat first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of itsinterior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sidesin such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in thecongenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grewhere as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yetall is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry andvirtue that appeal to the artistic as much as to the religious instinctsof the devout. More sacred still are the things treasured in the sanctumof the priests. There you will find gems of art for whose sake onlythe most abnormal impersonality can prevent you from breaking thetenth commandment. Of the value set upon them you can form a distantapproximation from the exceeding richness and the amazing number of thesilk cloths and lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept. As you gaze thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at somemasterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering, ina fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not after allonly another name for the contemplation of the beautiful, since devoteesto the one are ex officio such votaries of the other. 

Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one pointthe bustling street and the hushed temple are alike, --in the namelessgrace that beautifies both. 

This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness thanfor its inherent excellence. Both objectively and subjectively itscatholicity is remarkable. It imbues everything, and affects everybody. So universally is it applied to the daily affairs of life that there maybe said to be no mechanical arts in Japan simply because all suchhave been raised to the position of fine arts. The lowest artisan isessentially an artist. Modern French nomenclature on the subject, inspite of the satire to which the more prosaic Anglo-Saxon has subjectedit, is peculiarly applicable there. To call a Japanese cook, forinstance, an artist would be but the barest acknowledgment of fact, forJapanese food is far more beautiful to look at than agreeable to eat;while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of drapery, if they aresublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the male or female form. 

On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast amongthe people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it neverhides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from thehighest prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme. 

Now such a prevalence of artistic feeling implies of itselfimpersonality in the people. At first sight it might seem as if sciencedid the same, and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset theother, and that consequently both should be equally impersonal. But inthe first place, our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit, as theirs are with artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a masonan impersonal interest in the principles of the arch, or of a plumbera non-financial devotion to hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong increditing the masses in general or European waiters in particular withmuch abstract love of mathematics, for example. In the second place, there is an essential difference in the attitude of the two subjectsupon personality. Emotionally, science appeals to nobody, art toeverybody. Now the emotions constitute the larger part of that complexbundle of ideas which we know as self. A thought which is not tinged tosome extent with feeling is not only not personal; properly speaking, itis not even distinctively human, but cosmical. In its lofty superiorityto man, science is unpersonal rather than impersonal. Art, on the otherhand, is a familiar spirit. Through the windows of the senses she findsher way into the very soul of man, and makes for herself a home there. But it is to his humanity, not to his individuality, that she whispers, for she speaks in that universal tongue which all can understand. 

Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no merecoincidence that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asiarespectively, the French and the Japanese, are at the same time the mostartistic. Even politeness, which, as we have seen, distinguishes both, is itself but a form of art, --the social art of living agreeably withone's fellows. 

This impersonality comes out with all the more prominence when we passfrom the consideration of art in itself to the spirit which actuatesthat art, and especially when we compare their spirit with our own. The mainsprings of Far Eastern art may be said to be three: Nature, Religion, and Humor. Incongruous collection that they are, allthree witness to the same trait. For the first typifies concreteimpersonality, the second abstract impersonality, while the province ofthe last is to ridicule personality generally. Of the trio the first isaltogether the most important. Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamentala part of himself is his love of Nature that before we view its mirroredimage it will be well to look the emotion itself in the face. The FarOriental lives in a long day-dream of beauty. He muses rather thanreasons, and all musing, so the word itself confesses, springs fromthe inspiration of a Muse. But this Muse appears not to him, as to theGreeks, after the fashion of a woman, nor even more prosaically afterthe likeness of a man. Unnatural though it seem to us, his inspirationseeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to mankind. She is tooimpersonal for any personification, for she is Nature. 

That poet whose name carries with it a certain presumption ofinfallibility has told us that "the proper study of mankind is man;" andif material advancement in consequence be any criterion of the fitnessof a particular mental pursuit, events have assuredly justified thesaying. Indeed, the Levant has helped antithetically to preach the samelesson, in showing us by its own fatal example that the improperstudy of mankind is woman, and that they who but follow the fair willinevitably degenerate. 

The Far Oriental knows nothing of either study, and cares less. Thedelight of self-exploration, or the possibly even greater delight oflosing one's self in trying to fathom femininity, is a sensation equallyforeign to his temperament. Neither the remarkable persistence of one'sown characteristics, not infrequently matter of deep regret to theirpossessor, nor the charmingly unaccountable variability of the fairersex, at times quite as annoying, is a phenomenon sufficient to stir hiscuriosity. Accepting, as he does, the existing state of things more asa material fact than as a phase in a gradual process of development, heregards humanity as but a small part of the great natural world, insteadof considering it the crowning glory of the whole. He recognizes manmerely as a fraction of the universe, --one might almost say as a vulgarfraction of it, considering the low regard in which he is held, --andaccords him his proportionate share of attention, and no more. 

In his thought, nature is not accessory to man. Worthy M. Perichon, ofprosaic, not to say philistinic fame, had, as we remember, his travelsimmortalized in a painting where a colossal Perichon in front almostcompletely eclipsed a tiny Mont Blanc behind. A Far Orientalthinks poetry, which may possibly account for the fact that in hismind-pictures the relative importance of man and mountain standsreversed. "The matchless Fuji, " first of motifs in his art, admits nopilgrim as its peer. 

Nor is it to woman that turn his thoughts. Mother Earth is fairer, inhis eyes, than are any of her daughters. To her is given the heart thatshould be theirs. The Far Eastern love of Nature amounts almost to apassion. To the study of her ever varying moods her Japanese admirerbrings an impersonal adoration that combines oddly the aestheticism ofa poet with the asceticism of a recluse. Not that he worships in secret, however. His passion is too genuine either to find disguise or seekdisplay. With us, unfortunately, the love of Nature is apt to beconsidered a mental extravagance peculiar to poets, excusable in exactratio to the ability to give it expression. For an ordinary mortal tofeel a fondness for Mother Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefullyconcealed from his fellows. A sort of shamefacedness prevents him fromavowing it, as a boy at boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a ladhis love. He shrinks from appearing less pachydermatous than the rest. Or else he flies to the other extreme, and affects the odd; pretends, poses, parades, and at last succeeds half in duping himself, half indeceiving other people. But with Far Orientals the case is different. Their love has all the unostentatious assurance of what has received thesanction of public opinion. Nor is it still at that doubtful, hesitatingstage when, by the instrumentality of a third, its soul-harmony cansuddenly be changed from the jubilant major key into the despairingminor. No trace of sadness tinges his delight. He has long since passedthis melancholy phase of erotic misery, if so be that the course of histrue love did not always run smooth, and is now well on in matrimonialbliss. The very look of the land is enough to betray the fact. In Japanthe landscape has an air of domesticity about it, patent even to themost casual observer. Wherever the Japanese has come in contact withthe country he has made her unmistakably his own. He has touched her tocaress, not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted his fondness asa matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in return. His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is everythingexquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are actuallychanged, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's mind. Bushes, shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent, and grow as hewills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance, now contracting intodwarf designs of their former selves, all to obey his caprice and pleasehis eye. Even stubborn rocks lose their wildness, and come to seem apart of the almost sentient life around them. If the description of suchdutifulness seems fanciful, the thing itself surpasses all supposition. Hedges and shrubbery, clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept thesuggestion of the pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims. Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, withall the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest, grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. Andthey are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most natural ofartificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural whole. To walkinto a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden into one of thosestrange worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concavemirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into afantastic miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutiverivers flow gracefully under tiny trees, past mole-hill mountains, till they fall at last into lilliputian lakes, almost smothered for theflowers that grow upon their banks; while in the extreme distance of acouple of rods the cone of a Fuji ten feet high looks approvingly downupon a scene which would be nationally incomplete without it. 

But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys dailyin Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too. When he feelsthus specially stirred, he invites a chosen few of his friends, equallyinfatuated, and together they repair to some spot noted for its scenery. It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy pond overhung by trees, or thedistant glimpse of a mountain peak framed in picture-wise between thenearer hills; or, at their appropriate seasons, the blossoming ofthe many tree flowers, which in eastern Asia are beautiful beyonddescription. For he appreciates not only places, but times. One spot isto be seen at sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in thespring-time, another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, atea-house, placed to command the best view of the sight, stands ready toreceive him. For nature's beauties are too well recognized to remainthe exclusive property of the first chance lover. People flock to viewnature as we do to see a play, and privacy is as impossible as it isunsought. Indeed, the aversion to publicity is simply a result of thesense of self, and therefore necessarily not a feature of soimpersonal a civilization. Aesthetic guidebooks are written forthe nature-enamoured, descriptive of these views which the Japanesetranslator quaintly calls "Sceneries, " and which visitors come not onlyfrom near but from far to gaze upon. In front of the tea-house properare rows of summer pavilions, in one of which the party make themselvesat home, while gentle little tea-house girls toddle forth to serve themthe invariable preliminary tea and confections. Each man then producesfrom up his sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink, and brush, andproceeds to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and the feelingsit calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring companions. Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a German orabsinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize, passingtheir couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one another. Atlast, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and sake combined, thesymposium of poets breaks up. 

Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his family, wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of his holidayare much the same as before. For the scenery is still the centre ofattraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far Eastern etiquettepermits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and child. 

This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition. Allclasses feel its force, and freely indulge the feeling. Poor as well asrich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic instinctsfor natural scenery. As for flowers, especially tree flowers, orthose of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris, the Japaneseappreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is that beauty itself. Those who can afford the luxury possess the shrubs in private; those whocannot, feast their eyes on the public specimens. From a sprig in a vaseto a park planted on purpose, there is no part of them too small ortoo great to be excluded from Far Oriental affection. And of the two"drawing-rooms" of the Mikado held every year, in April and November, both are garden-parties: the one given at the time and with the title of"the cherry blossoms, " and the other of "the chrysanthemum. "

These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not simplybecause of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention anywhere, but for the national attitude toward them. For no better example of theJapanese passion for nature could well be cited. If the anniversariesof people are slightingly treated in the land of the sunrise, the samecannot be said of plants. The yearly birthdays of the vegetable worldare observed with more than botanic enthusiasm. The regard in whichthey are held is truly emotional, and it not actually individual inits object, at least personal to the species. Each kind of tree as itsseason brings it into flower is made the occasion of a festival. For thebeauty of the blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration. From peers to populace mankind turns out to witness it. Nor are theseoccasions few. Spring in the Far East is one long chain of flower fetes, and as spring begins by the end of January and lasts till the middle ofJune, opportunities for appreciating each in turn are not half spoiledby a common contemporaneousness. People have not only occasion but timeto admire. Indeed, spring itself is suitably respected by being datedconformably to fact. Far Orientals begin their year when Nature beginshers, instead of starting anachronously as we do in the very middle ofthe dead season, much as our colleges hold their commencements, on thelast in place at on the first day of the academic term. So previoushas the haste of Western civilization become. The result is that ourrejoicing partakes of the incongruity of humor. The new year exists onlyin name. In the Far East, on the other band, the calendar is made to fitthe time. Men begin to reckon their year some three weeks later than theWestern world, just as the plum-tree opens its pink white petals, as itwere, in rosy reflection of the snow that lies yet upon the ground. But the coldness of the weather does not in the least deter people fromthronging the spot in which the trees grow, where they spend hours inadmiration, and end by pinning appropriate poems on the twigs for latercomers to peruse. Fleeting as the flowers are in fact, they live foreverin fancy. For they constitute one of the commonest motifs of bothpainting and poetry. A branch just breaking into bloom seen against thesunrise sky, or a bough bending its blossoms to the bosom of a stream, is subject enough for their greatest masters, who thus wed, as itwere, two arts in one, --the spirit of poesy with pictorial form. Thisplum-tree is but a blossom. Precocious harbinger of a host of flowers, its gay heralding over, it vanishes not to be recalled, for it bears noedible fruit. 

The next event in the series might fairly be called phenomenal. Early inApril takes place what is perhaps as superb a sight as anything in thisworld, the blossoming of the cherry-trees. Indeed, it is not easy to dothe thing justice in description. If the plum invited admiration, thecherry commands it; for to see the sakura in flower for the first timeis to experience a new sensation. Familiar as a man may be with cherryblossoms at home, the sight there bursts upon him with the dazzlingeffect of a revelation. Such is the profusion of flowers that the treeseems to have turned into a living mass of rosy light. No leaves breakthe brilliance. The snowy-pink petals drape the branches entirely, yetso delicately, one deems it all a veil donned for the tree's nuptialswith the spring. For nothing could more completely personify the spiritof the spring-time. You can almost fancy it some dryad decked for herbridal, in maidenly day-dreaming too lovely to last. For like the plumthe cherry fails in its fruit to fulfil the promise of its flower. 

It would be strange indeed if so much beauty received no recognition, but it is even more strange that recognition should be so complete andso universal as it is. Appreciation is not confined to the cultivatedfew; it is shown quite as enthusiastically by the masses. The popularityof the plants is all-embracing. The common people are as sensitive totheir beauty as are the upper classes. Private gratification, roseateas it is, pales beside the public delight. Indeed, not content with whatrevelation Nature makes of herself of her own accord, man has multipliedher manifestations. Spots suitable to their growth have been peopled byhim with trees. Sometimes they stand in groups like star-clusters, as inOji, crowning a hill; sometimes, as at Mukojima, they line an avenuefor miles, dividing the blue river on the one hand from the blue-greenrice-fields on the other, --a floral milky way of light. But wherever thetrees may be, there at their flowering season are to be found throngsof admirers. For in crowds people go out to see the sight, multitudesstreaming incessantly to and fro beneath their blossoms as the time ofday determines the turn of the human tide. To the Occidental strangersuch a gathering suggests some social loadstone; but none exists. In thecherry-trees alone lies the attraction. 

For one week out of the fifty-two the cherry-tree stands thus glorified, a vision of beauty prolonged somewhat by the want of synchronousnessof the different kinds. Then the petals fall. What was a nuptial veilbecomes a winding-sheet, covering the sod as with winter's winding-sheetof snow, destined itself to disappear, and the tree is nothing but acommon cherry-tree once more. 

But flowers are by no means over because the cherry blossoms are past. Abrief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry turn to thewistaria. Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the populace greatlygiven to the gardens. There they go to sit and gaze at the grape-likeclusters of pale purple flowers that hang more than a cubit long overthe wooden trellis, and grow daily down toward their own reflections inthe pond beneath, vying with one another in Narcissus-like endeavor. And the people, as they sip their tea on the veranda opposite, behold adoubled delight, the flower itself and its mirrored image stretching tokiss. 

After the wistaria comes the tree-peony, and then the iris, with itstrefoil flowers broader than a man may span, and at all colors under thesky. To one who has seen the great Japanese fleur-de-lis, France looksludicrously infelicitous in her choice of emblem. 

But the list grows too long, limited as it is only by its own annualrepetition. We have as yet reached but the first week in June; thesummer and autumn are still to come, the first bringing the lotus forits crown, and the second the chrysanthemum. And lazily grand the lotusis, itself the embodiment of the spirit of the drowsy August air, thevery essence of Buddha-like repose. The castle moats are its specialdomain, which in this its flowering season it wrests wholly from theirmore proper occupant--the water. A dense growth of leather-like leaves, above which rise in majestic isolation the solitary flowers, encirclesthe outer rampart, shutting the castle in as it might be the palace ofthe Sleeping Beauty. In the delightful dreaminess that creeps over oneas he stands thus before some old daimyo's former abode in the heart ofJapan, he forgets all his metaphysical difficulties about Nirvana, forhe fancies he has found it, one long Lotus afternoon. 

And then last, but in some sort first, since it has been taken for theimperial insignia, comes the chrysanthemum. The symmetry of its shapewell fits it to symbolize the completeness of perfection which theMikado, the son of heaven, mundanely represents. It typifies, too, thefullness of the year; for it marks, as it were, the golden wedding ofthe spring, the reminiscence in November of the nuptials of the May. Itsown color, however, is not confined to gold. It may be of almost anyhue and within the general limits of a circle of any form. Now it is achariot wheel with petals for spokes; now a ball of fire with lambenttongues of flame; while another kind seems the button of some naturallegion of honor, and still another a pin-wheel in Nature's ownday-fireworks. 

Admired as a thing of beauty for its own sake, it is also used merelyas a material for artistic effects; for among the quaintest of suchconceits are the Japanese Jarley chrysanthemum works. Every November inthe florists' gardens that share the temple grounds at Asakusa may beseen groups of historical and mythological figures composed entirelyof chrysanthemum flowers. These effigies are quite worthy of comparisonwith their London cousins, being sufficiently life-like to terrifychildren and startle anybody. To come suddenly, on turning acorner, upon a colossal warrior, deterrently uncouth and frightfullybattle-clad, in the act of dispatching a fallen foe, is a sensationnot instantly dispelled by the fact that he is made of flowers. Thepractice, at least, bears witness to an artistic ingenuity of no meanmerit, and to a horticulture ably carried on, if somewhat eccentricallyapplied. 

From the passing of the chrysanthemum dates the dead season. But it issuitably short-lived. Sometimes as early as November, the plum-tree isalready blossoming again. 

Even from so imperfectly gathered a garland it will be seen that theJapanese do not lack for opportunities to admire, nor do they turncoldly away from what they are given. Indeed, they may be said to livein a chronic state of flower-fever; but in spite of the vast amount ofadmiration which they bestow on plants, it is not so much the quantityof that admiration as the quality of it which is remarkable. The intenseappreciation shown the subject by the Far Oriental is something whosevery character seems strange to us, and when in addition we considerthat it permeates the entire people from the commonest coolie to themost aesthetic courtier, it becomes to our comprehension a state ofthings little short of inexplicable. To call it artistic sensibility isto use too limited a term, for it pervades the entire people; ratheris it a sixth sense of a natural, because national description; for thetrait differs from our corresponding feeling in degree, and especiallyin universality enough to merit the distinction. Their care for treeflowers is not confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approachesto a sort of natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing ispersonified. For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is justas truly an emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greekpersonified its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is. To think of the cherry-tree, for instance, as a woman, would be to hismind a conception transcending even the limits of the ludicrous. 

Chapter 6. Art. 

That nature, not man, is their beau ideal, the source of inspirationto them, is evident again on looking at their art. The same spirit thatmakes of them such wonderful landscape gardeners and such wonder-fulllandscape gazers shows itself unmistakably in their paintings. 

The current impression that Japanese pictorial ambition, and consequentskill, is confined to the representation of birds and flowers, thoughentirely erroneous as it stands, has a grain of truth behind it. Thisidea is due to the attitude of the foreign observers, and was in fact atribute to Japanese technique rather than an appreciation of Far Easternartistic feeling. The truth is, the foreigners brought to the subjecttheir own Western criteria of merit, and judged everything by thesestandards. Such works naturally commended themselves most as had leastoccasion to deviate from their canons. The simplest pictures, therefore, were pronounced the best. Paintings of birds and flowers were thusadmitted to be fine, because their realism spoke for itself. Of theexquisite poetic feeling of their landscape paintings the foreigncritics were not at first conscious, because it was not expressed interms with which they were familiar. 

But first impressions, here as elsewhere, are valuable. One is very aptto turn to them again from the reasoning of his second thoughts. Floraand fauna are a conspicuous feature of Far Asiatic art, because theyenter as details of the subject-matter of the artist's thoughts andday-dreams. These birds and flowers are his sujets de genre. Where weshould select a phase of human life for effective isolation, they chooseinstead a bit of nature. A spray of grass or a twig of cherry-blossomsis motif enough for them. To their thought its beauty is amplysuggestive. For to the Far Oriental all nature is sympatheticallysentient. His admiration, instead of being centred on man, embraces theuniverse. His art reflects it. 

Leaving out of consideration, for the moment, minor though stillimportant distinctions in tone, treatment, and technique, the greatfundamental difference between Western and Far Eastern art lies in itsattitude toward humanity. 

With us, from the time of the Greeks to the present day, man has beenthe cynosure of artistic eyes; with them he has never been vouchsafedmore than a casual, not to say a cursory glance, even woman failingto rivet his attention. One of our own writers has said that, withoutpassing the bounds of due respect, a man is permitted two looks atany woman he may meet, one to recognize, one to admire. A Japaneseordinarily never dreams of taking but one, --if indeed he goes so far asthat, --the first. It is the omitting to take that second look that hasleft him what he is. Not that Fortune has been unpropitious; only blind. Fate has offered him opportunity enough; too much, perhaps. For in Japanthe exposure of the female form is without a parallel in latitude. Nevernude, it is frequently naked. The result artistically is much the same, though the cause be different. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose theJapanese an immodest people. According to their own standards, they areexceedingly modest. No respectable Japanese woman would, for instance, ever for a moment turn out her toes in walking. It is consideredimmodest to do so. Their code is, however, not so whimsical as this bitof etiquette might suggest. The intent is with them the touchstone ofpropriety. In their eyes a state of nature is not a state of indecency. Whatever exposure is required for convenience is right; whateverunnecessary, wrong. Such an Eden-like condition of society would seem tobe the very spot for a something like the modern French school of art tohave developed in. And yet it is just that study of the nude which hasfrom immemorial antiquity been entirely neglected in the Far East. Anancient Greek, to say nothing of a modern Parisian, would have shocked aJapanese. Yet we are shocked by them. We are astounded at the sights wesee in their country villages, while they in their turn marvel at theexhibitions they witness in our city theatres. At their watering-placesthe two sexes bathe promiscuously together in all the simplicityof nature; but for a Japanese woman to appear on the stage in anycharacter, however proper, would be deemed indecent. The differencebetween the two hemispheres may be said to consist in an artless libertyon the one hand, and artistic license on the other. Their unwritten codeof propriety on the subject seems to be, "You must see, but you may notobserve. "

These people live more in accordance with their code of proprietythan we do with ours. All classes alike conform to it. The adjective"respectable, " used above as a distinction in speaking of woman, was inreality superfluous, for all women there, as far as appearance goes, arerespectable. Even the most abandoned creature does not betray her statusby her behavior. The reason of this uniformity and its psychologicalimportance I shall discuss later. 

This form of modesty, a sort of want of modesty of form, has noconnection whatever with sex. It applies with equal force to themale figure, which is even more exposed than the female, and offersanatomical suggestions invaluable alike to the artistic and medicalprofessions, --suggestions that are equally ignored by both. The cooliesare frequently possessed of physiques which would have delighted MichaelAngelo; and as for the phenomenal corpulency of the wrestlers, it wouldhave made of the place a very paradise for Rubens. In regard to thedoctors, --for to call them surgeons would be to give a name to what doesnot exist, --a lack of scientific zeal has been the cause of their notinvestigating what tempts too seductively, we should imagine, to beignored. Acupuncture, or the practice of sticking long pins into anypart of the patient's body that may happen to be paining him, prettymuch irrespective of anatomical position, is the nearest approach tosurgery of which they are guilty, and proclaims of itself the in corporevili character of the thing operated upon. 

Nor does the painter owe anything to science. He represents humanitysimply as he sees it in its every-day costume; and it betokens thehighest powers of generalized observation that he produces the resultshe does. In his drawings, man is shown, not as he might look in theprimitive, or privitive, simplicity of his ancestral Garden of Eden, butas he does look in the ordinary wear and tear of his present garments. Civilization has furnished him with clothes, and he prefers, when he hashis picture taken, to keep them on. 

In dealing with man, the Far Oriental artist is emphatically a realist;it is when he turns to nature that he becomes ideal. But by ideal is notmeant here conventional. That term of reproach is a misnomer, foundedupon a mistake. His idealism is simply the outcome of his love, which, like all human love, transfigures its object. The Far Oriental hasplenty of this, which, if sometimes a delusion, seems also secondsight, but it is peculiarly impersonal. His color-blindness to the warm, blood-red end of the spectrum of life in no wise affects his perceptionof the colder beauty of the great blues and greens of nature. To theirpoetry he is ever sensitive. His appreciation of them is somethingphenomenal, and his power of presentation worthy his appreciation. 

A Japanese painting is a poem rather than a picture. It portrays anemotion called up by a scene, and not the scene itself in all itselaborate complexity. It undertakes to give only so much of it as isvital to that particular feeling, and intentionally omits all irrelevantdetails. It is the expression caught from a glimpse of the soul ofnature by the soul of man; the mirror of a mood, passing, perhaps, infact, but perpetuated thus to fancy. Being an emotion, its intensityis directly proportional to the singleness with which it possesses thethoughts. The Far Oriental fully realizes the power of simplicity. Thisprinciple is his fundamental canon of pictorial art. To understand hispaintings, it is from this standpoint they must be regarded; not assoulless photographs of scenery, but as poetic presentations of thespirit of the scenes. The very charter of painting depends upon itsnot giving us charts. And if with us a long poem be a contradiction interms, a full picture is with them as self-condemnatory a production. From the contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one isapt, after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with anunpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the feast. 

Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-beslight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller ofmeaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, whichis very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's ownimagination elude one's power to portray it? Is it not forever flittingwill-o'-the-wisp-like ahead of us just beyond exact definition? Forthe soul of art lies in what art can suggest, and nothing is half sosuggestive as the half expressed, not even a double entente. To hinta great deal by displaying a little is more vital to effect than thecleverest representation of the whole. The art of partially revealingis more telling, even, than the ars celare artem. Who has not suspectedthrough a veil a fairer face than veil ever hid? Who has not beendelightedly duped by the semi-disclosures of a dress? The principleis just as true in any one branch of art as it is of the attempteddevelopments by one of the suggestions of another. Yet who but has thusfelt its force? Who has not had a shock of day-dream desecration onchancing upon an illustrated edition of some book whose story he hadlain to heart? Portraits of people, pictures of places, he does notknow, and yet which purport to be his! And I venture to believe that tomore than one of us the exquisite pathos of the Bride of Lammermoor isgone when Lucia warbles her woes, be it never so entrancingly, to anadmiring house. It almost seems as if the garish publicity of using hername for operatic title were a special intervention of the Muse, that wemight the less connect song with story, --two sensations that, like twolights, destroy one another by mutual interference. 

Against this preference shown the sketch it may be urged that toappreciate such suggestions presupposes as much art in the public as inthe painter. But the ability to appreciate a thing when expressed is buthalf that necessary to express it. Some understanding must exist inthe observer for any work to be intelligible. It is only a question ofdegree. The greater the art-sense in the person addressed, the more hadbetter be left to it. Now in Japan the public is singularly artistic. In fact, the artistic appreciation of the masses there is somethingastonishing to us, accustomed to our immense intellectual differencesbetween man and man. Sketches are thus peculiarly fitting to such aland. 

Besides, there is a quiet modesty about the sketch which is itselftaking. To attempt the complete even in a fractional bit of the cosmos, like a picture, has in it a difficulty akin to the logical oneof proving a universal negative. The possibilities of failure areenormously increased, and failure is less forgiven for the assumption. Art might perhaps not unwisely follow the example of science in suchmatters where an exhaustive work, which takes the better part of alifetime to produce, is invariably entitled by its erudite author anElementary Treatise on the subject in hand. 

To aid the effect due to simplicity of conception steps in the FarOriental's wonderful technique. His brush-strokes are very few innumber, but each one tells. They are laid on with a touch which islittle short of marvelous, and requires heredity to explain its skill. For in his method there is no emending, no super-position, no changepossible. What he does is done once and for all. The force of itgrows on you as you gaze. Each stroke expresses surprisingly much, andsuggests more. Even omissions are made significant. In his painting itis visibly true that objects can be rendered conspicuous by their veryabsence. You are quite sure you see what on scrutiny you discover tobe only the illusion of inevitable inference. The Far Oriental artistunderstands the power of suggestion well; for imagination always fillsin the picture better than the brush, however perfect be its skill. 

Even the neglect of certain general principles which we consider vitalto effect, such as the absence of shadows and the lack of perspective, proves not to be of the importance we imagine. We discover in thesepaintings how immaterial, artistically, was Peter Schlimmel's sad loss, and how perfectly possible it is to make bits of discontinuous distancetake the place effectively of continuous space. 

Far Eastern pictures are epigrams rather than descriptions. They presenta bit of nature with the terseness of a maxim of La Rochefoucault, andthey delight as aphorisms do by their insight and the happy concisenessof its expression. Few aphorisms are absolutely true, but then boldnessmore than makes up for what they lack in verity. So complex a subject islife that to state a truth with all its accompanying limitations is toweaken it at once. Exceptions, while demonstrating the rule, do not tendto emphasize it. And though the whole truth is essential to science, such exhaustiveness is by no means a canon of art. 

Parallels are not wanting at home. What they do with space in theirpaintings do we not with time in the case of our comedies, those actedpictures of life? Should we not refuse to tolerate a play that insistedon furnishing us with a full perspective of its characters' past? Andyet of the two, it is far perferable, artistically, to be given too muchin sequence than too much at once. The Chinese, who put much less intoa painting than what we deem indispensable, delight in dramas that lastsix weeks. 

To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-likegeneralities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which Ifell in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast ofJapan. A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a bankof mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the rising sun, while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three cranes are slowlysailing north. And that is all you see. You do not see the shore; you donot see the main; you are looking but at the border-land of that greatunknown, the heaving ocean still slumbering beneath its chilly coverlidof mist, out of which come the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes. 

So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at thelighter leads to the same conclusion. 

Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense ofhumor, --two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying together overthe meadows of imagination. For, as it might be put, "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers Is also the first to be touched by the fun. "

The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun ispossible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest mastersdown to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits. It is of all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry ambush, like thefaint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtilethat the observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meantwhat seems more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks outinto the broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happyincongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches mightbe twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist'swork as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flitseasily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanesetemperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out withcatching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in punswhich are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges oncertain consecrated plays on words. From the very constitution of thepeople there is of course nothing selfish in the national enjoyment. Aman is quite as ready to laugh at his own expense as at his neighbor's, a courtesy which his neighbor cordially returns. 

Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principleof the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name ofhumor, is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it haveto do wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them, whether it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is inincongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected thatprovokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoysa monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant ispleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. Butit is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to hererrors of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, forinstance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotentrevenge. But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate, which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capitalfall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as withfact. To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent ironyis unmeaning. Besides, it would be also untrue. For his May carries nosuggestion of unfulfilment in its name. 

Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for themost part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. Thelatter implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, forthe past has very little personality for the present. As for the former, its attention is, if anything, derogatory to him, for we are always shyof making fun of what we feel to be too closely a part of ourselves. But impersonality has prevented the Far Oriental from having much amourpropre. He has no particular aversion to caricaturing himself. FewEuropeans, perhaps, would have cared to perpetrate a self-portraitlike one painted by the potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as anamusing tour de force by a facetious picture-dealer. It is a compositepicture of a new kind, a Japanese variety of type face. The greatpotter, who was also apparently no mean painter, has combined threeaspects of himself in a single representation. At first sight theportrait appears to be simply a full front view of a somewhat moon-facedcitizen; but as you continue to gaze, it suddenly dawns on you thatthere are two other individuals, one on either side, hob-nobbing inprofile with the first, the lines of the features being ingeniously madeto do double duty; and when this aspect of the thing has once struckyou, you cannot look at the picture without seeing all three citizenssimultaneously. The result is doubtless more effective as a compositionthan flattering as a likeness. 

Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Easternarts, witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at ourmental antipodes. In this art, owing to its necessary limitations, therepresentation of nature in its broader sense is impossible. For in thefirst place, whatever the subject, it must be such as it is possibleto present in one continuous piece; disconnected adjuncts, as, forinstance, a flock of birds flying, which might be introduced with greateffect in painting, being here practically beyond the artist's reach. Secondly, the material being of uniform appearance, as a rule, color, or even shading, vital points in landscape portrayal, is out of thequestion, unless the piece were subsequently painted, as in Greciansculptures, a custom which is not practised in China or Japan. Lastly, another fact fatal to the representation of landscape is the size. Thereduced scale of the reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsitywhose belittlement the mind can neither forget nor forgive. Plainsculpture is therefore practically limited to statuary, either of men oranimals. The result is that in their art, where landscape counts forso much, sculpture plays a very minor part. In what little there is, Nature's place is taken by Buddha. For there are two classes of statues, divided the one from the other by that step which separates the sublimefrom the ridiculous, namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There isno happy human mean. Of the first kind are the beautiful bronzefigures of the Buddha, like the Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high andninety-seven feet round, in whose face all that is grand and noble liessleeping, the living representation of Nirvana; and of the second, thoseodd little ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the mostpart, grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods anddevils. Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which thedumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows. 

The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery andlacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the seriousand the comic in Far Eastern feeling. 

The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and italmost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon himin acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beautythat it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, isshe lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and shortextremes, months of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeksof winter in between; a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land wherethe bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found itspalm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separateidentity in one long self-obliterating kiss. 

Chapter 7. Religion. 

In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem singularlyaverse to practising what they have preached. Whether it be that hisself-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive of his ownintellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether sacred soil, like less hallowed ground, becomes after a time incapable of respondingto repeated sowings of the same seed, certain it is that in spiritualmatters most peoples have grown out of conceit with their ownconceptions. An individual may cling with a certain sentiment to thereligion of his mother, but nations have shown anything but a foolishfondness for the sacred superstitions of their great-grandfathers. Tothe charm of creation succeeds invariably the bitter-sweet after-tasteof criticism, and man would not be the progressive animal he is if helong remained in love with his own productions. 

What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeplyshrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder thatthe consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever beinghastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthlyjourneys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton toursthrough its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand ofmerely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consistedin the possible revision of one's routes. 

Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it issuch. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and nevermore so than when those views are religious visions. An enthusiast hascertainly a greater chance of being taken for a god among a people whodo not know him intimately as a man. So with his doctrines. The importedis apt to seem more important than the home-made; as the far-offbewitches more easily than the near. But just as castles in the air donot commonly become the property of their builders, so mansions in theskies almost as frequently have failed of direct inheritance. Ratherstrikingly has this proved the case with what are to-day the two mostpowerful religions of the world, --Buddhism and Christianity. Neither isnow the belief of its founder's people. What was Aryan-born has becomeTuranian-bred, and what was Semitic by conception is at present Aryan byadoption. The possibilities of another's hereafter look so much rosierthan the limitations of one's own present!

Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some still, dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive, as they run inever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have felt its fascinationsecond only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, afascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularlyattractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particleonly to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality. Some such pleasure must be theirs who have thrown their thoughts intothe hearts of men, and seen them spread in waves of feeling, whosesphere time widens through the world. For like the mobile water is themind of man, --quick to catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of allwaves of feeling, this is not the least true of religious ones, that, starting from their birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have buthumanity in common with those who professed them first. Like the ripplesin the pool, they leave their initial converts to sink back again intocomparative quiescence, as they advance to throw into sudden tremorshordes of outer barbarians. In both of the great religions in questionthis wave propagation has been most marked, only the direction ittook differed. Christianity went westward; Buddhism travelled east. Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy find counterparts inEastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually the taught surpassed theirteachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem and Benares at last gaveplace to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal centres. Still the movementjourneyed on. Popes and Lhamas remained where their predecessorshad founded sees, but the tide of belief surged past them in itsirresistible advance. Farther yet from where each faith began are tobe found to-day the greater part of its adherents. The home that theWestern hemisphere seems to promise to the one, the extreme Orientaffords the other. As Roman Catholicism now looks to America for itsstrength, so Buddhism to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China andJapan. 

But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is byno means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the greatIndian faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a system ofsuperstition which has held its own to this day. In fact, as the statereligion of the land, it has just experienced a revival, aregalvanizing of its old-time energy, at the hands of some of the nativearchaeologists. Its sacred mirror, held up to Nature, has been burnishedanew. Formerly this body of belief was the national faith, the Mikado, the direct descendant of the early gods, being its head on earth. Hisreinstatement to temporal power formed a very fitting first step towardreinvesting the cult with its former prestige; a curious instance, indeed, of a religious revival due to archaeological, not to religiouszeal. 

This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboardof Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. Theword "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods, " and the letterof its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief. For itsscriptures are rather an itinerary of the gods' lives than a guide tothat road by which man himself may attain to immortality. Thus with acertain fitness pilgrimages are its most noticeable rites. One cannotjourney anywhere in the heart of Japan without meeting multitudes ofthese pilgrims, with their neat white leggings and their mushroom-likehats, nor rest at night at any inn that is not hung with countlesslittle banners of the pilgrim associations, of which they all aremembers. Being a pilgrim there is equivalent to being a tourist here, only that to the excitement of doing the country is added a sustainingsense of the meritoriousness of the deed. Oftener than not the objectivepoint of the devout is the summit of some noted mountain. For peaksare peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto faith. The fact is perhaps anexpression of man's instinctive desire to rise, as if the bodily actin some wise betokened the mental action. The shrine in so exalteda position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or without the onlydistinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the god and thependent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive offeringsof man. As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of thosenatural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at or fears, the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the wind; all, inshort, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot comprehend. He clotheshis terrors with forms which resemble the human, because he can conceiveof nothing else that could cause the unexpected. But the awful shapes heconjures up have naught in common with himself. They are far too fearfulto be followed. Their way is the "highway of the gods, " but no Jacob'sladder for wayward man. 

In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism andBuddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism inhelping to form that happy family of faith which is so singular afeature of Far Eastern religious capability. It is not simply that thetwo contrive to live peaceably together; they are actually both of themimplicitly believed by the same individual. Millions of Japaneseare good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time. That such acombination should be possible is due to the essential difference in thecharacter of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic, in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little abouthimself and his hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself andwhat he may become. In examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, forpersonality, or the reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having noparticular bearing upon the subject. The only effect it has is indirectin furthering the natural propensity of these people to an adoration ofnature. 

In Korea and in China, again, Confucianism is the great moral law, as byreflection it is to a certain extent in Japan. But that in its turnmay be omitted in the present argument; inasmuch as Confucius taughtconfessedly and designedly only a system of morals, and religiouslyabstained from pronouncing any opinion whatever upon the character orthe career of the human soul. 

Taouism, the third great religion of China, resembles Shintoism to thisextent, that it is a body of superstition, and not a form of philosophy. It undertakes to provide nostrums for spiritual ills, but is dumb as tothe constitution of the soul for which it professes to prescribe. Its pills are to be swallowed unquestioningly by the patient, and arewarranted to cure; and owing to the two great human frailties, fearand credulity, its practice is very large. Possessing, however, nophilosophic diploma, it is without the pale of the present discussion. 

The demon-worship of Korea is a mild form of the same thing with thehierarchy left out, every man there being his own spiritual adviser. An ordinary Korean is born with an innate belief in malevolent spirits, whom he accordingly propitiates from time to time. One of nobler birthpropitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors. 

We come, then, by a process of elimination to a consideration ofBuddhism, the great philosophic faith of the whole Far East. 

Not uncommonly in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemnhalf-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cutfrom a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, thebasin, and a few stone lanterns--so called from their form, and nottheir function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look forwicks--are the sole occupants of the place. Sheltered from thewind, withdrawn from sound, and only piously approached by man, thisantechamber of the god seems the very abode of silence and rest. Itmight be Nirvana itself, human entrance to an immortality like the god'swithin, so peaceful, so pervasive is its calm; and in its midst is themoss-covered monolith, holding in its embrace the little imprisoned poolof water. So still is the spot and so clear the liquid that you know theone only as the reflection of the other. Mirrored in its glassy surfaceappears everything around it. As you peer in, far down you see a tinybit of sky, as deep as the blue is high above, across which slowly sailthe passing clouds; then nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as ifbending to catch glimpses of themselves in that other world below; andthen, nearer yet--yourself. 

Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes. Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive tolight that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems illusion!Though portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know of the thingitself is that it is. Through none of the five senses do we perceive it. Neither sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch can tell usit exists; we feel it to be by the muscular sense alone, that blind anddumb analogue for the body of what consciousness is for the soul. Onlywhen disturbed, troubled, does the water itself become visible, and thenit is but the surface that we see. So to the Far Oriental this stilllittle lake typifies the soul, the eventual purification of his own; asomething lost in reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of theouter world. 

For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life. Therepose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar systemis slowly tending as its death, --this to him appears, though from noscientific deduction, the end of all existence. So he sits and ponders, abstractly, vaguely, upon everything in general, --synonym, alas, toman's finite mind, for nothing in particular, --till even the senseof self seems to vanish, and through the mist-like portal ofunconsciousness he floats out into the vast indistinguishable samenessof Nirvana's sea. 

At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of uswho stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate. As a systemof philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks unexpectedlyfamiliar as a faith. Indeed, the one religion might well pass for thecounterfeit presentment of the other. The resemblance so struck theearly Catholic missionaries that they felt obliged to explain theremarkable similarity between the two. With them ingenuous surpriseinstantly begot ingenious sophistry. Externally, the likeness was soexact that at first they could not bring themselves to believe that theBuddhist ceremonials had not been filched bodily from the practices ofthe true faith. Finding, however, that no known human agency had actedin the matter, they bethought them of introducing, to account forthings, a deus ex machina in the shape of the devil. They were sopleased with this solution of the difficulty that they imparted itat once with much pride to the natives. You have indeed got, theygraciously if somewhat gratuitously informed them, the outward semblanceof the true faith, but you are in fact the miserable victims of animpious fraud. Satan has stolen the insignia of divinity, and is nowmasquerading before you as the deity; your god is really our devil, --arecognition of antipodal inversion truly worthy the Jesuitical mind!

Perhaps it is not matter for great surprise that they converted but fewof their hearers. The suggestion was hardly so diplomatic as might havebeen expected from so generally astute a body; for it could not makemuch difference what the all-presiding deity was called, if his actionswere the same, since his motives were beyond human observation. Besides, the bare idea of a foreign bogus was not very terrifying. The Chinesepossessed too many familiar devils of their own. But there was anotherand a much deeper reason, which we shall come to later, why Christianitymade but little headway in the Far East. 

But it is by no means in externals only that the two religions arealike. If the first glance at them awakens that peculiar sensation whichmost of us have felt at some time or other, a sense of having seen allthis before, further scrutiny reveals a deeper agreement than merely inappearances. 

In passing from the surface into the substance, it may be mentionedincidentally that the codes of morality of the two are about on a level. I say incidentally, for so far as its practice, certainly, is concerned, it not its preaching, morality has no more intimate connection withreligion than it has with art or politics. If we doubt this, we have butto examine the facts. Are the most religious peoples the most moral? Itneeds no prolonged investigation to convince us that they are not. Ifproof of the want of a bond were required, the matter of truth-tellingmight be adduced in point. As this is a subject upon which a slightmisconception exists in the minds of some evangelically persuadedpersons, and because, what is more generally relevant, the presence ofthis quality, honesty in word and deed, has more than almost any otherone characteristic helped to put us in the van of the world's advanceto-day, it may not unfittingly be cited here. 

The argument in the case may be put thus. Have specially religious racesbeen proportionally truth-telling ones? If not, has there been anyother cause at work in the development of mankind tending to increaseveracity? The answer to the first question has all the simplicity ofa plain negative. No such pleasing concomitance of characteristicsis observable to-day, or has been presented in the past. Permitting, however, the dead past to bury its shortcomings in oblivion, let us lookat the world as we find it. We observe, then, that the religious spiritis quite as strong in Asia as it is in Europe; if anything, that at thepresent time it is rather stronger. The average Brahman, Mahometan, or Buddhist is quite as devout as the ordinary Roman Catholic orPresbyterian. If he is somewhat less given to propagandism, he is nota whit less regardful of his own salvation. Yet throughout the Orienttruth is a thing unknown, lies of courtesy being de rigueur and liesof convenience de raison; while with us, fortunately, mendacity isgenerally discredited. But we need not travel so far for proof. The sameis evident in less antipodal relations. Have the least religious nationsof Europe been any less truthful than the most bigoted? Was fanaticSpain remarkable for veracity? Was Loyola a gentleman whose assertionscarried conviction other than to the stake? Were the eminently mundaneburghers whom he persecuted noted for a pious superiority to fact? Or, to narrow the field still further, and scan the circle of one's ownacquaintance, are the most believing individuals among them worthy ofthe most belief? Assuredly not. 

We come, then, to the second point. Has there been any influence at workto differentiate us in this respect from Far Orientals? There has. Twoseparate causes, in fact, have conduced to the same result. The one isthe development of physical science; the other, the extension of trade. The sole object of science being to discover truth, truth-telling is anecessity of its existence. Professionally, scientists are obliged to betruthful. Aliter of a Jesuit. 

So long as science was of the closet, its influence upon mankindgenerally was indirect and slight; but so soon as it proceeded to stalkinto the street and earn its own living, its veracious character beganto tell. When out of its theories sprang inventions and discoveries thatrevolutionized every-day affairs and changed the very face of things, society insensibly caught its spirit. Man awoke to the inestimable valueof exactness. From scientists proper, the spirit filtered down throughevery stratum of education, till to-day the average man is born exact toa degree which his forefathers never dreamed of becoming. To-day, asa rule, the more intelligent the individual, the more truthful he is, because the more innately exact in thought, and thence in word andaction. With us, to lie is a sign of a want of cleverness, not of anexcess of it. 

The second cause, the extension of trade, has inculcated the same regardfor veracity through the pocket. For with the increase of businesstransactions in both time and space, the telling of the truth has becomea financial necessity. Without it, trade would come to a standstill atonce. Our whole mercantile system, a modern piece of mechanism unknownto the East till we imported it thither, turns on an implicit beliefin the word of one's neighbor. Our legal safeguards would snap likered tape were the great bond of mutual trust once broken. Westerncivilization has to be truthful, or perish. 

And now for the spirits of the two beliefs. 

The soul of any religion realizes in one respect the Brahman idea of theindividual soul of man, namely, that it exists much after the manner ofan onion, in many concentric envelopes. Man, they tell us, is composednot of a single body simply, but of several layers of body, each shellas it were respectively inclosing another. The outermost is the merelymaterial body, of which we are so directly cognizant. This encases asecond, more spiritual, but yet not wholly free from earthly affinities. This contains another, still more refined; till finally, inside of allis that immaterial something which they conceive to constitute thesoul. This eventual residuum exemplifies the Franciscan notion of puresubstance, for it is a thing delightfully devoid of any attributeswhatever. 

We may, perhaps, not be aware of the existence of such an elaborateset of encasings to our own heart of hearts, nor of a something sovery indefinite within, but the most casual glance at any religion willreveal its truth as regards the soul of a belief. We recognize the factoutwardly in the buildings erected to celebrate its worship. Not amongthe Jews alone was the holy of holies kept veiled, to temper the divineradiance to man's benighted understanding. Nor is the chancel-rail ofChristianity the sole survivor of the more exclusive barriers of oldentimes, even in the Western world. In the Far East, where difficulty ofaccess is deemed indispensable to dignity, the material approachesare still manifold and imposing. Court within court, building afterbuilding, isolate the shrine itself from the profane familiarity ofthe passers-by. But though the material encasings vary in number andin exclusiveness, according to the temperament of the particularrace concerned, the mental envelopes exist, and must exist, in bothhemispheres alike, so long as society resembles the crust of the earthon which it dwells, --a crust composed of strata that grow denser as onedescends. What is clear to those on top seems obscure to those below;what are weighty arguments to the second have no force at all uponthe first. There must necessarily be grades of elevation in individualbeliefs, suited to the needs and cravings of each individual soul. Acreed that fills the shallow with satisfaction leaves but an achingvoid in the deep. It is not of the slightest consequence how the beliefstarts; differentiated it is bound to become. The higher minds alonecan rest content with abstract imaginings; the lower must have concreterealities on which to pin their faith. With them, inevitably, idealsdegenerate into idols. In all religions this unavoidable debasement hastaken place. The Roman Catholic who prays to a wooden image of Christis not one whit less idolatrous than the Buddhist who worships a bronzestatue of Amida Butzu. All that the common people are capable of seeingis the soul-envelope, for the soul itself they are unable to appreciate. Spiritually they are undiscerning, because imaginatively they are blind. 

Now the grosser soul-envelopes of the two great European and Asiaticfaiths, though differing in detail, are in general parallel instructure. Each boasts its full complement of saints, whose congruentcatalogues are equally wearisome in length. Each tells its circle ofbeads to help it keep count of similarly endless prayers. For in both, in the popular estimation, quantity is more effective to salvationthan quality. In both the believer practically pictures his heaven forhimself, while in each his hell, with a vividness that does like creditto its religious imagination, is painted for him by those of the cultwho are themselves confident of escaping it. Into the lap of each motherchurch the pious believer drops his little votive offering with the sameaffectionate zeal, and in Asia, as in Europe, the mites of the many makethe might of the mass. 

But behind all this is the religion of the few, --of those to whomsensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings;whose god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whomworship means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion of thesoul. 

The rays of the truth, like the rays of the sun, which universally seemsto have been man's first adoration, have two properties equally inherentin their essence, warmth and light. And as for the life of all thingson this globe both attributes of sunshine are necessary, so to thedevelopment of that something which constitutes the ego both qualitiesof the truth are vital. We sometimes speak of character as if it werea thing wholly apart from mind; but, in fact, the two things are sointerwoven that to perceive the right course is the strongest possibleof incentives to pursue it. In the end the two are one. Now, whileclearness of head is all-important, kindness of heart is none the lessso. The first, perhaps, is more needed in our communings with ourselves, the second in our commerce with others. For, dark and dense bodiesthat we are, we can radiate affection much more effectively than we canreflect views. 

That Christianity is a religion of love needs no mention; that Buddhismis equally such is perhaps not so generally appreciated. But just as thegospel of the disciple who loved and was loved the most begins its storyby telling us of the Light that came into the world, so none the lesssurely could the Light of Asia but be also its warmth. Half of theteachings of Buddhism are spent in inculcating charity. Not only to menis man enjoined to show kindliness, but to all other animals as well. The people practise what their scriptures preach. The effect indirectlyon the condition of the brutes is almost as marked as its more directeffect on the character of mankind. In heart, at least, Buddhism andChristianity are very close. 

But here the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Upto this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on theyare so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went beforeonly suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeitingshadow of the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are allthere, but within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor thetwo beliefs are kin, but as regards one's self, as far apart as the Westis from the East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly awareof standing on the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down intothat great gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot seethe bottom. It is a separation more profound than death; it seems tonecessitate annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all weknow as ourselves. 

Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. Inthis fundamental difference lies the world-wide opposition of the twobeliefs. Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoycountless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have uspurify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore. 

For all that it preaches the essential vileness of the natural man, Christianity is a gospel of optimism. While it affirms that at presentyou are bad, it also affirms that this depravity is no intrinsic partof yourself. It unquestioningly asserts that it is something foreignto your true being. It even believes that in a more or less spiritualmanner your very body will survive. It essentially clings to the ego. What it inculcates is really present endeavor sanctioned by the prospectof future bliss. It tacitly takes for granted the desirabilityof personal existence, and promises the certainty of personalimmortality, --a terror to evildoers, and a sustaining sense of comingunalloyed happiness to the good. Through and through its teachings runsthe feeling of the fullness of life, that desire which will not die, that wish of the soul which beats its wings against its earthly casementin its longing for expansion beyond the narrow confines of threescoreyears and ten. 

Buddhism, on the contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life, it says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiplyevil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. Wethink they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, andwe are victims of a mirage. This personality, this sense of self, isa cruel deception and a snare. Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, anindivisible part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, andthen only, will you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence ofNirvana. 

With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were bothpresent in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have turnedto the consolations of religion by reason of their own wretchedness;Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others whom, in his ownhappy life journey, he chanced one day to come across. Shocked by thesight of human disease, old age, and death, sad facts to which hithertohe had been sedulously kept a stranger, he renounced the world that hemight find for it an escape from its ills. But bliss, as he conceivedit, lay not in wanting to be something he was not, but in actual want ofbeing. His quest for mankind was immunity from suffering, not the activeenjoyment of life. In this negative way of looking at happiness, he acted in strict conformity with the spirit of his world. For thedoctrine of pessimism had already been preached. It underlay the wholeBrahman philosophy, and everybody believed it implicitly. Already theEast looked at this life as an evil, and had affirmed for the individualspirit extinction to be happier than existence. The wish for an endto the ego, the hope to be eventually nothing, Gautama accepted for atruism as undeniably as the Brahmans did. What he pronounced false wasthe Brahman prospectus of the way to reach this desirable impersonalstate. Their road, be said, could not possibly land the traveller whereit professed, since it began wrong, and ended nowhere. The way, heasserted, is within a man. He has but to realize the truth, and fromthat moment he will see his goal and the road that leads there. Thereis no panacea for human ills, of external application. The Brahmanhomoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The slaughtering of men andbulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To mortify the body forthe sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in desire alone lies allthe ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die of inanition. Manhimself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then, said the Buddha, of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold thetrue soul a prisoner. They have to do with things which we know aretransitory: how can they be immortal themselves? We recognize them assubject to our will; they are, then, not the I. 

As a man, he taught, becomes conscious that he himself is somethingdistinct from his body, so, if he reflect and ponder, he will come tosee that in like manner his appetites, ambitions, hopes, are reallyextrinsic to the spirit proper. Neither heart nor head is truly the man, for he is conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire, behind even the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with thesoul of the universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth, the man has entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of theindividual soul into the soul of all things, since the one has alwaysbeen a part of the other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It issimply the recognition of the eternal oneness of the two, back throughan everlasting past on through an everlasting future. 

Such is the belief which the Japanese adopted, and which they professto-day. Such to them is to be the dawn of death's to-morrow; a blessedimpersonal immortality, in which all sense of self, illusion that itis, shall itself have ceased to be; a long dreamless sleep, a beatifiedrest, which no awakening shall ever disturb. 

Among such a people personal Christianity converts but few. They acceptour material civilization, but they reject our creeds. To preach aprolongation of life appears to them like preaching an extension ofsorrow. At most, Christianity succeeds only in making them doubters ofwhat lies beyond this life. But though professing agnosticism while theylive, they turn, when the shadows of death's night come on, to the bosomof that faith which teaches that, whatever may have been one's earthlyshare of happiness, "'tis something better not to be. "

Strange it seems at first that those who have looked so long to therising sun for inspiration should be they who live only in a sort oflethargy of life, while those who for so many centuries have turnedtheir faces steadily to the fading glory of the sunset should be theones who have embodied the spirit of progress of the world. Perhaps thelight, by its very rising, checks the desire to pursue; in its settingit lures one on to follow. 

Though this religion of impersonality is not their child, it is theirchoice. They embraced it with the rest that India taught them, centuriesago. But though just as eager to learn of us now as of India then, Christianity fails to commend itself. This is not due to the fact thatthe Buddhist missionaries came by invitation, and ours do not. Nor is itdue to any want of personal character in these latter, but simply to anexcess of it in their doctrines. 

For to-day the Far East is even more impersonal in its religion than arethose from whom that religion originally came. India has returned againto its worship of Brahma, which, though impersonal enough, is less sothan is the gospel of Gautama. For it is passively instead of activelyimpersonal. 

Buddhism bears to Brahmanism something like the relation thatProtestantism does to Roman Catholicism. Both bishops and Brahmansundertake to save all who shall blindly commit themselves toprofessional guidance, while Buddhists and Protestants alike believethat a man's salvation must be brought about by the action of the manhimself. The result is, that in the matter of individuality the tworeformed beliefs are further apart than those against which theyseverally protested. For by the change the personal became morepersonal, and the impersonal more impersonal than before. TheProtestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began to takea lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of the universallyillusive, set to work energetically towards self-extinction. Curiouslabor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinkingitself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a FarOriental is constantly striving to make himself more so. 

We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples weare brought face to face with impersonality in each of those threeexpressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have lookedat them first from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularlylittle regard is paid the individual from his birth to his death. Howhe lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerilea tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up. How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself todestroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations mighthave left. How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought tothe bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of politeconsideration to his neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself asmuch as possible as if he were another, and to that other as if hewere himself. Then, not content with standing stranger like upon thethreshold, we have sought to see the soul of their civilization in itsintrinsic manifestations. We have pushed our inquiry, as it were, one step nearer its home. And the same trait that was apparentsociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychicalresearch. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the principalmedium of communication between one soul and another; how impersonalare the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns tonature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when hespeculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desireis to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds andvanish invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracingspace. 

Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoplesso different from us in this most fundamental of considerations toany people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to someinteresting conclusions. 

Chapter 8. Imagination. 

If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled roundher orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to find, between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked continually to thesun, and those of the other peering eternally out at the stars, some such difference as actually exists between ourselves and ourlongitudinal antipodes. For our conception of the cosmos is of asunlit world throbbing with life, while their Nirvana finds not unfitexpression in the still, cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. Thatwe cannot thus directly account for the difference in local coloringserves but to make that difference of more human interest. Thedissimilarity between the Western and the Far Eastern attitude of mindhas in it something beyond the effect of environment. For it points tothe importance of the part which the principle of individuality playsin the great drama daily enacting before our eyes, and which we know asevolution. It shows, as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bearsthe same relation to the development of mind that the differentiationof species does to the evolution of organic life: that the degree ofindividualization of a people is the self-recorded measure of its placein the great march of mind. 

All life, whether organic or inorganic, consists, as we know, ina change from a state of simple homogeneity to one of complexheterogeneity. The process is apparently the same in a nebula or abrachiopod, although much more intricate in the latter. The immediateforce which works this change, the life principle of things, is, in thecase of organic beings, a subtle something which we call spontaneousvariation. What this mysterious impulse may be is beyond our presentpowers of recognition. As yet, the ultimates of all things lie hiddenin the womb of the vast unknown. But just as in the case of a man we cantell what organs are vital, though we are ignorant what the vital sparkmay be, so in our great cosmical laws we can say in what their powerresides, though we know not really what they are. Whether mind be but asublimated form of matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, mattera menial kind of mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be asomething incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, thesame laws of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of continuityleads from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we canfollow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is to thematerial organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental one. Justas spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal or the plantto push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions, while naturalconditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort of unconsciouspruning power, so imagination is ever at work urging man's mind out andon, while the sentiment of the community, commonly called common sense, which simply means the point already reached by the average, is assteadily tending to keep it at its own level. The environment helps, inthe one case as in the other, to the shaping of the development. Purelyphysical in the first, it is both physical and psychical in thesecond, the two reacting on each other. But in either case it is only aconstraining condition, not the divine impulse itself. Precisely, then, as in the organism, this subtle spirit checked in one direction findsa way to advance in another, and produces in consequence among anoriginally similar set of bodies a gradual separation into specieswhich grow wider with time, so in brain evolution a like force for likereasons tends inevitably to an ever-increasing individualization. 

Now what evidence have we that this analogy holds? Let us look at thefacts, first as they present themselves subjectively. 

The instinct of self-preservation, that guardian angel so persistent toappear when needed, owes its summons to another instinct no less strong, which we may call the instinct of individuality; for with the sameinnate tenacity with which we severally cling to life do we hold tothe idea of our own identity. It is not for the philosophic desire ofpreserving a very small fraction of humanity at large that we take suchpains to avoid destruction; it is that we insensibly regard death asthreatening to the continuance of the ego, in spite of the theories ofa future life which we have so elaborately developed. Indeed, thepsychical shrinking is really the quintessence of the physical fear. Wecleave to the abstract idea closer even than to its concrete embodiment. Sooner would we forego this earthly existence than surrender thatsomething we know as self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courtingdeath; we cannot conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality foranother's, still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separablefrom himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by theclimatic conditions of our present existence, one without which wecould no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not necessarilynegative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering spirit's fate. But topart with the sense of self seems to be like taking an eternal farewellof the soul. The Western mind shrinks before the bare idea of such athought. 

The clinging to one's own identity, then, is now an instinct, whateverit may originally have been. It is a something we inherited from ourancestors and which we shall transmit more or less modified to ourdescendants. How far back this consciousness has been felt passesthe possibilities of history to determine, since the recording of itnecessarily followed the fact. All we know is that its mention is coevalwith chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory. The Bible, one of theoldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology ofa very significant kind. When the Jews undertook to trace back theirfamily tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growingthere beside the tree of life, another tree called the tree ofknowledge. Of what character this knowledge was is inferable from thesudden self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it. So that ifwe please we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the manyevils of our morbid self-consciousness of the present day. But withoutindulging in unchivalrous reflections we may draw certain morals from itof both immediate and ultimate applicability. 

To begin with, it is a most salutary warning to the introspective, andin the second place it is a striking instance of a myth which is nota sun myth; for it is essentially of human regard, an attempt on man'spart to explain that most peculiar attribute of his constitution, the all-possessing sense of self. It looks certainly as if he was notover-proud of his person that he should have deemed its recognitionoccasion for the primal curse, and among early races the person is fora good deal of the personality. What he lamented was not life but theunavoidable exertion necessary to getting his daily bread, for thequestion whether life were worth while was as futile then as now, and asinconceivable really as 4-dimensional space. 

We are then conscious of individuality as a force within ourselves. Butour knowledge by no means ends there; for we are aware of it in the caseof others as well. 

About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves itsimpress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in contactwith them. This something is a power, but a power of so indefinable adescription that we beg definition by calling it simply the personalityof the man. It is not a matter of subsequent reasoning, but of directperception. We feel it. Sometimes it charms us; sometimes it repels. Butwe can no more be oblivious to it than we can to the temperature ofthe air. Its possessor has but to enter the room, and insensibly we areconscious of a presence. It is as if we had suddenly been placed in thefield of a magnetic force. 

On the other hand there are people who produce no effect upon uswhatever. They come and go with a like indifference. They are asunimportant psychically as if they were any other portion of thefurniture. They never stir us. We might live with them for fifty yearsand be hardly able to tell, for any influence upon ourselves, whetherthey existed or not. They remind us of that neutral drab which certainreligious sects assume to show their own irrelevancy to the world. Theyare often most estimable folk, but they are no more capable of inspiringa strong emotion than the other kind are incapable of doing so. And wesay the difference is due to the personality or want of personality ofthe man. Now, in what does this so-called personality consist? Not inbodily presence simply, for men quite destitute of it possess theforce in question; not in character only, for we often disapprove of acharacter whose attraction we are powerless to resist; not in intellectalone, for men more rational fail of stirring us as these unconsciouslydo. In what, then? In life itself; not that modicum of it, indeed, whichsuffices simply to keep the machine moving, but in the life principle, the power which causes psychical change; which makes the individualsomething distinct from all other individuals, a being capable ofproving sufficient, if need be, unto himself; which shows itself, inshort, as individuality. This is not a mere restatement of the case, forindividuality is an objective fact capable of being treated by physicalscience. And as we know much more at present about physical facts thanwe do of psychological problems, we may be able to arrive the sooner atsolution. 

Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only threedifferent aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many variousviews of the soul according as we regard it from an intrinsic, analtruistic, or an egoistic standpoint. For by individuality is not meantsimply the isolation in a corporeal casing of a small portion of theuniversal soul of mankind. So far as mind goes, this would not beindividuality at all, but the reverse. By individuality we mean thatbundle of ideas, thoughts, and daydreams which constitute our separateidentity, and by virtue of which we feel each one of us at home withinhimself. Now man in his mind-development is bound to become more andmore distinct from his neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress souniform as not to necessitate this. It would be contrary to all weknow of natural law, besides contradicting daily experience. For eachsuccessive generation bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Childrenof the same parents are never exactly like either their parents or oneanother, and they often differ amazingly from both. In such instancesthey revert to type, as we say; but inasmuch as the race is steadilyadvancing in development, such reversion must resemble that of an estatewhich has been greatly improved since its previous possession. Theappearance of the quality is really the sprouting of a seed whoseoriginal germ was in some sense coeval with the beginning of things. This mind-seed takes root in some cases and not in others, according tothe soil it finds. And as certain traits develop and others do not, one man turns out very differently from his neighbor. Such inevitabledistinction implies furthermore that the man shall be sensible of it. Consciousness is the necessary attribute of mental action. Not only isit the sole way we have of knowing mind; without it there would be nomind to know. Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not to be. This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I, "has for its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personalityis the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others. 

But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imaginationthe cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-makingfaculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the worldwithin. The separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone isdue the building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. Forthere is no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinctionthat imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, isitself, except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw;for it is only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely amatter of relation. We may instance dreams which are usually consideredto rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not inhis dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escapedunhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments he wouldassuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say thething is impossible. But is it? Only under the relative conditions ofhis mass and the earth's. If the world he happens to inhabit were notits present size, but the size of one of the tinier asteroids, no suchdisastrous results would follow a chance misstep. He could there walkoff precipices when too closely pursued by bears--if I remember rightlythe usual childish cause of the same--with perfect impunity. Thebear could do likewise, unfortunately. We should have arrived at ourconclusion even quicker had we decreased the size both of the man andhis world. He would not then have had to tumble actually so far, andwould therefore have arrived yet more gently at the foot. This turnsout, then, to be a mere question of size. Decrease the scale of thepicture, and the impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies arenot so easily reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, butall, perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way. At present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thusexplained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in thislittle world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what weshould have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale ofthe flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver'stravels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse theinter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiterthe land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of theBrobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would haveto be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the smallone. Still stranger things may exist around other suns. In those brightparticular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the darkcanopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are findingconditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To ourgroping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on themin their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditionsmay exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplacefacts. There may be

 "Some Xanadu where Kublai can a stately pleasure dome decree, "

and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. Forif the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing furtherto be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge'sdistinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds ofimaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundationin fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, notinaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. Forotherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring ofpsychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping theaction regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine withwhat we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but thelocal. It does not mark the limits of the possible. 

That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world isevident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. Weare in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction betweenthe search after truth and the search after beauty, calling theone science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to imputeimagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate itsconnection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on thesubject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of hervotaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, butthat a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amountof imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now paintingbegins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poorcopyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudestsymbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by afew scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved. Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another;a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not thatimagination of a higher order has not been called into play, althougheven now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creationsproper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately forthemselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art mayattain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction forits professors, without calling in the aid of imagination, is evidentenough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the other. 

Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the averagelayman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of itsconclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product ofhuman thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a fewso-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the results ofexperience. It is none the less imaginative because its discoveriesalways accord subsequently with fact, since man was not aware of thembeforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions inevitable to any savethose possessed of the mathematician's prophetic sight. Once discovered, it requires much less imagination to understand them. With the lightcoming from in front, it is an easy matter to see what lies behind one. 

So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinningand weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the mostabstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination;for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we considertheoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, andeven the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle atits core. We are too prone to regard the present age of the world aspreeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witchingfancies of his boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel thananalogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so atforty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on amore critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century isperhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known. While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anythingbut talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the actionof mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself. 

History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind, imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and notthe power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, hasbeen the cause of soul-evolution. 

The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, attimes, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore. The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty inimagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers ofobservation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indiantracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a whiteman, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very manturns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out ofhis beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not the power toimagine something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of theforce of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat forhim. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk, to besure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place, an animalcannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrowbounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is. 

What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginativeraces have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance. 

Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to theother; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progressionimplies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination isthe force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explainsincidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence. 

We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now ifindividuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization whicha nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggardposition in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these peoplecertain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state ofdevelopment. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of whichincrease in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality shouldbe at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularlyunimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lackof imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought incontact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students. Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to makeit evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is trulydistressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One noticesit all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whoseappearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated todull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues, cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeatit here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English masterasked him what he thought of

 "That orbed maiden With white fires laden Whom mortals call the moon, "

replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in themongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes bythe name of pidgin English). 

Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as theyappear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the noveltyto us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an "up-down" has arefreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much more descriptivethan imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the phrase "the being (so)is difficult, " in place of "thank you, " a surprisingly beautiful bit ofimagery, delightful as it sounds for a change. Our own tongue has, inits daily vocabulary, far more suggestive expressions, only familiarityhas rendered us callous to their use. We employ at every instant wordswhich, could we but stop to think of them, would strike us as poeticin the ideas they call up. As has been well said, they were once happythoughts of some bright particular genius bequeathed to posteritywithout so much as an accompanying name, and which proved so popularthat they soon became but symbols themselves. 

Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of anyfanciful ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Easternraces, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of assalient. Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in theirevery-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every branch ofthought. Originality is not their strong point. Their utter ignorance ofscience shows this, and paradoxical as it may seem, their art, inspite of its merit and its universality, does the same. That art andimagination are necessarily bound together receives no very forcibleconfirmation from a land where, nationally speaking, at any rate, thefirst is easily first and the last easily last, as nations go. It is toquite another quality that their artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and later the Japanese have accomplished resultsat which the rest of the world will yet live to marvel, is due totheir--taste. But taste or delicacy of perception has absolutely nothingto do with imagination. That certain of the senses of Far Orientals arewonderfully keen, as also those parts of the brain that directly respondto them, is beyond question; but such sensitiveness does not in theleast involve the less earth-tied portions of the intellect. A peculiarresponsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental agreement with itsearthly environment, is a marked feature of the Japanese mind. But appreciation, however intimate, is a very different thing fromoriginality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the other, but theother by no means always accompanies the one. 

So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to findif our diagnosis be correct. 

If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, threerelative results should follow. In the first place, the race in questionwill at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, itsrate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual memberswill all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff, starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, dividesinto drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and fartherapart, descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences arevisible in the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first resultscarcely needs to be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe itwithout proof. It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, theircivilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they arecertainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars, their wholescheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it does not go so far. Less rude, it is morerudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its surface-perfection reallyshows that nature has given less thought to its substance. One may sayof it that it is the adult form of a lower type of mind-specification. 

The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progresshas been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. Thependulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stopat the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they callthemselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caughton their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, whichelsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatallystable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is somethingmore than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the statusquo. Jostled, he at once settles back to his previous condition again;much as more materially, after a lifetime spent in California, at hisdeath his body is punctiliously embalmed and sent home across fivethousand miles of sea for burial. With the Japanese the condition ofaffairs is somewhat different. Their tendency to stand still is of apurely passive kind. It is a state of neutral equilibrium, stationaryof itself but perfectly responsive to an impulse from without. Left totheir own devices, they are conservative enough, but they instantlycopy a more advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. Thisproclivity on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On thecontrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see thevery same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown with everyday. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality. The lessstrong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt the ideas ofothers, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreignbody than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece ofpaper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself. 

The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not, perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident oninspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Easternstate of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity thereis singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes ofmind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack ofdivergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but inall those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes. Inreasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception, itis the same story. If this were simply the impression at first sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of racialsimilarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance of onepeople by another. Even in outward appearance it is so. We find itat first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it equallyimpossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is not amatter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The menwhom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than isthe case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliesttimes. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanesehumanity is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of geniusis fully paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the pathsof preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewiseunfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departureof individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;--so muchalike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hopefor disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have notmet with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving classof enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief might dowell to attempt it. They would find there a very virgin field of a mostpromisingly dead level. It is true, human opposition would undoubtedlyprevent their tilling it, but Nature, at least, would not present quitesuch constitutional obstacles as she wisely does with us. 

The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race mind. The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental characteristicsthere are a sort of common property, of which a certain undifferentiatedportion is indiscriminately allotted to every man at birth. One soulresembles another so much, that in view of the patriarchal systemunder which they all exist, there seems to the stranger a peculiarappropriateness in so strong a family likeness of mind. An idea of howlittle one man's brain differs from his neighbor's may be gathered fromthe fact, that while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare timein playing a chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advancedphilosopher is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the ponsasinorum. 

We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what ourtheory demanded. 

There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that theenvironment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that thesoul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact doesnot, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped in theprocess. Change of scene is beneficial to others besides invalids. How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove, when at allfavorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of the marguerite, which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped our fields. Thesame has been no less true of peoples. Now these Far Eastern peoples, incomparison with our own forefathers, have travelled very little. A racein its travels gains two things: first it acquires directly a greatdeal from both places and peoples that it meets, and secondly it isconstantly put to its own resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal as the outcome of such strife. The changedconditions, the hostile forces it finds, necessitate mental ingenuityto adapt them and influence it unconsciously. To see how potent theseinfluences prove we have but to look at the two great branches of theAryan family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and theone that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryanmind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics theimagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world'sprogress to-day. The inevitable numbness of monotony crept over thestay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced itsunavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like some paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a drowsy slumber only todream in the land they had formerly wrested from its possessors. Theirbirthright passed with their cousins into the West. 

In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause andeffect mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel moreis due primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack ofimagination, and then their want of travel told upon their imagination. They were also unfortunate in their journeying. Their travels wereprematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical Nirvana thePacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it themselves. Thatthey would have journeyed further is shown by the way their dreams wenteastward still. They themselves could not for the preventing ocean, andthe lapping of its waters proved a nation's lullaby. 

One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization hasmore than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world, tendsinevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of the cosmosthe more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it. Its soul mustbe one, not many. The divine power that made all things is not itselfmultifold. How to reconcile the ever-increasing divergence withan eventual similarity is a problem at present transcending ourgeneralizations. What we know would seem to be opposed to what wemust infer. But perception of how we shall merge the personal in theuniversal, though at present hidden from sight, may sometime come tous, and the seemingly irreconcilable will then turn out to involve nocontradiction at all. For this much is certain: grand as is the greatconception of Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest itwould lead us to, the road here below is not one the life of the worldcan follow. If earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help usignore it; but if by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively craveactivity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; forto abandon self--egoism, that is, not selfishness is the true vacuumwhich nature abhors. As for Far Orientals, they themselves furnish proofagainst themselves. That impersonality is not man's earthly goal theyunwittingly bear witness; for they are not of those who will survive. Artistic attractive people that they are, their civilization is liketheir own tree flowers, beautiful blossoms destined never to bear fruit;for whatever we may conceive the far future of another life to be, theimmediate effect of impersonality cannot but be annihilating. If thesepeople continue in their old course, their earthly career is closed. Just as surely as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are theseraces of the Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before theadvancing nations of the West. Vanish they will off the face of theearth and leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers wherethe day declines. Unless their newly imported ideas really take root, itis from this whole world that Japanese and Koreans, as well as Chinese, will inevitably be excluded. Their Nirvana is already being realized;already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its winding-sheet, the shroudof those whose day was but a dawn, as if in prophetic keeping with thenames they gave their homes, --the Land of the Day's Beginning, and theLand of the Morning Calm.