obedient and docile race that a little string stretched across a road is quite enough to close the thoroughfare. It is difficult to reconcile the character of this peaceable and pleasure-loving race which the modern traveller sees with that which is ascribed to their forefathers—those heroes of the desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries of Tokugawa rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed qualities of unreasoning obedience, and perhaps all the struggles of the past were merely dynastic, or affairs between the warriors of different clans; perhaps the people themselves have always been as gentle as they are now, cultivating their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little affected by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all times and countries, they were called on to supply the sinews of war.
THE LAST TEA LEAVES—COTTAGE NEAR YOKOHAMA
The lotus is intimately connected with Buddhism; most personifications of the Buddha are represented as seated or standing on its flower, or holding an unexpanded bud in their hands; it is largely used in temple decorations, and vases with imitations in metal of the flowers, leaves, buds, and seed-pods, often very exquisite in workmanship, stand on all the altars. It is typical to the Buddhist mind of the qualities of the ideal man: as it grows in the mud, yet produces a lovely flower, it is a symbol of purity in a naughty world; as its odor sweetens the air around, so his good deeds influence those about him; it opens in the morning sunshine, and his mind is expanded by the light of knowledge; its branchless stalks, rising without a break to the leaf or flower, are a type of his single-mindedness and directness of purpose; and its edible root shows that the basis of his life must be usefulness to others. To this I may add that, like the very good, the flower always dies young. It is lovely enough in itself without all this halo of virtue. Hardy says of Tess, “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”; this is unavoidable with most of us, and the suggestion of feelings and memories of our own does not necessarily obscure our visual sense; but a fixed and recognized suggestion is the result of mental laziness, and may lead to the ignoring of intrinsic beauty; as our lovely primrose is to some eyes a political badge, admired only because of its association with a name and a faction, or rejected for the same cause. To quote Mr. Punch,
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A party emblem was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
But the lotus has not sunk so low as this; though it has been adopted by the Buddhists, it excites no animosity in Shinto breasts; and where temples under the present régime have been handed over from the one religion to the other, though the pagoda and other distinctively Buddhist
LOTUS-PONDS AT KAMAKURA