"Famous Takino Temple stands not far away, and Somen Fall too. It is worth while to be there once."
It is indeed, and many times! But can you imagine a rural council in England breaking into this personal note? And how reserved! Almost like Japanese art. Compare the invitation I once saw in Switzerland, to visit "das schönste Schwärm- und Aussichtspunkt des ganzen Schweitzerischen Reichs." There speaks the advertiser. But beside the Somen Fall there was no restaurant.
Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back of their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense for beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane memento they would say, if they knew the tag; and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie to this complacent theory. No nations were ever more virile than the Greeks or the Italians. They have left a mark on the world which will endure when Anglo-Saxon civilisation is forgotten. And none have been, or are, more virile than the Japanese. That they have the delicacy of women, too, does not alter the fact. The Russian War proved it, if proof so tragic were required; and so does all their mediæval history. Japanese feudalism was as bloody, as ruthless, as hard as European. It was even more gallant, stoical, loyal. But it had something else which I think Europe missed, unless it were once in Provence. It had in the midst of its hardness a consciousness of the pathos of life, of its beauty, its brevity, its inexplicable pain. I think in no other country has anything arisen analogous to the Zen sect of Buddhism, when knights withdrew from battle to a garden and summerhouse, exquisitely ordered to symbolise the spiritual life, and there, over a cup of tea served with an elaborate ritual, looking out on a lovely nature, entered into mystic communion with the spirit of beauty which was also the spirit of life. From that communion, with that mood about them, they passed out to kill or to die—to die, it might be, by their own hand, by a process which I think no Western man can bear even to think of, much less conceive himself as imitating.
This sense at once of the beauty and of the tragedy of life, this power of appreciating the one and dominating the other, seems to be the essence of the Japanese character. In this place, it will be remembered, is the tomb of Iyeyasu, the greatest statesman Japan has produced. Appropriately, after his battles and his labours, he sleeps under the shade of trees, surrounded by chapels and oratories more sumptuous and superb than anything else in Japan, approached for miles and miles by a road lined on either side with giant cryptomerias. His spirit, if it could know, would appreciate, we may be sure, this habitation of beauty. For these men, ruthless as they were, were none the less sensitive. For example, the traveller is shown (in Kyoto, I think) a little pavilion in a garden where Hideyoshi used to sit and contemplate the moon. I believe it. I think Iyeyasu did the same. And also he wrote this, on a roll here preserved:
"Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy load. Let thy steps be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. Persuade thyself that privations are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou hast passed through. Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance for ever. Look upon wrath as thy enemy. If thou knowest only what it is to conquer, and knowest not what it is to be defeated, woe unto thee! It will fare ill with thee. Find fault with thyself rather than with others. Better the less than the more."
Marcus Aurelius might have said that. But Marcus Aurelius belonged to a race peculiarly insensitive to beauty. The Japanese stoics were also artists and poets. Their earliest painters were feudal lords, and it was feudal lords who fostered and acted the No dances. If Nietzsche had known Japan—I think he did not?—he would surely have found in these Daimyos and Samurai the forerunners of his Superman. A blood-red blossom growing out of the battlefield, that, I think, was his ideal. It is one which, I hope, the world has outlived. I look for the lily flowering over the fields of peace.
IV
DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN
When Japan was opened to the West, after more than two centuries of seclusion, she was in possession of a national spirit which had been enabled, by isolation, to become and remain simple and homogeneous. All public feeling, all public morals centred about the divinity of the Emperor; an idea which, by a process unique in history, had hibernated through centuries of political obscuration, and emerged again to the light with its prestige unimpaired in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the Emperor, one may say, Japan was incarnate. And to this faith the Japanese, as well as foreign observers, attribute their great achievement in the Russian War. The little book of Captain Sakurai, Human Bullets, testifies to this fact in every sentence: "Through the abundant grace of Heaven and the illustrious virtue of his Majesty, the Imperial forces defeated the great enemy both on land and sea." ... "I jumped out of bed, cleansed my person with pure water, donned my best uniform, bowed to the East where the great Sire resides, solemnly read his proclamation of war, and told his Majesty that his humble subject was just starting to the front. When I offered my last prayers—the last I then believed they were—before the family shrine of my ancestors I felt a thrill going all through me, as if they were giving me a solemn injunction, saying: 'Thou art not thy own. For his Majesty's sake, thou shalt go to save the nation from calamity, ready to bear the crushing of thy bones and the tearing of thy flesh. Disgrace not thy ancestors by an act of cowardice.'" This, it is clear, is an attitude quite different from that of an Englishman towards the King. The King, to us, is at most a symbol. The Emperor, to the Japanese, is, or was, a god. And the difference may be noted in small matters. For instance, a Japanese, writing from England, observes with astonishment that we put the head of the King on our stamps and cover it with postmarks. That, to a Japanese, seems to be blasphemy. Again, he is puzzled, at the Coronation in Westminster Abbey, to find the people looking down from above on the King. That, again, seems to him blasphemy. Last year, when the Emperor was dying, crowds knelt hour after hour, day and night, on the road beside the palace praying for him. And a photographer who took a picture of them by flashlight was literally torn to pieces. One could multiply examples, but the thing is plain. The national spirit of Japan centres about the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that this attitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought is an irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Men cannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that a man is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believe that their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above all, they cannot be politicians and abstain from analysing the real source and sanction of political power. English political experience, it is true, suggests immense possibilities in the way of clinging to fictions with the feelings while insisting upon facts in practice. And the famous verse: