Be it nevertheless observed that the old Japanese loved shadows made by the moon, and painted the same, because these were weird and did not interfere with color. But they had no admiration for shadows that blacken and break the charm of the world under the sun. When their noon-day landscapes are flecked by shadows at all,'tis by very thin ones only,—mere deepenings of tone, like those fugitive half-glooms which run before a summer cloud. And the inner as well as the outer world was luminous for them. Psychologically also they saw life without shadows.
Then the West burst into their Buddhist peace, and saw their art, and bought it up till an Imperial law was issued to preserve the best of what was left. And when there was nothing more to be bought, and it seemed possible that fresh creation might reduce the market price of what had been bought already, then the West said: "Oh, come now! you must n't go on drawing and seeing things that way, you know! It is n't Art! You, must really learn to see shadows, you know,—and pay me to teach you."
So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced shadows were the sole product of Western civilization, and bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows of machinery and chimneys and telegraph-poles; and at the shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of houses twenty stories high, and of hunger begging under them; and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty; and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for the purpose of an auto-da-fé. Whereat Japan became rather serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes. Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still clung to her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did before.
III
Just beyond the cemetery, in a tiny patch of hedged-in land, a farmer and his ox are plowing the black soil with a plow of the Period of the Gods; and the wife helps the work with a hoe more ancient than even the Empire of Japan. All the three are toiling with a strange earnestness, as though goaded without mercy by the knowledge that labor is the price of life.
That man I have often seen before in the colored prints of another century. I have seen him in kakemono of much more ancient date. I have seen him on painted screens of still greater antiquity. Exactly the same! Other fashions beyond counting have passed: the peasant's straw hat, straw coat, and sandals of straw remain. He himself is older, incomparably older, than his attire. The earth he tills has indeed swallowed him up a thousand times a thousand times; but each time it has given back to him his life with force renewed. And with this perpetual renewal he is content: he asks no more. The mountains change their shapes; the rivers shift their courses; the stars change their places in the sky: he changes never. Yet, though unchanging, is he a maker of change. Out of the sum of his toil are wrought the ships of iron, the roads of steel, the palaces of stone; his are the hands that pay for the universities and the new learning, for the telegraphs and the electric lights and the repeating-rifles, for the machinery of science and the machinery of commerce and the machinery of war. He is the giver of all; he is given in return—the right to labor forever. Wherefore he plows the centuries under, to plant new lives of men. And he will thus toil on till the work of the world shall have been done,—till the time of the end of man.
And what will be that end? Will it be ill or well? Or must it for all of us remain a mystery insolvable?
Out of the wisdom of the West is answer given: "Man's evolution is a progress into perfection and beatitude. The goal of evolution is Equilibration. Evils will vanish, one by one, till only that which is good survive. Then shall knowledge obtain its uttermost expansion; then shall mind put forth its most wondrous blossoms; then shall cease all struggle and all bitterness of soul, and all the wrongs and all the follies of life. Men shall become as gods, in all save immortality; and each existence shall be prolonged through centuries; and all the joys of life shall be made common in many a paradise terrestrial, fairer than poet's dream. And there shall be neither riders nor ruled, neither governments nor laws; for the order of all things shall be resolved by love."
But thereafter?