Olympus and Fuji yama; a study in transcendental history

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

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LYMPUS AND
FUJI YAMA

A ST U DY IN TR A N S-
CENDENTAL HISTORY
By LAYTON CRIPPEN

GRANNIS PRESS

NEW YORK
MCMV

Copyright, 1905
BY LAYTON CRIPPEN

Before man parted for this earthly strand.
While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood,

God put a heap of letters in his hand.
And bade him make with them what word he could.

And man has turn'd them many times; made Greece,
Rome, England, France; — yes, nor in vain essay' d

Way after way, changes that never cease!
The letters have combined, something was made.

But ah! an inextinguishable sense

Haunts him that he has not made what he should;
That he has still, though old, to recommence,

Since he has not yet found the word God would.

And empire after empire, at their height

Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on;

Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,
And droop' d, and slowly died upon their throne.

One day, thou say'st, there will at last appear

The word, the order, which God meant should be.

Ah! we shall know THAT well when it comes near;
The band will quit man's heart, he will breathe free.

— Matthew Arnold.

world is ready for a new Civilization.
Since the dawn of history, since the day
when the wise King told his people to
live by Law, it has learned and suf-
fered much. It has lived for pleasure, the lust
of the eye and the lust of the flesh, and has grown
satiated. In a fever of disgust it has mortified
the body that the soul might be redeemed, and
has become sick of renunciation. Then it has
turned to pleasure again, pleasure less innocent
and more alluring because of the haunting fear of
an offended God.

And now the world is a-weary. The old
ideals, the old faiths, the old incentives to hope
and noble effort are fast vanishing. Chris-
tianity is no longer a religion, but a sweet
memory which the people cannot bring them-
selves to abandon. The ethics of Christianity
have already disappeared before the persistent
questioning which is the surest sign of the end
of an era. There is a babel of voices, an in-
ferno of activities, but there are few now-a-
days who hope. Quo Vadis? is the cry again,
but this time there is none to answer.

Despair is the dominant note in music and
art and literature — despair arid wistful long-
ing for days gone by. Pessimism has become
a creed, which gains new followers every day.
Schopenhauer and Hartmann are its prophets,
FitzGerald and James Thomson are its psalmists,
and its apostles are in every land.

THE WORLD MELANCHOLY.

Rediscovering a principle which the Buddha
discovered two thousand years ago, the phi-
losophers of to-day tell us of what they call the
Desire of Life, the Will to Live. What it is
they do not know, and do not attempt to know,
but that without it humanity could not exist
they are ready to prove. How else, they ask,
can the clinging to life of those who dwell in
misery and filth and poverty be explained?
Life can give them nothing, and yet they
choose to live. There are a hundred ways of
escape, a hundred doors to death, and not one
in ten thousand breaks the bond of body and
soul that makes our life.

All philosophy is but the pushing back of
principles a little nearer to the final mystery,
the great First Principle of all ; and surely we
can get a little nearer to the heart of things
than this aphorism of the Desire of Life, the
consideration of the world as Will and Idea.
For besides the instinct for life which humanity
shares with all sentient creation, with the
lion and the bee, with the birds and trees and

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 7

flowers, there is another principle at work. It
is a principle without which man would have
remained savage and soulless, dwelling in the
forests and the caves, caring for nothing but to
satisfy his hunger and gratify his lust.

It is a principle which blesses and which
bans. It has given us Praxiteles' Hermes and
Lionardo's Monna Lisa, Homer's epics and
Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's sonatas and
Schubert's Serenade; and it has been responsi-
ble for the most terrible wars of humanity, for
much of its suffering, for many of its diseases,
for abominable sins, for incredible cruelties.

Life and Desire are co-existent. Each hu-
man being is seeking something that life gives,
or may be supposed to give. However
wretched his state, he believes — though pos-
sibly he may be unconscious of believing —
that he is living on in order to attain some
happiness, usually for himself, very rarely for
others. Power, knowledge, fame, money, love,
beauty, pleasure, some aims noble, some ig-
noble— the man without an ideal for the at-
tainment of which he strives or wishes does not
exist. Not every one endeavors actively to
realize his desire, but each has some end to
which he looks and for which he hopes.

But side by side with Desire, and the multi-
plication of desires, there has been evolved in
mankind, collectively and individually, the
consciousness of an Influence in the world
which is at once the negation and the comple-

8 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A

ment of Desire — the note of sadness, frustra-
tion, pity. It began with humanity's sense of
its own helplessness, with the tragedies of
death and pain. Along with the delight, the
passion, the joy in life there grew the recogni-
tion of another principle — the realization that
all those things that are most pleasant pass as
quickly as the lily is withered, the purple of
the violet turned into paleness.

Every beautiful thing in the world preaches
the same lesson. The lost Eden — for a little
time we think we may find it here, and then
the fair human creature we loved because of
something other than human that was there be-
comes altogether human; we realize our ideal
in words or in marble or on canvas and our
ideal inspires no longer; sooner or later is born
the sorrowful knowledge that all that is divine
in our existence is but a memory or a fore-
shadowing. Seek not your happiness here, nor
in love, nor in life, it all seems to say: / did
but taste a little honey with the end of the rod
that was in mine hand, and Lo, I must die.

It is this sense of frustration, this realiza-
tion that all things present are more frail and
weak than the webs of spiders and more de-
ceitful than dreams, that has resulted in the
world's progresses and its retrogressions, on
the one hand in the arts and on the other in re-
ligions. It is now a stimulant, now a narcotic.
It leads mankind to high noble effort, and then,
the effort failing, to listen to the voice of the

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 9

prophet and the priest. For man, the only
unsatisfied created thing, is ever seeking an
ideal, and the spirit that strives after a diviner
beauty than nature's is the cause of all his ac-
tivities and of all his defeats.

Inspiration of all poetry and song, of all arts;
moving humanity ever to search for an elusive
excellence, a hidden perfection; it wrote
Sappho's sweet burning verses, full of a hedon-
ism that yet is akin to tears; it moulded the
Cnidian Venus and the Olympian Hermes and
the Singing Boys of Donatello into figures so
gracious that rhythmic curve and subtle
modelling seem to strain beyond nature after
the divine ; it put the soul into the eyes of Botti-
celli's Madonna and traced the mystical, flame-
like lines of Blake's Morning Stars; Rubinstein
heard it when he wrote his Melody and its
voice is present in the meanest folk-song; it
guides the patriot when he dies for his country,
and the lover reads it in the glance of his be-
loved.

But it has done other things than these. By
it the Daughters of Music were raised up, but
by it also were they brought low. For it in-
spired the human sacrifices of a hundred creeds,
the self-tortures of the Brahmans and the
Flagellants, the work of the Inquisition, the wars
of Christianity and Mohammedanism. Men be-
gan by regarding the gods they worshipped as the
realization of their own ideals; from this the
transition was natural to the belief that the gods
had power to enable man to attain the ideal.

io OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

And together with this belief came the belief that
mankind's normal aims and delights, seeing
that they all led in the end to bitterness and
failure and death, must be wrong; that the
way to please the gods was by renunciation;
that for a man to attain to perfection it was
necessary for him to become more than man.

And when man learned that he could obtain
strength by refraining, asceticism was born
into the world, and with it a great part of the
ills that have afflicted humanity, but without
which, it would seem, humanity could not have
progressed. There are no historic parallels,
says the savant. Possibly, but there is a
lesson which history demonstrates so clearly
that none can gainsay it — the lesson that
asceticism, discipline, the result either of the
laws of religion, the laws of the state, or na-
tional adversities, is as necessary to a civiliza-
tion, a race, or a country as is sleep to the
individual, as is the denuding of the trees be-
fore the life that is in them obtains strength
for renewed manifestation.

And behind it all, humanity's efforts and fail-
ures, its wars and invasions, its periods of
cultivation and its periods of darkness, its
times of progress and its times of reverie, its
struggles to reach toward the light in so many
ways — behind it all can we not see, dimly it
may be but yet surely, an Order in the world, a
law which governs the activities of the human
race, and which, when apprehended, will help

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A n

us to explain its past and, in some little meas-
ure, to foretell its future? For the beginning
of all philosophy is this — that man has ac-
complished nothing, save through his renun-
ciations, through his tears.

THE LESSON OF HISTORY.

In considering the records left to us from the
past we can hardly fail to be impressed by the
strangely alternating nature of the energies
and ideas that have from the earliest times
dominated the Occidental world. The con-
viction forces itself upon us that the life and
thought of civilized mankind can be expressed
by two words — action and reaction. We find
that there have been two forces at work, or
rather a single force exerted in different ways.
Alternately has man been engaged, now in
searching in his own soul for the God whom
the visible world only seems to conceal, now in
trying to find the gods whom nature ever seems
to be on the point of revealing, but never re-
veals.

We find that the luminous period of any
nation, the period during which it has produced
great men and has done great things, during
which literature and the arts have flourished in
it, has always been preceded by a tenebrous
period, during which religion has usually
played a principal part in the nation's activities

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 13

and in which a stern asceticism has invariably
ruled the lives of its people. A period of re-
ligious ascendency has not always been fol-
lowed by a period of productive activity, but
no nation has ever had a flowering time with-
out first passing through the fires of discipline,
and suppression, and pain.

And when we regard, not isolated nations,
but civilization as a whole, this law becomes
still more manifest. The earliest civilization
of which we have any accurate knowledge was
that of Egypt, and in the gigantic temples, the
great enigmatic statues, the marvellous tombs
of that land we read the records of a nation to
which death was more real than life, in which
mystery lay behind mystery and secret and
terrible knowledge was in the hands of a few.
There may have been a literature in Egypt, but
that there was no art except that regulated by
the sternest traditionary laws we know. And
we know, too, that had it not been for the re-
pressive influence of their religion the art of the
Egyptians might have progressed far. No
race was ever more alive to beauty of form. In
one work after another wrought by the Egyp-
tians we find a sweet suggestion of the delicate
swaying motion of the human body, a gracious-
ness of line, a capacity for refinement, that
even the Greeks did not surpass. And it was
all wasted, all came to naught, because the
priests stood in the way.

For the Egyptians there was no flowering
time, and the great seated figures on the banks

14 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

of the Nile now seem to us but the embodiment
of the spirit of Silence, bearing no message of
hope or of joy, telling us nothing but that the
people who made them were shackled, re-
strained, accursed.

Far otherwise was it with Greece, whither
from Egypt the center of Mediterranean civili-
zation was transferred. She, too, had her
period of restraint, of asceticism, but it was fol-
lowed by a period of splendid effort, glorious
achievement, when poet and painter called on
the world to live with joy and the straight-
limbed maiden viewed the gods with scorn.
The Greeks brought a new message to the
world, a message telling of strange joys, of the
enthronement of the body and the perception
through the life of the senses of the divine in
humanity. Among them the search for beauty
became the task of those endowed with in-
tellect and sublimated desire. The priests of
Jupiter and the priests who at Tanagra, the sun-
light on their naked bodies, led the procession of
Mercury, were youths chosen for their beauty.
In a song of Simonides, telling of four wishes,
the first was for health, the second for beauty.
In the chamber of the Greek bride was set a
figure of Narcissus or of Hyacinth that, gazing
on it, she might give birth to a perfect child.

We find these two great civilizations of the an-
tique world, the Egyptian and the Greek, symbol-
izing the two great forces which, now one, now
the other, have ruled mankind. We know what
the Power was that overthrew the star-throned,
softly smiling gods of Hellenism ; how their deli-

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 15

cate wine-stained limbs were dragged in the dust,
their fair temples given over to the lizard and the
bat, their sacred groves left to become haunted
wastes and desert places. We know how flower-
crown and song and love gave place to the visions
of the anchorite, the morbid excesses of a hundred
sects. We know how Christianity prevailed in a
time enervated by luxury and sick of culture ; how
the wonderful work of the past was destroyed;
how the iconoclast went through the length and
breadth of what was then the world leaving be-
hind him the wreckage of an era, the corpse of an
ideal. The reign of humanism was ended; they
had to do their penance for all they had tasted of
the divine before ; the sweets had turned to bitter-
ness; the Egyptian spirit was alive again.

And then for thirteen hundred years there
was darkness; the world turned its gaze to a
symbol of suffering; beauty was regarded as
something devilish ; the very Devil himself was
supposed to be incarnate in a flower. Only
in Southern Spain among a handful of Moors,
and in Byzantium in a small company of
learned men, was the feeble flame of culture
kept alive. Throughout the rest of the Occi-
dental world all the vitality of the people was
centered in a narrow and ignorant sacerdotal-
ism, all the power of the nation in a brutalized
and overbearing seigneurage.

But the pendulum swung again, and there
followed the Renaissance of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, the grandest enfranchise-
ment of all recorded history. It is finished,
they had said in the time that even the Church

16 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

now allows us to call the time of darkness; it
is finished, the Lord cometh, the end of the
world is very near. Therefore why waste time
and imperil our immortal souls with thoughts
of earthly things? Did not the Master say:
"Lo, I come quickly?" Are not all things
tending to destruction?

And then from this message, which seems to
us a message of terror, but which was called
in those days good news, gospel; from the pale
sad Christ dying on the cross; from the
doctrine of suffering, the religion of death, the
world turned again to the old Greek ideals, to
the worship of the divine in life.

Once more the pendulum swung. The
Catholic reaction in Italy, the Huguenot move-
ment in France, followed by the puritanism
which swept over England and Scotland, were
evidences of the reawakening of the ascetic
spirit. The destruction of the tomb of Ron-
sard may serve as a symbol of the new fury
against humanism, a fury which reached its
culmination in the burning of Giordano Bruno.

Since then the pendulum has swung back-
ward and forward many times. The English
Commonwealth, for example, was followed by
the license of the Restoration, then by the re-
ligious revival of the eighteenth century, then
by the Victorian age, with its poets and artists
and philosophers, its doubts and questionings,
its overturning of old beliefs.

But the simile of the pendulum applies not
only to the action and reaction in the history of

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 17

mankind, to the alternate waves of humanism
and asceticism; it holds good in another and
a deeply suggestive way. The pendulum
keeps its balance, but at each swing the mo-
mentum is a little less than that which caused
the previous one; each time a little less distance
is covered. And so it has been with the world.
At each swing the impulse has been less power-
ful than that which preceded it. The Renais-
sance, glorious as it was, was less glorious than
the flowering time of Occidental humanity in
the Greek era, and the religious revival which
followed it was but a faint reflection of the
terrible zeal, the frenzy of righteousness, which
marked the opening centuries of the age of
Christianity. And, as the present time has
been approached, action and action have been
more and more rapid, the impulse either way
ever fainter.

And what of to-day? Voices in every di-
rection call to us, lament, adjure. The noise
deafens us, but no cry is louder than another.
Churches and sects and evangelists appeal to
us, minatory, commanding. A hundred phi-
losophies offer us different secrets of happiness,
different solutions of the mystery of life. And
through it all we remain indifferent, seeking in
activity, in material well-being, an anodyne for
all our doubts and fears. Neither cold nor hot,
a fatal Laodiceanism has seized the world.

Are we not reaching the motionless center,
the name of which is Death?

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL.

Beyond towering buildings and giant cities ;
beyond dazzling wealth and luxury and pride;
beyond great armies and splendid warships;
beyond even boundless wheatfields, inex-
haustible mines, illimitable forests, must we
look if we would perceive the true strength of
a nation. We must look in its heart, to the
things that move it, the things that impel and
compel. We must apprehend the nation's
Genius in order to foretell its future and under-
stand its past.

Apprehend, for to comprehend is not pos-
sible. We can read the literary work of the old
Greeks, for instance, with full appreciation of
its exquisite form and its noble restraint.
Hellenic art can inspire us until we perceive
in carven marble and clear-cut gem something
of the great mystery of absolute beauty — the
sense of frustration, the sense of longing, the
divine to which all nature tends. At Rouen
or Chartres we can understand something of
the spirit of the France of the knightly years
which gave Christian chivalry to the world.

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A 19

In the pearl-like city on the Arno we can trace
the beginnings of the great movement toward
humanism; in the city of Aldus and of Giorgi-
one we can see that movement at its splendid
maturity.

And all these things we discern as in a glass
— darkly. The Genius of Greece, of mediaeval
France, of Tuscany, of Venice has passed
away. We have their songs and literatures
and arts and buildings and now we are all
praisers of times gone by, but our ears are not
attuned to the same harmonies, our eyes are
open and they cannot see.

And, be it noted, a nation must be judged,
just as a man, by what it accomplishes — by
the works, that is, of its rulers, lawgivers, sol-
diers, philosophers, poets, painters. One hears
a great deal of talk now-a-days to the effect
that however corrupt, immoral, and brainless
the dominating class of a state may be, the
country's potentialities are not affected if the
people retain their virtues and their ideals.
But in reality the dominating class is the ex-
pression of the country's potentialities; if it is
enfeebled by what in place of a better word
may be called corruption, the whole structure
is weak. The dominating class of a state is
not an accident, but an effect. Bad rulers, bad
laws, bad strategy, bad poetry and art are but
symptoms of the destruction of national ideals,
of the loss of national vitality, and sometimes
they are the only visible symptoms. The
people of Spain are outwardly of the same

20 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

character to-day as they were in the sixteenth
century, but Spain has lost her rich colonies
one by one. Turkey to-day is powerless, keep-
ing her territory only because those who could
take it away are jealous of each other ; yet those
who have seen the Turkish soldier fight all bear
tribute to his courage, his tenacity, his cheer-
fulness amid hardship: the Sultan's army to
outward seeming is as capable of great things
now as in the days when Mahmud planted the
crescent flag upon the citadel of Byzantium
and Solyman made all Europe quail.

Walk along the streets of modern Athens,
and at every turn you meet young men and
maidens who, but for their costume, would pass
as originals of the figures of the Elgin marbles
or the vases of Megara. On the hills of Fiesole
the tourist finds shepherd boys whose very
counterparts appear in the frescoes of Gozzoli
and the cassone of Pinturicchio. We know
into what kind of men the youths of old Athens
and fifteenth century Tuscany grew; we know
little of the men of modern Athens and of
modern Tuscany, for the reason that it is not
worth our while to know.

What, then, is the meaning of this paralysis
that seizes a whole nation, that cannot be diag-
nosed in the lives of its people, but that never-
theless leads to helplessness and sterility?

It means that the nation's Genius has paled,
that its flowering time has passed. When the
Genius of a nation shines before it bright and
clear that nation is great ; when its Genius be-

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 21

comes obscured the nation, however wide its
power, loses its strength, becomes barren,
ceases to produce, and ultimately dies. The
dominating class gives expression to the na-
tion's Genius. It may express itself in many
ways, or in few, but it can express itself in no
ignoble way. A nation whose ideals are ig-
noble is a nation whose Genius has paled.

We can, therefore, judge the vitality of a
country or of a civilization only by the great
things it does, the great men it produces. And,
judged by this standard, what can we say of the
Occidental world to-day?

What of England? Only a quarter of a
century ago she had great men in every walk of
life. On a fine May day in London one might
meet Disraeli, leaning on Rowley's arm and
bowing gravely to passers-by whom he never
saw; Gladstone, in his gorgeous carriage and
his shabby clothes ; Matthew Arnold, chatting
on the steps of the Athenaeum, and Herbert
Spencer, entering the club for his game of
billiards; William Morris, denouncing or prais-
ing some work at an art exhibition; Ruskin,
pointing out to a student the perfections of the
Turner water-colors in the basement of the
National Gallery. In Chelsea one could see
Carlyle, gray and bowed, and Whistler, with
his dandified air, his cane and his monocle,
searching the old book-shops for seventeenth
century fly-leaves on which to print his etch-
ings, and Rossetti, a wreck through sorrow but

22 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A

still inspired to write and paint things beautiful
and strange, and Burne-Jones, with his bril-
liant eyes full of enthusiasm, eager to catch
every hint of loveliness in sky and waving tree
and the unconscious play of children. In the
suburbs of the city one might sometimes see
Darwin, and, more rarely, Tennyson, on one of
his brief absences from his beloved island
home. Browning one met everywhere, at the
Academy show, at the first nights of plays, at
musicales and receptions, never alone and most
often the center of a group of beautiful
women.

And what of England to-day? How many
great men has she now? A few survivors of
the splendid Victorian period remain — Swin-
burne and Meredith and Kelvin. But what of
the contemporary generation, as that generation
is regarded by its own critics? How many of
those who live to-day have found the Roses of
Pieria ? There is Kipling, who is inspired some-
times, but whose pen more often seems afflicted
with a febrile weariness — the weariness of the
age. And after Kipling in the domain of letters,
mediocrity. In the domain of art, mediocrity. In
the domain of statesmanship, one erratic strong
man and after him, mediocrity. In the domain of
science, several careful investigators. In the
domain of philosophy, no one.

What of the rest of Europe? A poet in
France, a playwright in Scandinavia, in Russia a
novelist-reformer, a poet in Belgium. After
them, mediocrity.

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 23

What of America? Eighty million people,
the majority of them educated, the worlds of
science, art, and letters available for them to
a greater extent than ever before in the history
of mankind, and the net result of it all at the
present day a statesman, a handful of eminent
scientific men and inventors, not a single poet,
one painter (who prefers to live abroad), and two
or three prose writers. The showing is pitiful.

But, it may be argued, the world has had great
men before, whose greatness was not realized
till years, sometimes centuries, after they were
dead. Yes, but the world has also had men
deemed great in their own generation who,
when seen in the perspective of time, have been
found not to be great at all. And the latter
class has always outnumbered the former.

The conclusion seems inevitable that an-
aemia has seized the entire Occident with
almost incredible suddenness. Were one na-
tion, or two or three, alone affected no moral
could be drawn. Most countries have had
their periods of stagnation and have recovered
from them. But now a whole civilization is
involved, not in a period of religious ascend-
ancy, when the West has ever been sterile, but
in an age when opportunity is greater than at
any time before and when all doors are open.

It is pleasant, for some of us, to live in a
crepuscular time. Neither gladness nor sorrow
is there, but a sweet sad light over all things —
a light that makes visible many a subtle curve

24 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

and delicate tone unseen in the sunshine or the
night. The austerities of religion horrify us,
we cannot understand the sacrifices of patriot-
ism, and we are dazzled and blinded by the
works produced in periods of intense human-
istic activity. Things strange and exotic move
us. We turn to the despairing songs made in
the twilight of the gods by the poets of the
Anthology, to the artificially simple verses of
the French Pleiad, to the bitter ballades of
Villon, the flowers of evil of Baudelaire.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili attracts us, and Au-
cassin and Nicolette, and the story of Cupid and
Psyche. We become connoisseurs of emotion.
We see the pathos of childhood and the
tragedy of age. There is a tear in every minor
poet's sonnet, a thrill in every song. In place
of the splendid strong fellowship of human life
of the luminous periods, the alert sense of
beauty, the sympathy with all high effort, the
robust disregard of repressive conventions; in
place of the faith of the tenebrous periods, the
fear of offending, the restraints and renuncia-
tions, there is for the many a materialism that
atrophies and degrades and for the few a self-
consciousness that is morbid, a capacity for
emotion that is hysterical.

And a message that all the clairvoyants of all
time, the poets and prophets and philosophers,
have brought us is that there is no room under
the sky for those who know not of worst or
best.

THE PHOENICIANS OF TO-DAY.

There was once a boy, clear-eyed and with
fair hair like an aureole, who looked down from
the windows of a cottage on a mountain, across
a valley of waving cornfields, to where, in the
far distance, a faint haze showed where a great
city stood. And the city, which he had never
visited, was to him enchanted, a symbol of all
the mystery and glory of life.

Near his father's cottage was a house in
which the child was allowed to wander as he
willed. The house was rich in old Greek
things, marbles and bronzes and vases from the
Hellespont, and Smyrna, and Cyprus. And
there were Persian tiles of subtle, splendid
color, and gems with intagli, and illuminated
books, and copies of great paintings. There
was La Gioconda with her delicious smile, and
Botticelli's unearthly dancers, and Piero di
Cosimo's Death of Procris.

And the child, playing among the flowers
and in the cornfields, came to know a little of
Nature's language, to look for the rose color of
the dawn, to listen for the sighing of the wind

26 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

among the trees. For at first the flowers and
trees and sky were more to him than books and
pictures and craftsman's fancies, and the striv-
ing after a diviner beauty than Nature's was
as yet unmeaning to him.

Till, one day, rising early as was his wont,
he chanced to enter a room while the first rays
of sunshine were falling on a great head of
Pallas Athene, the chief treasure of the rich
man's collection. Pale, alone, against a dark
undefined background, every line seen clear,
that sculptured thing told to him its story of
a creation not dead and not alive. Its voiceless
lips spoke marvellous words, and the invisible
crown of secret wisdom lay in the fiery lines
of its hair.

And then he began to understand. The
whole of nature became attuned to another key,
and he searched always for some echo or
whisper of that hidden music. There was an
unaccustomed wonder in things, some hint of
elusive excellence in gem and picture and
tapestry, in the writings of the poets, in the
histories of great men and deeds of olden days.

The time came for the youth to go out into
the world. He left his father's cottage and
went down into the city, that had seemed so
glorious from afar. Instead of the enchanted
city of his dreams he found narrow streets with
hideous, dingy buildings, and men ever hurry-
ing, and giant machines roaring. On the worn
faces of the people in the daytime was writ the
lust for gain, in the nighttime the greed for
pleasure.

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A 27

He would have fled, but shame prevented
him. It was only for a little while, he said, and
then he would depart for ever from that ac-
cursed place. He became a worker in the city,
spending his days in painful effort to earn the
means to live. And always the thought of the
world he had left was with him — the harmo-
nies of field and sky, the sweet suggestions of
poet and of painter.

The years passed, and his work bore fruit.
He grew rich, and filled his house with beauti-
ful and rare and costly things. He had no
time to enjoy them, but, he told himself, he
would soon give up the toil for gold and then
he would go back to the old ideals and enthusi-
asms. He remembered how the work of
writer and artist had thrilled him, and, he said,
he could return to the delicious life of former
days when he willed.

And at length he ceased from his labor and
built himself a house on a mountain, like the
house in which so many hours of his childhood
had been spent. And thither he had his pic-
tures and bronzes and tapestries and books
taken, and, when all was ready, he went to
enjoy those things that he had dreamed of
through many years.

It was all unmeaning to him. It had all
turned to dust and ashes in his grasp.

Is not this the story of many a toiler in
great cities? Is it not the story of the Ameri-
can people ? While they dream of noble things

28 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

to be, they let them wait. They will wait for
beautiful cities, and in the meanwhile their
cities become so hideous that they must be
razed before beauty is possible. They will
wait for a great literature, and in the mean-
while their newspapers and cheap magazines
are vulgarizing the minds of the people, de-
stroying their language. They will wait for
high national ideals, and in the meanwhile in-
dividualism, more perfectly developed than
ever before since the decadence of Rome, caring
nothing for country or state or city, destroys
morality in business and makes legislators and
public officials corrupt to an extent that, after
revelation upon revelation, is even now but
faintly realized.

Every moment, said one of the wisest phi-
losophers of the nineteenth century, some form
grows perfect in hand or face ; some tone on the
hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some
mood of passion or insight or intellectual ex-
citement is irresistibly real and attractive for
us — for that moment only. While all melts
under our feet, we may well catch at any ex-
quisite passion, or any contribution to knowl-
edge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the
spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the
senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curi-
ous odors, or work of the artist's hands, or the
face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every
moment some passionate attitude in those
about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A 29

some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is,
on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep be-
fore evening. We are all condamnes, all under
sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite
reprieve. Some spend this interval in listless-
ness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least
among the children of this world, in art and
song.

It is all there is. If a man, or a nation, with
ears to hear and eyes to see, becomes deaf and
blind to those things which are the reflections
and symbols of the ultimate ideal, the side-
realized life, that man, that nation, is a failure.
To gain that which is best in life is success in
life; to lose it is defeat. Viewed in this light,
the American people to-day are a failure.
Their rich men buy rare books and famous
pictures, but how many of them could we im-
agine taking part in those conversations be-
tween Florentine plutocrats and artists in the
gardens of the Medici in the day of Lorenzo
the Magnificent; how many, even, would be
intellectually fit to join in a discussion at a
Roman gentleman's table in the decadent
Neronic period?

Americans have often been grieved and as-
tonished at the behavior of distinguished visit-
ors from Europe. They have come here, have
been received with much honor, have been en-
tertained with all lavishness, have seen the
towering buildings and gorgeous clubs of New
York, the stockyards of Chicago, the steel
works of Pittsburg, and the miscellaneous

30 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A

architectural effects of Washington; and then
they have gone home to say things about
America bitter, biting, sarcastic, and some-
times even untrue. Americans have not been able
to understand it, and, in their turn, have had
many caustic things to say about Europe in
general and eminent Europeans in particular.

But the explanation would seem to lie deeper
than envy, or the lack of courtesy due from
guest to host. These visitors from foreign
lands cannot all have been ill-bred clowns;
there must be some reason for their boorish-
ness. Is it not to be found in the intense, all-
pervading, deadly materialism which is all that
America has to show?

Some faint trace of nobler life is still to be
found in Europe; the impulse is lost, but the
memory of diviner days remains. And so,
when a traveller of quick perception visits us
he is often, without realizing the cause, op-
pressed and overcome by a sentiment of an-
tipathy, estrangement. It is all so perfectly or-
ganized; the machine — at least so far as the
stranger can see — runs so smoothly; and it all
results in such utter futility.

There are men in America who recognize
and deplore the lack of a national ideal and who
do what they can to awaken the people to a
sense of their grovelling condition. But a na-
tional Genius cannot be made to order; by no
amount of legislation can nobility of spirit be
ordained. The degradation of America is ex-
hibited to an appalling degree in the lives of

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 31

the people. The very rich live in a manner
which is nauseating in its aimlessness, vul-
garity, ineptitude, and imbecility. They are
such a by-word that no newspaper, editorially,
ever takes them seriously, but this does not
prevent the majority of the press from describ-
ing at great length all the doings of the Upper
Class — their dresses, diamonds, dinner parties,
dances, and divorces. A little lower down in
the social scale what may be called the stock-
broker class — the men who are to be seen
in the restaurants at night trying to galvanize
themselves into neurotic emotion writh wine
and music and pretty women — exhibit char-
acteristics even more sordid. In all classes of
American society the poison is at work — the
poison of activity directed toward ignoble
ends. To become rich has been desired by men
ever since money was invented, but not till now
and here since the days of the Phoenicians has
the effort of an entire people been concentrated
so completely on this one ideal.

And what befell the Phoenicians we know —
how they disappeared leaving no heritage to
the world, no beautiful thing, no uplifting
thought, no example of heroism or of high
achievement, and how, even as the Prophet had
foretold, their cities became desolate, a place
to spread nets upon.

THE SLEEP OF THE ORIENT

One day in the Summer of 1904 three Eng-
lishmen entered a low doorway between dirty,
tawdry houses and, after passing through open
courtyards and a maze of dark passages
and chapels, found themselves in a high pil-
lared sanctuary in which, thrown into clear
relief against the surrounding obscurity, was
a wonderful golden shrine, adorned with tur-
quoises and pearls, with amber and coral and
lapis lazuli. And seated on a throne within the
shrine was the most famous statue in all the
world.

The place was Lhasa, the cathedral was the
Jo-Kang, the statue was that image of the
Buddha which was given by the King of
Magadha to the Chinese Emperor for his aid
when the Yavanas were overrunning the plains
of India and which, as the dowry of the Prin-
cess Konjo, was taken to Lhasa from Peking
twelve hundred years ago.

Until that Summer day no white man had
seen the statue, the most sacred thing in the
sacred city beyond the Himalayas. The Eng-

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 33

lishmen who were admitted to the Jo-Kang —
and the Chinese Amban, who obtained the
privilege for them, paid for it later with his
life — had supposed that they would see a
Buddha like the other Buddhas of countless
temples of the Orient — the ascetic figure, the
mystical, absorbed, ageless countenance, the
same from Ceylon to Japan.

But the image in the Holy of Holies of
Lhasa, illumined by the light of great golden
lamps, set in its jewel-decked shrine, beneath
the dragon-borne canopy with its turquoise
crown, is not the figure of the Blessed One,
already more than man, who, under the bo-tree
of Uruvela, cleft the mountain of ignorance
and saw that all was illusion and that all was
vanity. The face of the Buddha of the Jo-
Kang is rounded, alert, youthful; the smile,
enigmatic it may be, but almost triumphant.
Here, says one of those who saw the figure, is
nothing of the Melancholia who has known too
much and who has renounced it all as vanity.
Here, instead, is the quiet happiness and the
quick capacity for pleasure of the boy who had
never yet known either pain, or disease, or
death. It is Gautama as a pure and eager
prince, without a thought for the morrow, or
a care for to-day.

In this figure, to which for a thousand years
the Buddhists of all Asia have made pilgrim-
age, braving hardships greater than the travel-
lers to Mecca, making their way over terrible
deserts and everlasting mountain snows, we

34 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A

can read a symbol — a symbol that to-day
shines forth more clearly than at any other
time since the great golden statue was fash-
ioned, by no man, the Buddhists say, but by
Visrakarma, the constructive force of the uni-
verse. For the youthful, gracious figure of the
Jo-Kang reminds us that Buddhism is a two-
fold religion, that it indeed leads to great re-
nunciations, to contempt for life, to self-morti-
fication, to the negation of desire; but that it
also teaches the sacredness and interdepend-
ence of all manifestations of life, that there is
a divine order in things, that humanity is evolv-
ing to a condition ever nearer to perfection.

Christ was born in a manger, Mohammed in
a desert, but the Siddartha of the Buddhist
legend was born in a garden of roses and grew
up in a palace of marble and cedar-wood, sur-
rounded by princely playfellows, and musi-
cians, and beautiful girls. As the centuries
have passed the story of his early years has
ever been more richly embroidered, until now
the legend is a recital of all the suavities of our
world-existence, all the delights that nature
and art bestow, all the allurements of love and
of desire.

Buddhism, in some respects the most ascetic
of all religions, is capable of developing into a
belief, or a philosophy, as brilliantly humanistic
as that of the Greeks. The sense of frustra-
tion, of the helplessness of humanity, has ever
been more lively in the Orient than in the Occi-
dent. While the Western divine warns us that

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 35

all shall burn, and with it the world, and all the
memory and fame of it shall die, the Eastern
teacher goes far beyond this, and tells us that
all that is is but illusion, that the soul is
drowned in the sea of conditioned existence,
that if she sing within her chrysalis of flesh and
matter, that even if she whisper to herself that
she exists, she is of the earth, ensnared in the
webs of delusion. Saint Simeon lived on his
pillar and the anchorites of Ireland on lonely
storm-swept rocks, but the hermit of Tibet to-
day, with his rosary of human bones and the
top of a skull to hold his food, lives in a cave,
walled up so that no light may penetrate, and
with an opening only large enough to allow a
hand to be passed out.

Yes, but they too have lips to kiss with,
hearts to love, and eyes to see, and if their re-
nunciations have been more supreme, their ca-
pacity for joy is greater. They live an intenser
life than we. In place of the Morte Amoureuse
of the West is the Eastern story of the monk
who seven times foreswore the world, and
seven times returned to it. The Italian Despot
built a Christian church to glorify an illicit
passion, but the Eastern King when his favor-
ite died built the Taj Mahal, the result of the
labor of twenty thousand men for twenty
years.

From the East the world has learned mysti-
cism, esoteric religion, the negation of the
flesh by means of violent austerities; but out
of the East also have come those things that

36 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

are types and symbols of the delight that life
has to give, enchanted pleasures, subtilized de-
sires — rose gardens and dancing girls, rich
perfumes and precious gems, myrrh and aloes
and opium, amber and sandal-wood, rubies and
pearls and emeralds, fabrics of silk and marvel-
lously wrought textiles, carvings of ivory and
crystal and jade.

And out of that night which ascetic religion
has cast over the Orient there have come
strange flowers, fascinating as moonlight, in-
scrutable as the stars. Persia has produced
sweet-cadenced verses, passionate with the pas-
sion of those for whom the visible world exists
but who must steal all joy. India gives us the
visions of those who have tortured themselves
into clairvoyance, have stupefied themselves
into an artificial paradise. From China come
porcelains blue as the sky after rain, rose-
colored, pearl-white, of tenderest green.

The Orient has been asleep, but it has
dreamed, and its dreams have been sweet.

But they have been dreams — nothing else.
That in the past the East has been awake we
know, and even now we are beginning to learn
of the treasures of philosophy and romance and
song — the productions of periods of alert and
luminous life — which have been preserved
through centuries of obtenebration in China
and the Indies and Korea.

Will there be another awakening? Will
India again be inspired by the spirit which
wrote the Vedic hymns ; will her Genius again

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 37

shine bright and clear? Will China, recover-
ing as she once recovered before from a period
of darkness and sterility, produce instead of
collate, arrange, and contemplate what has
already been done? We cannot tell. The
Hindus, a conquered people, find their ideal in
the extinction of life and of desire. The Chi-
nese, the oldest nation in the world, seem
weary, spiritless, without even the negative
ideal of the Hindus. It would seem that these
two ancient civilizations of the East must be
classed with the civilization of the West as
having played their part in the world's pro-
gress. Their ideals have departed; the Genius
of each has paled.

Is there then no hope for humanity, no promise
of a new light to disperse the clouds of pessimism,
disappointment, disbelief, to heal the atrophy
that results from low ideals ?

The answer has been given — in the Sea of
Japan, on the plains of Manchuria, on the hills
of Liao-Tung.

THE MAKING OF A CIVILIZATION.

Evolved during centuries of isolated life, per-
fected by discipline compared with which even
that of the Spartans was license, encouraged by
the natural conditions of temperate climate and
a country as beautiful as Italy or the islands
of the Grecian archipelago, there has appeared
in the Farthest East a nation which is the best
hope of humanity to-day — a nation whose
Genius shines before it clear as a star, with
ideals which are noble, with memories that in-
spire, with leaders who are great.

In the last eighteen months the Occident has
been learning a new word. It was whispered
around the correspondents' campfires at Feng-
huang-Cheng, while the priests of Shinto and of
Buddha, in their shimmering silken robes, were
paying honor to those who were slain in the
first great battle of the war; it was heard be-
neath the rose-trees of Liao-Yang; when Port
Arthur fell the West began to talk of it ; after
Mukden it was to be read in newspapers from
San Francisco to Vienna; and now, when
Japan's triumph over a foe of whom all Europe

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 39

was afraid is complete, commentators everywhere
are discussing bushido.

They call it the Soul of Japan, forgetting that
the standard of conduct of a people is not its
soul, but the manifestation of its soul. They
tell the West to learn bushido, but they forget
that there can be no effect without a cause and
that a noble rule of life is the result of nobility
of spirit, of noble national ideals, of steadfast-
ness of purpose, of unspoiled capacity for en-
thusiasm, of a Genius that guides and inspires.

What bushido does the world knows. It has
seen warriors go to certain destruction, not
only in the excitement of battle, but coldly, de-
liberately, sacrificing themselves that their
cause might gain some slight advantage; it has
seen all considerations of personal glory cast
aside — even the glory that comes from heroic
death — and each soldier of an army inspired
only by the hope of the triumph of that army as
a whole ; it has seen a fighting force on land and
another on the sea operating with no hint of
discord among the commanders; it has seen an
entire nation aiding the army and the navy in
every possible way, even the schoolboys form-
ing themselves into companies to till the fields
of those who were fighting their country's bat-
tles; it has seen fathers kill their children in
order to be allowed to join the troops in the
field, mothers kill themselves in order that their
sons might the more unhesitatingly offer their
lives for the Emperor, maidens pray that their
lovers at the front might be slain or wounded;

40 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

it has seen the Japanese Nation, though its very
existence was at stake, though it knew that
slaughter and rapine would be its lot were the
Muscovite to conquer, composed, confident,
admitting no doubt or fear, no hesitation on
entering upon the struggle; it has seen that
nation, while the issue was uncertain, suffering
silently and cheerfully, and not one man in all
its millions failing to do what is the hardest
thing of all in a time of national excitement, to
keep silence; it has seen that nation in time
of victory courteous to the vanquished, violating
no canon of good taste in its celebrations, express-
ing no triumph, making no boast, and finally, it
has seen the Japanese people display anger for the
first time, not at the continuance of the war, not
at the prospect of the loss of more lives and the
imposition of greater burdens, but at the con-
clusion of peace when further struggle would
have resulted in further triumph.

It has seen all these things — has seen them
and marvelled. And yet even now it does not
understand. When a man receives a stinging
blow he remains dazed for a time. The world
within the past year has received such a blow
as it had not received for two thousand years,
and it is still dazed. It should have been pre-
pared. Perhaps it would have been prepared
had it not been that it was so flattered and
dazzled by Japan's adaptation of the unes-
sential concomitants of the civilization of the
West that it forgot to study her retention of
the essentials of her own civilization, the things
that count, the things that impel and compel.

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 41

And now, with its slowly dawning realiza-
tion of what the events in the Far East mean,
the Occident talks of bushido, the knightly
code of the Japanese, the standard of conduct
which guides the warrior, the counsel of per-
fection which is held up as the ideal for the
entire nation. But bushido is not the cause of the
strength of the Japanese; it is a manifestation of
their strength, and that strength they have at-
tained through an order of life which has taught
the individual that his existence is valueless,
meaningless, save in relation to that of the family,
the community, the state.

Japan comes by her strength naturally, in-
evitably. It is the strength born of the repres-
sions of a thousand years. Discipline such as
she has undergone could not but make her
strong. In the ultimate analysis, of course, the
strength, the Genius, the virtue as the ancients
would have called it, of the Japanese, as of any
other nation or race, must remain unexplained.
Why this people should have chosen those
things that make for strength and not for
drunkenness we cannot tell, any more than we
can tell why one human being is beautiful and
another deformed, why one man is a poet and
another a thief, why one is an animal and in
another passion leaves the ground to lose itself
in the sky.

But as we know that if, possessing a spark of
the divine fire, a man guard it by discipline and
fan it into flame by work and keep it bright
by suffering and hardship, that man is destined

42 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

to become great, so we know that a nation with
noble ideals, its energies conserved by denial,
its arms sharpened by necessity, must conquer
and prevail. And by learning the extent of the
sacrifices and hardships which have been
Japan's we can judge her power to-day.

In his last book, the proofsheets of which
were waiting for his correction as he lay upon
his deathbed, the man who, of all Occidentals,
perhaps came nearer to knowing the Japanese
people than any other, described for us the
constitution of society in Japan as it existed
until a few years ago and which, though no
longer legally appointed, is still in all its es-
sentials the organization of the nation. About
the sacred person of the Mikado, says Lafcadio
Hearn, "we see the tribes ranged in obeisance
— each tribe, nevertheless, maintaining its own
ancestral cult; and the clans forming these
tribes, and the communities forming these
clans, and the households forming these com-
munities, have all their separate cults; and out
of the mass of these cults have been derived the
customs and the laws. Yet everywhere the
customs and the laws differ more or less,
because of the variety of their origins;
they have this only in common, — that they
exact the most humble and implicit obedience,
and regulate every detail of private and
public life. Personality is wholly suppressed
by coercion; and the coercion is chiefly
from within, not from without, — the life of
every individual being so ordered by the will

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A 43

of the rest as to render free action, free speak-
ing, or free thinking, out of the question. This
means something incomparably harsher than
the socialistic tyranny of early Greek society;
it means religious communism doubled with a
military despotism of the most terrible kind.
The individual did not legally exist, — except
for punishment ; and from the whole of the pro-
ducing classes, whether serfs or freemen, the
most servile submission was ruthlessly exacted.
It is difficult to believe that any intelligent man
of modern times could endure such conditions

and live The incessant and multiform

constraint upon mental and moral life would
of itself be enough to kill."

And the same writer, in telling us of the
manner of discipline under which the Japanese
lived, describes the laws which regulated the
existence of a farmer with an income, for in-
stance, of a hundred koku of rice. He might
build a house sixty feet long, but no longer;
he was forbidden to construct it with a room
containing an alcove; and he was not allowed
— except by special permission — to roof it
with tiles. No member of his family was per-
mitted to wear silk. Three kinds of viands
only were to be served at the wedding of such
a farmer's daughter or son; and the quality as
well as the quantity of the soup, fish, or sweet-
meats offered to the wedding guests was
legally fixed. So likewise the number of the
wedding-gifts; even the cost of the presents of
rice-wine and dried fish was prescribed, and the

44 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

quality of the single fan which it was permissi-
ble to offer to the bride

And when the farmer became a grandfather
the presents he was allowed to give to the new-
born child were all ordained. On the occasion
of the Boy's Festival the gifts from the whole
family, including the grandparents, were lim-
ited by law to one paper flag and two toy
spears.

This rigor of law governed every detail of
life. The manner of speech to a superior, an
equal, or an inferior, was prescribed. Even the
manner of smiling was subject to rule; it was
a grave offense so to smile in addressing a su-
perior that the back teeth could be seen.

And through it all the Japanese people re-
mained joyous and young; submitting to re-
straint willingly; eager and alert; sensitive to
all things beautiful. The West speaks of
Japan as an ancient country, but the age of a
nation is not to be reckoned, as the age of a
man, by years, but by the sum of the effort put
forth when the nation, emerging from its tene-
brous period, realizes itself, draws on the power
it has stored up, and gives expression to its
ideals.

Japan is beginning to do that. She is
young; her flowering time is not over, but is
only now arriving, and before it has gone by
she is destined to impress upon the Occident
the civilization which she has evolved through
many centuries. And the weapon which she
has forged for her work in the world is not her

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 45

army or her navy, not her statecraft or her
mastery of the science of the West, but bushido,
hammered out of pure metal, tempered by dis-
cipline, sharpened by obedience, proved by re-
straint.

It is an ideal new and strange to the West.
Take, says one writer, the average scheme of
life of the average society of the West, and
bushido, as nearly as may be, represents its
exact antithesis. It offers the ideal of poverty
instead of wealth, humility in place of ostenta-
tion, reserve instead of reclame, self-sacrifice in
place of selfishness, the care of the interest of
the State rather than that of the individual.
Bushido inspires ardent courage and the refusal
to turn the back upon the enemy; it looks death
calmly in the face and prefers it to ignominy of
any kind. It preaches submission to authority
and the sacrifice of all private interests,
whether of self or of family, to the common
weal. It requires its disciples to submit to a
strict physical and mental discipline, develops
a martial spirit, and, by lauding the virtues of
courage, constancy, fortitude, faithfulness,
daring, and self-restraint, offers an exalted
code of moral principles, not only for the man
and the warrior, but for men and women in
times both of peace and of war.

This is the ideal with which Japan emerges
from her period of restraint, of obtenebration;
this is the spirit which, actuating her warriors,
has enabled them to conquer. Now she has
reached the turning point. The old discipline,

46 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

the old ascetic order, are about to pass away;
the stored up strength is bursting forth. And
the world should hope that the flowering time
may be as glorious as the preparation was
severe.

THE RISEN SUN.

It was a benign Buddha that the sweet child
Saint whom Japanese art loves to picture
brought back with him across the sea from
China a thousand years ago, a Buddha human
and loving, a creed which civilized and inspired.
The Blessed One pictured in Japanese temples
is the same ascetic figure as that which is to be
found in Ceylon and China and Borneo, but the
spirit of the Japanese Buddha is that of the
young Prince, joyous and eager, whom the
Englishmen saw imaged in the Jo-Kang of
Lhasa.

In Japan it has not been religion which has
supplied the restraints and renunciations that
have stored up the energy of the people; this
discipline has come from within and has been
built up out of custom and law like the disci-
pline of the early Greeks. And, like the re-
ligion of the Greeks, the religion of the Japan-
ese has been a humanizing influence. The arts
followed Buddhism to the country. There was
no architecture, no art, no literature in Japan
till the Buddhist priest-craftsmen built their

48 OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA

temples and adorned them with statuary and
pictures and symbols and taught the people to
read the Chinese classics. Gentle and tender
and gracious has been the work of Buddhism in
Japan, teaching resignation and hope, kindness
to all living things and pity for all suffering,
harmonizing itself naturally and perfectly with
the ancient belief of the country, educating the
people, introducing refinements in life and de-
lightful customs and festivals, and, beyond all,
providing the impetus that inspired the Jap-
anese to evolve an art and a literature which
are by this time perfect media for the expres-
sion of the national Genius.

In every museum of the West one may now
see specimens of the art of Japan — gray
kakemono, in which nebulous tones and subtle
curves suggest an attenuation of beauty
which the painters of the West have never at-
tempted; Shippo cloisonnes, of colors so bril-
liant that in the sunlight they glow like a mil-
lion gems ; lacquers of design so faultless that
it seems as if the addition of a hairline would
mar it; old Satsuma pottery, in which all the
poetry of lamp-lit gardens and all the fascina-
tion of glittering accoutrement and bizarre cos-
tume are suggested in the space of a square
inch ; netsukes and sword-guards of a fairy deli-
cacy; textiles of colors so splendid and so
strange that the Occident has no words to
describe them.

Books are written on Japanese art, cata-
logues of artists are made, experts talk of

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 49

styles and schools and masters. And with it
all we are unable to understand. We see
exquisitely decorated surfaces, cunningly
wrought metal, curious patterns, unusual tints
and tones; but the soul, the Genius, behind it
all is hidden from us. We can, as has been
said, only apprehend the Genius of the Greeks
or of the Italians of the Renaissance, yet some
message there is for us in the marbles of Phei-
dias, the Victory of Samothrace, the lunettes
of the Delia Robbia. But a painting by Nobu-
zane or a statue by Tankei is meaningless to us.
Beneath the bronze-tiled roofs of Nikko, beyond
the marvellous inner gates which guard the
tomb of lyeyasu, in the Halls of Worship with
their Buddhist angels, their vermillion pillars,
their golden bells and great stone lanterns, we
are impressed, we admire, but we cannot under-
stand. It is all the expression of a civilization
that is alien to us.

But it is not the complete expression, in the
sense in which, for instance, the Elgin marbles
are the expression of the Genius of Greece. The
art of the Japanese up to the present time has
been the manifestation of intense natural love
for beauty, of natural refinement and impec-
cable delicacy, nature subtilized, rather than a
conscious effort toward expression. This re-
finement, this delicacy, are greater perhaps
than any other people in all the world has
shown. They are exhibited by the Japanese in
a hundred ways that are strange to us — in
their perfect arrangement of flowers, in their

SO OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAM A

landscape gardening, their decoration of
houses, their blossom festivals, their tea cere-
monies, their poetical contests. And the art
of the Japanese has been, so far, chiefly the ex-
quisite arrangement of line and tone and color,
without the power of intellectual or emotional
excitation possessed by the best works of the
masters of the West.

There never has been, and there never can be,
any such thing as translation; but so far as
we are able to appreciate the literature of Japan
we find the same qualities in it as in Japanese
art — refinement carried to a point never
reached in the Occident, workmanship of amaz-
ing delicacy, intense feeling for natural beauty
— together with a deep sense of tragedy and an
all-pervading enthusiasm for nobility of con-
duct. It would seem that the literature of
Japan has already gone further as an expres-
sion of her national Genius than has her art.

And now? All the signs point to the ap-
proach of the great flowering time, the time
when the self-realization of Japan will be com-
plete, when her Genius will find clear and per-
fect expression. It has to its hand instruments
wonderfully fashioned, perhaps more nearly
approaching flawlessness than any the world
has previously produced.

The world waits for the message which it
will bring. When that message comes we
shall understand. Those enigmatic figures,
those elusive curves and subtle colors and curi-
ous harmonies, that self-abnegation which

OLYMPUS AND FUJI YAMA 51

sacrifices the individual for the State, that
strange code of honor which regards life so
lightly — for a moment the world will under-
stand.

Japan will prevail. It may be by conquest;
it will surely be by ideas. She has youth, and
the rest of the world is old. She has energy,
and the Occident is weakened and ennuye.
She has high ideals, and the people of the West
are sunk in a materialism that deadens and de-
grades. They have trod the grapes, they have
drunken the wine; with her the grapes are still
to tread, the wine is still to drink.

And other civilizations will come, other
world cataclysms, other epochal wars. State
will fight against state, race against race, and
ever the strongest will win. And ever, we may
hope, something of good will last, something be
gained.