It was with this in my mind that I wandered about this exquisite place, where Man has made a lovely nature lovelier still. More even than by the famous and sumptuous temples I was moved by the smaller and humbler shrines, so caressing are they of every choice spot, so expressive, not of princely, but of popular feeling. Here is one, for instance, standing under a cliff beside a stream, where women offer bits of wood in the faith that so they will be helped to pass safely through the pangs of childbirth. Here in a ravine is another where men who want to develop their calves hang up sandals to a once athletic saint. "The Lord," our Scripture says, "delighteth not in any man's legs." How pleasant, then, it must be to have a saint who does! Especially for the Japanese, whose legs are so finely made, and who display them so delightfully. Such, all over the world, is the religion of the people, when they have any religion at all. And how human it is, and how much nearer to life than the austerities and abstractions of a creed!
Hour after hour I strolled through these lovely places, so beautifully ordered that the authorities, one feels, must themselves delight in the nature they control. I had proof of it, I thought, in a notice which ran as follows:
"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.
