Books and Habits | Page 4

with the magic of words.
"Amis and Amile," which otherwise ought to seem more foreign to us,
is strangely close in its glorification of friendship; for chivalry left with
us at least this one great ethical feeling, that to keep faith in friendship
is a holy thing. No wonder Amicus and Amelius were popular saints.
The story implies also, as it falls here in the book, some illustration of
those unconscious or unconsidered ethical reactions which, as we saw
in the chapter on the "Havamal," have a lasting influence on our ideals
and on our conduct.
Romanticist though he was, Hearn constantly sought the romance in the
highway of life, the aspects of experience which seem to perpetuate
themselves from age to age, compelling literature to reassert them
under whatever changes of form. To one who has followed the large
mass of his lectures it is not surprising that he emphasized those ethical
positions which are likely to remain constant, in spite of much new
philosophy, nor that he constantly recurred to such books as Cory's
"Ionica," or Lang's translation of Theocritus, in which he found
statements of enduring human attitudes. To him the Greek mind made a
double appeal. Not only did it represent to him the best that has yet
been thought or said in the world, but by its fineness and its maturity it
seemed kindred to the spirit he found in ancient Japan. Lecturing to
Japanese students on Greek poetry as it filters through English
paraphrases and translations, he must have felt sometimes as we now
feel in reading his lectures, that in his teaching the long migration of
the world's culture was approaching the end of the circuit, and that the
earliest apparition of the East known to most of us was once more
arriving at its starting place, mystery returning to mystery, and its path
at all points mysterious if we rightly observe the miracle of the human
spirit.

BOOKS AND HABITS
CHAPTER I

THE INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTY
I wish to speak of the greatest difficulty with which the Japanese
students of English literature, or of almost any Western literature, have
to contend. I do not think that it ever has been properly spoken about. A
foreign teacher might well hesitate to speak about, it--because, if he
should try to explain it merely from the Western point of view, he
could not hope to be understood; and if he should try to speak about it
from the Japanese point of view, he would be certain to make various
mistakes and to utter various extravagances. The proper explanation
might be given by a Japanese professor only, who should have so
intimate an acquaintance with Western life as to sympathize with it.
Yet I fear that it would be difficult to find such a Japanese professor for
this reason, that just in proportion as he should find himself in
sympathy with Western life, in that proportion he would become less
and less able to communicate that sympathy to his students. The
difficulties are so great that it has taken me many years even to partly
guess how great they are. That they can be removed at the present day
is utterly out of the question. But something may be gained by stating
them even imperfectly. At the risk of making blunders and uttering
extravagances, I shall make the attempt. I am impelled to do so by a
recent conversation with one of the cleverest students that I ever had,
who acknowledged his total inability to understand some of the
commonest facts in Western life,--all those facts relating, directly or
indirectly, to the position of woman in Western literature as reflecting
Western life.
Let us clear the ground it once by putting down some facts in the
plainest and lowest terms possible. You must try to imagine a country
in which the place of the highest virtue is occupied, so to speak, by the
devotion of sex to sex. The highest duty of the man is not to his father,
but to his wife; and for the sake of that woman he abandons all other
earthly ties, should any of these happen to interfere with that relation.
The first duty of the wife may be, indeed, must be, to her child, when
she has one; but otherwise her husband is her divinity and king. In that
country it would be thought unnatural or strange to have one's parents
living in the same house with wife or husband. You know all this. But

it does not explain for you other things, much more difficult to
understand, especially the influence of the abstract idea of woman upon
society at large as well as upon the conduct of the individual. The
devotion of man to woman does not mean at all only