Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation | Page 5

governed by altruism, every action directed by duty, and every object
shaped by art? You cannot help being delighted by such conditions, or
feeling indignant at hearing them denounced as "heathen." And
according to the degree of altruism within yourself, these good folk will
be able, without any apparent effort, to make you happy. The mere
sensation of the milieu is a placid happiness: it is like the sensation of a
dream in which people greet us exactly as we like to be greeted, and
say to us all that we like to hear, and do for us all that we wish to have
done,--people moving soundlessly through spaces of perfect repose, all
bathed in vapoury light. Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk can give
you all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long
with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with
the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream,--never; but it
will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural
[15] loveliness to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days.
Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into
Fairyland,--into a world that is not, and never could be your own. You
have been transported out of your own century--over spaces enormous

of perished time--into an era forgotten, into a vanished age,--back to
something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the
strangeness and beauty of things,--the secret of the thrill they give,--the
secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate
mortal! the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all
is enchantment,--that you have fallen under the spell of the dead,--that
the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into
emptiness and silence.
* * * * * *
Some of us, at least, have often wished that it were possible to live for a
season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture. Inspired by our
first acquaintance with the charm of Greek art and thought, this wish
comes to us even before we are capable of imagining the true
conditions of the antique civilization. If the wish could be realized, we
should certainly find it impossible to accommodate ourselves to those
conditions,--not so much because of the difficulty of learning the
environment, as because of the much greater difficulty of feeling just as
people used to feel some thirty centuries [16] ago. In spite of all that
has been done for Greek studies since the Renaissance, we are still
unable to understand many aspects of the old Greek life: no modern
mind can really feel, for example, those sentiments and emotions to
which the great tragedy of Oedipus made appeal. Nevertheless we are
much in advance of our forefathers of the eighteenth century, as regards
the knowledge of Greek civilization. In the time of the French
revolution, it was thought possible to reestablish in France the
conditions of a Greek republic, and to educate children according to the
system of Sparta. To-day we are well aware that no mind developed by
modern civilization could find happiness under any of those socialistic
despotisms which existed in all the cities of the ancient world before
the Roman conquest. We could no more mingle with the old Greek life,
if it were resurrected for us,--no more become a part of it,--than we
could change our mental identities. But how much would we not give
for the delight of beholding it,--for the joy of attending one festival in
Corinth, or of witnessing the Pan-Hellenic games? ... And yet, to
witness the revival of some perished Greek civilization,--to walk about

the very Crotona of Pythagoras,--to wander through the Syracuse of
Theocritus,--were not any more of a privilege than is the opportunity
actually afforded us to study Japanese life. Indeed, from the evolutional
[17] point of view, it were less of a privilege,--since Japan offers us the
living spectacle of conditions older, and psychologically much farther
away from us, than those of any Greek period with which art and
literature have made us closely acquainted.
The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that a civilization less
evolved than our own, and intellectually remote from us, is not on that
account to be regarded as necessarily inferior in all respects. Hellenic
civilization at its best represented an early stage of sociological
evolution; yet the arts which it developed still furnish our supreme and
unapproachable ideals of beauty. So, too, this much more archaic
civilization of Old Japan attained an average of aesthetic and moral
culture well worthy of our wonder and praise. Only a shallow mind--a
very shallow mind--will pronounce the best of that culture inferior. But
Japanese civilization is peculiar