points in the language so difficult for a foreigner to
master, whether in speaking himself, or in listening to others, as the
use of these honorific words. The most delicate shades of courtesy and
discourtesy may be expressed by them. Some writers have attributed the
relative absence of the personal pronouns from the language to the
dominating force of impersonal pantheism. I am unable to take this
view for reasons stated in the later chapters on personality.

Though the honorific characteristics of the language seem to indicate
a high degree of aesthetic development, a certain lack of delicacy in
referring to subjects that are ruled out of conversation by cultivated
people in the West make the contrary impression upon the uninitiated.
Such language in Japan cannot be counted impure, for no such idea
accompanies the words. They must be described simply as aesthetically
defective. Far be it from me to imply that there is no impure
conversation in Japan. I only say that the particular usages to which
I refer are not necessarily a proof of moral tendency. A realistic
baldness prevails that makes no effort to conceal even that which is
in its nature unpleasant and unaesthetic. A spade is called a spade
without the slightest hesitation. Of course specific illustrations of
such a point as this are out of place. AEsthetic considerations forbid.

And how explain these unaesthetic phenomena? By the fact that Japan has
long remained in a state of primitive development. Speech is but the
verbal expression of life. Every primitive society is characterized by
a bald literalism shocking to the aesthetic sense of societies which
represent a higher stage of culture. In Japan, until recently, little
effort has been made to keep out of sight objects and acts which we of
the West have considered disagreeable and repulsive. Language alters
more slowly than acts. Laws are making changes in the latter, and they
in time will take effect in the former. But many decades will
doubtless pass before the cultivated classes of Japan will reach, in
this respect, the standard of the corresponding classes of the West.

As for the aesthetics of conduct in Japan, enough is indicated by what
has been said already concerning the aesthetics of speech. Speech and
conduct are but diverse expressions of the same inner life. Japanese
etiquette has been fashioned on the feudalistic theory of society,
with its numberless gradations of inferior and superior. Asse