to
their Emperor, are the results of a vivid political idealizing
imagination. Imperial apotheosis is a combination of the political and
religious imagination. And in what land has the apotheosizing
imagination been more active than in Japan? Ambition and self-conceit
are likewise dependent on an active imaginative faculty.

There can be no doubt the writers quoted above have drawn attention to
some salient features of Japanese art. In the literature of the past,
the people have not manifested that high literary imagination that we
discover in the best literature of many other nations.

This fact, however, will not justify the sweeping generalizations
based upon it. Judging from the pre-Elizabethan literature, who would
have expected the brilliancy of the Elizabethan period? Similarly in
regard to the Victorian period of English literature. Because the
Japanese have failed in the past to produce literature equal to the
best of Western lands, we are not justified in asserting that she
never will and that she is inherently deficient in literary
imagination. In regard to certain forms of light fancy, all admit that
Japanese poems are unsurpassed by those of other lands. Japanese
amative poetry is noted for its delicate fancies and plays on words
exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, of translation, or even of
expression, to one unacquainted with the language.

The deficiencies of Japanese literature, therefore, are not such as to
warrant the conclusion that they both mark and make a fundamental
difference in the race mind. For such differences as exist are capable
of a sociological explanation.

The prosaic matter-of-factness of the Japanese mind has been so widely
emphasized that we need not dwell upon it here. There is, however,
serious danger of over-emphasis, a danger into which all writers fall
who make it the ground for sweeping condemnatory criticism.

They are right in ascribing to the average Japanese a large amount of
unimaginative matter-of-factness, but they are equally wrong in
unqualified dogmatic generalizations. They base their inductions on
insufficient facts, a habit to which foreigners are peculiarly liable,
through ignorance of the language and also of the inner thoughts and
life of the people.

The prosaic nature of the Japanese has not impressed me so much as the
visionary tendency of the people, and their idealism. The Japanese
themselves count this idealism a national characteristic. They