to have had, can possibly regard a large part of
their description as anything more than pleasing fancy. Both have
given rein to the poetic fancy, and thus have, from a purely literary
point of view, scored a success granted to few.... But as exponents of
Japanese life and thought they are unreliable.... They have given form
and beauty to much that never existed, except in vague outline or in
undeveloped germs in the Japanese mind. In doing this they have
unavoidably been guilty of misrepresentation.... The Japanese nation
of Arnold and Hearn is not the nation we have known for a quarter of a
century, but a purely ideal one manufactured out of the author's
brains. It is high time that this was pointed out. For while such
works please a certain section of the English public, they do a great
deal of harm among a section of the Japanese public, as could be
easily shown in detail did space allow."

I quite admit the fact that many Japanese themselves are quite
convinced that there is a great gulf fixed between the ideas and the
philosophy of Europe and those of the East, their own country
included. In a book dealing particularly with the art of Japan,
written in English by a Japanese, he attempts to emphasise this
matter. He remarks: "Asia is one. The Himalayas divide only to
accentuate two mighty civilisations--the Chinese, with its communism
of Confucius, and the Indian, with its individualism of the Vedas. But
not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad
expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal which is the
common-thought inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to
produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them
from those maritime people of the Mediterranean and the Baltic who
loved to dwell on the particular, and to search out the means not the
end of life." Indeed, the writer of this book appears to be in a
condition of transcendentalism in reference to the East. In another
portion of it he waxes eloquent in regard to what he terms the glory
of Asia, in language which I will briefly quote. He remarks:--

"But the glory of Asia is something more positive than these. It lies
in that vibration of peace that beats in every heart; that harmony
which brings together emperor and peasant; that sublime intuition of
oneness which commands all sympathy, all courtesy, to be its fruits,
making Takakura, Emperor of Japan, remove his sleeping robes on a
winter night becau