Page:Japan - A Lecture.djvu/16

14 nation becoming one family with your Emperor as its head. Your national unity has not been evolved from the comradeship of arms for defensive and offensive purposes, or from the partnership in raiding adventures, dividing among each member the danger and spoils of robbery. It is not an outcome of the necessity of organisation for some ulterior purposes, but it is an extension of the family and the obligations of the heart. The ideal of "Maitri" is at the bottom of your culture,—"maitri" with men and "maitri" with nature. And the true expression of this love is in the language of beauty, which is so abundantly universal in this land. This is the reason why a stranger, like myself, instead of feeling envy, or humiliation, before these manifestations of beauty, these creations of love, feels his readiness to participate in the joy and glory of such revealment of the human heart.

And this has made me all the more apprehensive of the change which threatens Japanese civilisation as something like a menace to one's own person. For the huge heterogeneity of the modern age, whose only common bond is usefulness, is nowhere so pitifully exposed against the dignity and the hidden power of reticent beauty as in Japan.

But the danger is that this organised ugliness storms the mind and carries the day by its mass, by its aggressive persistence, by its power of mockery directed against the deeper sentiments of heart.