Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/41

Rh worry, befitting the easy-going East; the god of honest labor being portrayed as a jolly, fat fisherman, very comfortably seated, chuckling at having just caught a carp.

Pleasures, too, have their special gods with whom perforce their votaries are on peculiarly intimate terms, inasmuch as such gods are very boon-companion patrons of the sport. Furthermore, every one chooses his gods for a general compatibility of temper with himself. He thus lives under congenial guardianship all his life.

Simple as such conceptions are, there is something fine in their sweet simplicity. The very barrenness of the faith's buildings has a beauty of its own, touched as it is by Japanese taste. Through those gracefully plain portals a simple life here passes to a yet simpler one beyond; and the solemn cryptomerea lend it all the natural grandeur that so fittingly canopies the old.

So are the few Shintō rites perfect in effect. Finished fashionings from a far past, they are so beautifully complete, that one forgets the frailty of the conception in the rounded perfection of the form.

One sees at once how aboriginal all this