Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/77

Rh I am thankful to Nichiren, although his influence was not universal, for his hopeful, brighter mind (it was almost a Western mind), whose theological adventure would certainly please the followers of Eucken; it was the effect of the common pessimism of Buddhism or thought of Nirvana, combined with the morality and ethics of the Confucian literature, that our original Japanese mind, indeed quite a Celtic mind, like that of the young woman in Yeats’ Land of Heart’s Desire, who ever wearied of four tongues and wished to dance upon the mountains like a flame, had slowly but steadily lost its imagination and passion, and our lives had become hardened and disfigured. I leave aside the question of religion, because my chief concern for the present moment is in poetry whose rejuvenation may depend in some measure on a leader (such a leader as Nichiren in religion)–a leader who, like Whitman, will cry for “the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling” from the worshipping mind gladdened in Nature’s sanctuary where our ancestors of three thousand years ago loved and lived. They had only the thought of life and birth, again the thought of birth and eternal life, never the thought of death and shadow; how our Japanese ancestors hated shadow and death is recorded in the first page of Kojiki or Records of Ancient Matters, the earliest book of Japanese literature in existence, as it