Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/146

134 West have, broadly speaking, a common past, a common fund of ideas, from which everything that they have and everything that they are springs naturally as part of a correlated whole,—one Roman Empire in the background, one Christian religion at the centre, one gradual emancipation, first from feudalism and next from absolutism, worked out or now in process of being worked out together, one art, one music, one kind of idiom, even though the words expressing it vary from land to land. Japan stands beyond this pale, because her past has been lived through under conditions altogether different. China is her Greece and Rome. Her language is not Aryan, as even Russia's is. Allusions familiar from one end of Christendom to the other require a whole chapter of commentary to make them at all intelligible to a Japanese student, who often has not, even then, any words corresponding to those which it is sought to translate. So well is this fact understood by Japanese educators, that it has been customary for many years past to impart most of the higher branches of knowledge through the medium of the English tongue. This, however, is an enormous additional weight hung round the student's neck. For a Japanese to be taught through the medium of English, is infinitely harder than it would be for English lads to be taught through the medium of Latin, as Latin does not, after all, differ very widely in spirit from English. It is, so to say, English in other words. But between English and Japanese the gulf fixed is so wide and gaping that the student's mind must be for ever on the stretch. The simpler and more idiomatic the English, the more does it tax his powers of comprehension. It is difficult to see any way out of this dilemma. All the heartier, therefore, is the praise due to a body of educators who fight on so bravely, and on the whole so successfully.

As for the typical Japanese student, he belongs to that class of youth who are the schoolmaster's delight,—quiet, intelligent, deferential, studious almost to excess. His only marked fault is a tendency common to all subordinates in Japan,—a tendency to wish to steer the ship himself. "Please, Sir, we don't want to