Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/20

8 slow growth, a gradual movement taking a century and a half to mature. It is that the national character persists intact, manifesting no change in essentials. Circumstances have deflected it into new channels, that is all. The arduous intellectual training of the Japanese gentry of former days—the committing to memory of the Confucian classics—fostered a mental habit at once docile, retentive, apt for detail. With these very same qualities their sons sit to-day at the feet of the science of the West. The devotion of the Samurai to his Daimyō and his clan was unsurpassed; for them, at any time, he would offer up his life, his all. This same loyal flame glows still at a white heat; only, the horizon having been widened by the removal of provincial barriers and the fall of petty feudal thrones, the one Emperor, the united nation have focused all its rays into a single burning-point. The Japanese of former days, even when political combination for any purpose was penal, always moved in families, in clans, in wards of townsmen, in posses of peasants, in any corporate way rather than as individuals. The boycotts, the combines, the sudden fashions and gusts of feeling before which the whole nation bends like grass, manifest exactly the same trait in a novel guise. To take a more radical characteristic, the ingrained tendency of the national mind towards the imitation of foreign models does but repeat to-day, and on an equally large scale, its exploit of twelve centuries ago. At that early period it flung itself on Chinese civilisation as it has now flung itself on ours; and in both cases alike certain reservations have been made. The old national religion, for instance, was not abolished then, neither has it been abolished now, though in both