Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/302

290 to the student for its interest and its easy style. It pur ports to be an authentic account of numbers of causes célèbres tried by Ōoka, the Japanese Solomon, who flourished early in the eighteenth century.

XVI. , including cyclopaedias, works on industries, sciences, arts, and inventions, works on Confucianism, works on Japanese and Chinese antiquities, and on a hundred other subjects. Under this heading, the popular moral treatises of Kaibara Ekken and Arai Hakuseki, Confucianists of the seventeenth century, call for particular notice, partly because their ideas are those that long moulded Japanese society, partly because the easy, flowing style of these books specially fits them for the student's use.

To the foregoing enumeration, borrowed from Sir Ernest Satow, one item more can now be added, namely:—

XVII. . The opening of the country was the death-blow to Japanese literature proper. True, thousands of books and pamphlets still pour annually from the press—more, probably, than at any previous time. But the greater number are either translations of European works, or else works conveying European ideas. From "Mrs. Caudle" up to Captain Mahan, nothing is amissing. It is but natural and right that this should be so. Immense civilising effects in every department of intellectual activity have been produced by the contemporary school of Europeanised authors, with Fuktizawa, Kato, and a dozen other eminent men leading the van. But of course their translations, adaptations, and imitations can interest Western readers, who are in possession of the originals, far less than do the books written under the old order; besides which, by the very nature of the case, most of their handiwork is provisional only. Some of these days, when the life-time of competent scholars shall have been given to the task, Shakespeare and Victor Hugo may possibly be rendered into Japanese not much more unsatisfactorily than we render Homer into English. In their present hastily donned Japanese dress, they send a cold shiver down one's back.