Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/37

 shall never associate itself with life’s clatter. Oh, Death is triumph! It is the great aspect of Japanese romance of the fighting age to make the moment of death as beautiful as possible; I can count a hundred names of heroes and fighters whom we remember only from the account of their beautiful death, not of their beautiful lives, on whom stories and dramas have been gorgeously written. And it was the civilisation of the Tokugawa feudalism, the age of peace, to make us look upon Death with artistic adoration and poetical respect. We read so much in our Japanese history of the powers and works of that Tokugawa family, which lasted with untired energy until only forty years ago; oh, where to-day can the strong proof of its existence be traced? Is it not, I wonder, only a “name written on water”? But the great reverence towards Death that it encouraged will be still observed like the sun or moon in the holy temples at Nikko or Shiba Park, the creations of art it realised during the long three hundred years. True to say, art lives longer than life and the world. Rh