It was a cottage overlooking
rice fields and a lagoon. From the Japanese scene outdoors I passed
indoors to a new Japan. Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Van
Gogh, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake--Yanagi has written
a big book on Blake which is in a second edition--hung within sight
of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music[108].
Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places
in the dwelling not occupied by Western pictures and the Western
library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history of
Eastern and Western mysticism. An armful of books about Blake and
Boehme, all Swedenborg, all Carlyle, all Emerson, all Whitman, all
Shelley, all Maeterlinck, all Francis Thompson, and all Tagore, and
plenty of other complete editions; early Christian mystics; much of
William Law, Bergson, Eucken, Caird, James, Haldane, Bertrand Russell,
Jefferies, Havelock Ellis, Carpenter, Strindberg, "AE," Yeats, Synge
and Shaw; not a little poetry of the fashion of Vaughan, Traherne and
Crashaw; a well-thumbed Emily Bronte; all the great Russian novelists;
numbers of books on art and artists--it was an arresting collection to
come on in a Japanese hamlet, and odd to sit down beside it in order
to talk of "heathen."

"Yes," said Yanagi--he speaks an English which reflects his wide
reading--"our young maid, on being shown the full moon the other
night, bowed her head. I find this natural instinct of some value. Our
people have much natural feeling towards Nature. If modern Japanese
art has degenerated it is because it does not sufficiently find out
life in things. The sough of the wind in the trees may have only a
slight influence on character, but it is a vital influence. I do not
like, of course, the word 'heathendom' of which Uchimura seems so
fond. I dearly admire Christ, but most of the Christianity of to-day
is not Christ. It is largely Paul. It is a mixture. It is not the
clear, pure, original thing. Christians must reform their Christianity
before it can satisfy us. In the East we now see clearly enough to
seek only the best that the West can offer."

Yanagi said that the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions
ought to be recognised. "You will find Christians admiring Walt
Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the
prophet of naturalness." He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect
of Buddhists. Many of the Zen devotees were "noble an