e such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion
only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that
purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or
Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out
of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic
drama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetry
in England, if we had as a living tradition anything analogous to work
upon!

III

NIKKO

Waking in the night, I heard the sound of running water. Across my
window I saw, stretching dimly, the branch of a pine, and behind it
shone the stars. I remembered that I was in Japan and felt that all the
essence of it was there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon and
stars. All their life, as all their art, seems to be a mood of these.
For to them their life and their art are inseparable. The art is not an
accomplishment, an ornament, an excrescence. It is the flower of the
plant. Some men, some families of men, feeling beauty as every one felt
it, had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should say--it is the
Japanese view--to suggest it. To them the branch of a tree stands for a
forest, a white disk on gold for night and the moon, a quivering reed
for a river, a bamboo stalk for a grove. Their painters are poets. By
passionate observation they have learnt what expression of the part most
inevitably symbolises the whole. That they give; and their admirers,
trained like them in feeling, fill in the rest. This art presupposes,
what it has always had, a public not less sensitive than the artist; a
similar mood, a similar tradition, a similar culture. Feel as they do,
and you must create as they do, or at least appreciate their creations.

It was with this in my mind that I wandered about this exquisite place,
where Man has made a lovely nature lovelier still. More even than by the
famous and sumptuous temples I was moved by the smaller and humbler
shrines, so caressing are they of every choice spot, so expressive, not
of princely, but of popular feeling. Here is one, for instance, standing
under a cliff beside a stream, where women offer bits of wood in the
faith that so they will be helped to pass safely through the pangs of
childbirth. Here in a ravine is another where men who want to develop
their calves hang up sandals to a once athletic saint. "The Lord," our
Scripture says, "delighteth not in any man's