legs." How pleasant, then,
it must be to have a saint who does! Especially for the Japanese, whose
legs are so finely made, and who display them so delightfully. Such, all
over the world, is the religion of the people, when they have any
religion at all. And how human it is, and how much nearer to life than
the austerities and abstractions of a creed!

Hour after hour I strolled through these lovely places, so beautifully
ordered that the authorities, one feels, must themselves delight in the
nature they control. I had proof of it, I thought, in a notice which
ran as follows:

"FAMOUS TAKINO TEMPLE STANDS NOT FAR AWAY, AND SOMEN FALL TOO.
IT IS WORTH WHILE TO BE THERE ONCE."

It is indeed, and many times! But can you imagine a rural council in
England breaking into this personal note? And how reserved! Almost like
Japanese art. Compare the invitation I once saw in Switzerland, to visit
"das schoenste Schwaerm- und Aussichtspunkt des ganzen Schweitzerischen
Reichs." There speaks the advertiser. But beside the Somen Fall there
was no restaurant.

Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back of
their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense
for beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. _Tu regere
imperio populos, Romane memento_ they would say, if they knew the tag;
and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie to
this complacent theory. No nations were ever more virile than the Greeks
or the Italians. They have left a mark on the world which will endure
when Anglo-Saxon civilisation is forgotten. And none have been, or are,
more virile than the Japanese. That they have the delicacy of women,
too, does not alter the fact. The Russian War proved it, if proof so
tragic were required; and so does all their mediaeval history. Japanese
feudalism was as bloody, as ruthless, as hard as European. It was even
more gallant, stoical, loyal. But it had something else which I think
Europe missed, unless it were once in Provence. It had in the midst of
its hardness a consciousness of the pathos of life, of its beauty, its
brevity, its inexplicable pain. I think in no other country has anything
arisen analogous to the Zen sect of Buddhism, when knights withdrew from
battle to a garden and summerhouse, exquisitely ordered to symbolise the
spiritual life, and there, over a cup of tea served with an elaborate
ritual, looking out on a lovely n