by Buddha. For there are two classes of statues,
divided the one from the other by that step which separates the sublime
from the ridiculous, namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There is
no happy human mean. Of the first kind are the beautiful bronze
figures of the Buddha, like the Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and
ninety-seven feet round, in whose face all that is grand and noble lies
sleeping, the living representation of Nirvana; and of the second, those
odd little ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the most
part, grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and
devils. Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which the
dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.

The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and
lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious
and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.

The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it
almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him
in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty
that it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, is
she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short
extremes, months of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks
of winter in between; a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry,
the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land where
the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found its
palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separate
identity in one long self-obliterating kiss.

Chapter 7. Religion.

In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem singularly
averse to practising what they have preached. Whether it be that his
self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive of his own
intellectual chisel to deceive him for long, or whether sacred soil,
like less hallowed ground, becomes after a time incapable of responding
to repeated sowings of the same seed, certain it is that in spiritual
matters most peoples have grown out of conceit with their own
conceptions. An individual may cling with a certain sentiment to the
religion of his mother, but nations have shown anything but a foolish
fondness for the sacred superstitions of their great-grandfathers. To
the charm of creation succeeds invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste
of criticism