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around a simple tea-pot as though it had been a magic vase, became God forgive me!-a kind of Japanese Hotel de Rambouillet.

Their habits of slaughter, moreover, never smothered their love of the madrigal. The extreme simplicity furnished an aid to poetic inspiration. They had learned at a comparatively early period how to turn an elegant epigram of one and thirty syllables, and they indulged at the critical moments of their lives in the Chinese coquetry of an impromptu. Some persons prepared improvisations to be uttered with the latest breath. The five verses in which they gave up the ghost were the obolus they paid on entering into glory. They liked to take a backward look over the fair aspect with which earth had flattered their eyes, and they preserved a tender and pious affection for a landscape which they had not hesitated to defile with bloodshed. Animal life was more sacred to them than that of man.

I have heard it said that in the old times, before the Chinese invasion of Japan, no one might be put to death while the trees were in bloom. Long since, the spring ceased to extend to human life the immunity of its hap py smile. The truce of its perfumes was at an end, but their fragrance might still be enjoyed; and men continued to dwell with inexhaustible delight on the subtile marvels of the vernal time. They preserved under their clumsy armor a refined impressionability and a feeling for delicate shades quite unknown to their contemporaries in Europe.

The populace-the laborers, artisans, merchants-reduced to obedience and constrained to resignation by the supremacy of the warlike caste, had to find their sole amusement in fabulous tales, religious dances and the metamorphoses of gardens and forests. Even when the heavens rained blood,

and the destinies of the people were most cruelly mocked, their anguish blossomed into a legend. The very social inferiority of the depressed classes brought them nearer to that earth, whose rocks and plants were beloved of the Buddhist. Reassured about another life by their bonzes, who guaranteed them a vague Paradise upon certain specific terms, they turned their attention to the trivial beauties of the smallest things. The curiosity which nature had kindled in their souls-like a night-lamp in a rustic sanctuary— might not, indeed, dissipate the great darkness of the firmament, but it shed a soft lustre over every blade of grass and the corolla of every flower. A mysterious affinity was established between these humble folk and the flowers that fade so soon, the leaves that the wind carries away, the stones worn to smoothness by the water of running streams. The absolute need to weigh one's words and regulate one's gestures, in a society where the slightest impertinence or faintest display of temper might be punished with death, made this the most patient, obliging, amiable people ever fashioned by the hand of tyranny. And when we consider, on the one hand, that warlike nobility, fierce and yet stoical, and on the other, the great undistinguished mass, disciplined and, at the same time, refined by fear, we begin to understand what St. Francis Xavier meant when he said that the Japanese were the "delight of his soul."

The apostle was under no delusion concerning their faults. He notes them with a precision which all his enthusiasm could not dull. But though he felt keenly the difficulties of his mission, the love of glory which he found among the Japanese, their chivalrous honor, their easy renunciation of the pleasures of this world, their courtesy, their wit, "eager," as he says, "for all knowledge, human and divine"-all these

things appeared to him to favor the triumph of the Christian faith. His hope was that baptism would impart new health to virtues that were corrupting for the lack of a little divine salt; and that hope seemed to be well founded, for daimios, samurai, and indeed whole cities, were converted. The sower stretched forth his hand, and the harvest was there. In 1550, only eight years after the wreck of a Portuguese vessel upon the coast of Japan, Christianity-that is to say, Western civilization—was playing a prominent part there, and had all but carried the day over the civilization of China. How came it, after all, to pass over the land like a hurricane, leaving behind it only the memory of a vague but distasteful imposture?

The reason is to be sought neither in the hatred of the bonzes nor in the scandal created by those Spanish 'monks, who disputed, with anathemas, the conquest of the "Silver Isles" by Portuguese Jesuits, nor in the shamelessness of the European sailors, who gave the lie in so emphatic a manner to the alleged moral benefit of Christianity. The arrival of St. Francis Xavier exactly coincided with the advent on the scene of three great statesmen, destined to mould the Japanese clay in so masterly a manner that it bears their impress still.

The last fifty years of the fifteenth century were convulsed by the forces of feudalism. It was, perhaps, the most illustrious epoch in the history of Japan. All dykes were broken and the people overflowed. The individual shook off the chains which had riveted him to the community, and a spontaneous energy overcame all social convention. For the first time a living spirit animated the dry bones, and we begin to see some meaning in the massacres. A commanding volition hurries the movement of events and regulates their wild confusion. There is unity of

action in that trilogy, which lasted for half a century.

The first act was performed by Nobunaga, maker and unmaker of shoguns. He declared war upon the Buddhist nobility, sacked their monasteries and annihilated religious feudalism. Nobunaga was of noble birth, but his successor and the heir of his policy had been a groom, and his name was Hideyoshi.

With the physique of a gorilla, the morals of a barrack-room, and that overweening pride of the parvenu, which borders upon madness, he had also an incredible faculty for command and designs so vast that they make of this monster a kind of genius. It had taken the plebs of Japan centuries to conceive him, and nothing less than a widespread catastrophe could have brought him to the birth. This man, having received information of the ambuscade which was to cost Nobunaga his life, left it to the gods to defend his benefactor, concentrated all power in the hands of a single prime minister, struck at the feudal nobility with blow upon blow, and finally gave a new turn to warlike instincts which he had but half subdued by himself assuming command of the feudal forces and launching them against Corea. It was an expedition equally famous and sterile; but Hideyoshi cared less for foreign conquest than for exhausting in foreign warfare the hot spirit of civil conflict. He died, leaving one son, a minor; and also a pupil who was destined to surpass his masterYeyasu.

To the coarse, lusty, brutal plebeian, who walked with his head flung always insolently backward, there succeeded a man of the old noblesse-cold, silent, tenacious, unscrupulous, but whose interests were identified with those of the country, and who loved in his own serfs the entire Japanese people. The South now rose in arms against the

North, and claimed the empire for the son of Hideyoshi, whose triumph would certainly have involved the ruin of his father's work. The day of Sekigahara, in 1600, when forty thousand Japanese perished, was really the salvation of Japan. Heavy blows were dealt upon either side, but the future belonged to the genius of Yeyasu. On the night after the combat that first of the line of the Tokugawa shoguns, who had fought all day bareheaded, resumed his helmet. "A good general," he remarked, "never covers his head until the battle is over and won." It was more than an epigram accompanied by a fine gesture. The morrow of that great victory found the victor upright, pacific in temper, but with his helmet on.

Those about him had had enough of bloodshed. One only danger still remained; it was the Catholic party among the southern clans. Encouraged by Nobunaga, who saw in Christianity only a sect hostile to the Buddhists, and roughly used by his successor, Hideyoshi, the missionaries were to encounter in Yeyasu and his grandson, Yemitsu, enemies as intelligent as they were implacable. Their hostility was not aggravated by fanaticism. They simply tried the Christian doctrine and condemned it, both as pagans and as statesmen. Christianity would stir up dissension and rekindle the flames of civil war. It menaced the national life no less than the moral security of Japan. In the wake of Dominican and Franciscan monks from Manila, came Spanish adventurers, who scented a new prey. The Tokugawa refused to surrender the keys of their hearts to these disquieting apostles. As a matter of fact, what they felt vaguely, and dreaded all the more was that breath of freedom which the Christian religion exhales-the noble individualism, if I may venture so to call it, which is aroused by the sense of his own dignity, which it imparts to every man.

The ideas fostered by Christianity tended toward nothing less than a new revolution, of which the country, in its exhausted condition, dared not run the risk. The new faith had been preached, either a hundred years too late or a hundred years too soon.

In 1638 the last of the Japanese Christians revolted, and were massacred, not far from Nagasaki, in the castle of Shimabara, where they had been besieged, and which they had defended in the most heroic manner. It has been strenuously asserted that no European was mixed up in this rebellion, and that it was provoked less by religious persecution than by those feudal iniquities which weighed sa heavily upon the peasant class. But the very fact of a revolt against iniquity bore witness to the emancipating influence of Christianity. Those poor folk who sang hymns to the glory of God from the top of their ramparts and called on the angels to testify that they were in their right, troubled the souls of the besieging army sent out by the shogun. This was like no war which they had ever waged before. It was the very first time that an appeal to the justice of heaven had been heard above the din of arms, and it was a noble page of Japanese history.

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But I can perfectly understand the relief it was to the new masters of Japan to learn that order reigned in their Warsaw.

The Portuguese expelled and all relations with timid England broken off, only the Dutch Protestants were now permitted to trade with the empire, and even they were confined as though they had been plague-stricken, to the port of Nagasaki, and to the island of Deshima which lies just off the coast and is shaped somewhat like a fan without a handle. There they continued for more than two centuries to offer the humiliating spectacle of a white race in subjection, degraded less by the contempt

on which the Japanese piqued themselves, than by their own deplorable passion for gain. Japan, meanwhile, wrapped herself in a garment of thick darkness. Her sons, who in times of peace had roamed the seas in the character of adventurous explorers, were no longer allowed to quit her shores; and the only trace left there by the brief visitation of the occident was the use of tobacco, which became universal, and a few firearms, that soon turned rusty.

And now let the reader cast his eye over a map of Japan. Let him consider that slender archipelago lying along the Asiatic continent in an elegant curve, like that of a waving vinebranch hung with unequal clusters of fruit. Of all the islands that darken all the seas of earth, I know none so gracefully designed; of which the contours are so supple and charming. But this wavy empire calls up I know not what image of a headless and invertebrate creature, sleeping on the crest of the waves. The life that circulates through its rings and folds seems not to be animated by a single soul. But if this aspect of the country seems partially to explain its lawless agitations, it also fills us with admiration for those Tokugawa shoguns, who were able to inform that serpentine body with one mind and one will.

Take first the island of Kuishiu at the southern extremity, the last and biggest of the grape clusters. It lies with its group of lesser islands as though severed from the rest of the empire, leaning toward Formosa and the Philippines. It received the first Europeans, and, before them perhaps, the Malaysian invaders. But the old invasions are forgotten; Christianity flourished there for but one hour, and the men who people the slopes of the uttermost cape, add to their insular vanity a sort of taciturn grimness-as

of sentinels stationed on the outposts

of a land. Where they are the world ends for them. Their pride has no bounds, and their humanity no horizon. Vanquished, they accepted a defeat of which their remoteness from the rest of their compatriots prevented their feeling all the brutal humiliation. Yet they will continue for ages to taste the bitterness of that defeat. Their semitropical climate has not rendered them torpid. Neither the charms of woman nor the spell of the bonze have any great hold on them. What they love best are warlike dances and sword exercise. Such are the people of Satsuma. I have spent some time in their capital city, Kagoshima, and I still receive from it the impression of a rude and circumscribed existence, in a bay encircled by mountains, a bay of heaving waters irradiated by dazzling sunshine. In April the hills array themselves in azaleas and anemones, but the craters are always active.

Move on toward the north and you will find mountains, forests, volcanoes -a nature sweet and wild, but ever menaced by disaster. What vultures' nests! What lairs for rebels! On the left the peninsula of Hizen; in front the strait of Shimonosaki, under the governorship of Prince Choshiu, who is himself one of the vanquished. His two provinces command the Inner Sea. His subjects are quite as haughty and difficult as the men of Satsuma, but the rivers of Central Japan flow past their territory. They have taste, keen intelligence and a cultivated form of speech. The Japanese who have been in Europe say that Satsuma is Sparta, while Choshiu is Athens.

The farther you go from this province the more docile you find the disposition of the people and their characters are less strongly marked. The very waves of the mediterranean sea of Japan wear a kind of human aspect from having reflected so many heroic faces and divine phantoms. The island of Shi

koku, however, which forms the boundary upon one side of that azure expanse, nourishes a curious population. Sheltered by their ramparts of schist, and facing the unknown Pacific, they manage to escape, to some extent, the observation of their masters. The men of Tosa live amid the same kind of scenery as those of Satsuma; and their view of a wide expanse of ocean begets in them a similar feeling of solitary importance. On the great island in their rear-which is a continent for the doubly insulated folk of Japan-are the ancient provinces that constitute the heart of the country and the grassgrown battle-fields; and there the simple web of life is beginning once more to be shot with threads of gold. There are Kioto, city of emperors and bonzes, and Nara, once the seat of the imperial court, a home of art and learning, to which the Italian harmony of its sweet and sonorous name seems altogether appropriate.

But Yeyasu went farther still, until he had put between himself and the emperor mountains which can be crossed only by the pass of Hakoné, and then he built at the mouth of the Sumida Gawa his new capital of Yeddo. Behind it Japan goes tapering away to the sea of Yeso-first a level stretch, then foot-hills where the soil is exceeding rich, then snow-capped mountains, long winters and infinite security. The victor, setting his back against that realm which he has first garrisoned with his own creatures, allows his eye to range over the rest of the empire. He puts forth a stealthy paw and clutches first the cities which had been exempted from the general distribution, and which he transforms into the shogunal strongholds: Nagasaki in the province of Kiushiu, the only port where a European is suffered to land; Osaka, the principal port for the commerce of the internal sea, the great granary of Japan, and its wealth

iest city. The remote seats of the most warlike clans, like Satsuma and Choshiu, he does not venture to touch, but he endeavors to circumscribe them. The new daimios, who have been ennobled and enriched by his conquest, will receive the territory bordering on those formidable fiefs. Down the long chess-board of Japan Yeyasu will silently push his pawns against the pieces of his adversary, and he will have the extraordinary sagacity to checkmate without taking them.

This man of brilliant genius, one of the most notable of all those who have had the capacity for organizing a nation, was able, in the end, to reconcile the separatism of the feudal system with the centralization of absolute power. He wrested to the use and made the strong support of his beneficent despotism the narrow virtues which feudalism cultivates, and the solidarity and reverence for tradition which it imparts to provincial life. This great pacificator built up a structure of peace that was destined to endure for ages, on the foundation of a war of caste. He rescued from disgrace and exalted the throne of the emperor, whose palace had been for the fifty previous years no better than a farmyard, where the chickens on which the poor god subsisted were caught by ladies on the very threshold of the imperial hall. Yeyasu restored to the degraded sovereign his honors and his envelope of mystery. He enveloped him in a cloud of incense, and the reinstated divinity devolved upon his high-priest, the shogun, the trivial care of human affairs. The shogun, with the support of a council called the Bakufu, and having at his orders an inquisitorial police, divided up the country into three hundred and sixty daimiats. Each daimio was the absolute master of his own province or canton and shogun of his samurai-who are the daimios of the lower classes. Shut up with them in

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