over his pages, almost exhausting the resources of the French language in that direction: petit, bizarre, disparate, heterogéne, invraisemblable, mignon, bariolé, extravagant, inimaginable, fréle, monstrueux, grotesque, mivré, exotique, lilliputien, minuscule, manieré, etc., etc. The houses are all maisonnettes; each garden is, not a jardin, but a jardinet, each meal a dínette, each inscription a griffonnage. The Kobe-Kyōto railway is un dróle de petit chemin de fer, qui n'a pas l'air serieux, qui fait l'effet d'une chose pour rire, comme toutes les choses japonaises.—Doubtless there is an element of truth in all this. Query: is it the whole truth? Pierre Loti's final and sweeping condemnation of Japan, as he was preparing to set sail, is as follows: "Je le trouve petit, vieillot, à bout de sang et à bout de sève; j'ai conscience de son antiquité antèdiluvienne; de sa momification de tant de siecles, qui va bientót finir dans le grotesque et la bouffonnerie pitoyable, au contact des nouveautés d'occident." Such criticism, published sixteen years ago, reads oddly nowadays. Instead of Japan being at fault, it was her French detractor whose self-centred, unsympathetic attitude rendered him unfit for the comprehension of a highly complex subject.
Mr. Walter Dening, whose acquaintance with modern Japanese literature and with the men who produce it is probably unrivalled, writes as follows:
"It is well-known that one of the most marked characteristics of the Japanese mind is its lack of interest in metaphysical, psychological, and ethical controversy of all kinds. It is seldom you can get them to pay sufficient attention to such questions to admit of their understanding even their main outlines." And again:—
"Neither their past history nor their prevailing tastes show any tendency to idealism. They are lovers of the practical and the real: neither the fancies of Goethe nor the reveries of Hegel are to their liking. Our poetry and our philosophy and the mind that appreciates them are alike the result of a network of subtle influences to which the Japanese are comparative strangers. It is maintained by some, and we think justly, that the lack of
