within his own province, though visible to the multitude and often journeying among the people, received almost equal devotion; so that his material power, though rarely, if ever, exercised, was scarcely less than that of the daimio of Izumo himself. It was indeed large enough to render him a person with whom the shogunate would have deemed it wise policy to remain upon good terms. An ancestor of the present Guji even defied the great Taikō Hideyoshi, refusing to obey his command to furnish troops with the haughty answer that he would receive no order from a man of common birth.1 This defiance cost the family the loss of a large part of its estates by confiscation, but the real power of the Kokuzō remained unchanged until the period of the new civilization.

Out of many hundreds of stories of a similar nature, two little traditions may be cited as illustrations of the reverence in which the Kokuzō was formerly held.

It is related that there was a man who, believing himself to have become rich by favor of the Daikoku of Kitzuki, desired to express his gratitude by a gift of robes to the Kokuzō. The Kokuzō courteously declined the proffer; but the pious worshiper persisted in his purpose, and ordered a tailor to make the robes. The tailor, having made them, demanded a price that almost took his patron's breath away. Being asked to give his reason for demanding such a price, he made answer: "Having made robes for the Kokuzō, I cannot hereafter make garments for any other person. Therefore I must have money enough to support me for the rest of my life." The second story dates back to about one hundred and seventy years ago.

Among the samurai of the Matsue Iclan in the time of Nobukori, fifth daimio of the Matsudaira family, there was one Sugihara Kitoji, who was stationed in some military capacity at Kit

1 Hideyoshi, as is well known, was not of princely extraction.

zuki. He was a great favorite with the Kokuzō, and used often to play at chess with him. During a game, one evening, this officer suddenly became as one paralyzed, unable to move or speak. For a moment all was anxiety and confusion; but the Kokuzō said: "I know the cause. My friend was smoking; and although smoking disagrees with me, I did not wish to spoil his pleasure by telling him so. But the Kami, seeing that I felt ill, became angry with him. Now I shall make him well." Whereupon the Kokuzō uttered some magical word, and the officer was immediately as well as before.

XVII.

Once more we are journeying through the silence of this holy land of mists and of legends; wending our way between green leagues of ripening rice white-sprinkled with arrows of prayer, between the far processions of blue and verdant peaks whose names are the names of gods. We have left Kitzuki far behind. But as in a dream I still see the mighty avenue, the long succession of torii with their colossal shimenawa, the majestic face of the Guji, the kindly smile of the priest Sasa, and the girl priestess in her snowy robes dancing her beautiful ghostly dance. It seems to me that I can still hear the sound of the clapping of hands, like the crashing of a torrent. I cannot suppress some slight exultation at the thought that I have been allowed to see what no other foreigner has been privileged to see the interior of Japan's most ancient shrine, and those sacred utensils and quaint rites of primitive worship so well worthy the study of the anthropologist and the evolutionist.

But to have seen Kitzuki as I saw it is also to have seen something much more than a single wonderful temple. To see Kitzuki is to see the living centre of Shinto, and to feel the life-pulse of the ancient faith, throbbing as mightily in this nineteenth century as ever in

that unknown past whereof the Kojiki itself, though written in a tongue no longer spoken, is but a modern record.1 Buddhism, changing form or slowly decaying through the centuries, might seem doomed to pass away at last from this Japan to which it came only as an alien faith; but Shinto, unchanging and vitally unchanged, still remains all dominant in the land of its birth, and only seems to gain in power and dignity with time.2 Buddhism has a voluminous theology, a profound philosophy, a literature vast as the sea. Shintō has no philosophy, no code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet, by its very immateriality, it can resist the invasion of Occidental religious thought as no other Orient faith can. Shinto extends a welcome to Western science, but remains the irresistible opponent of Western religion; and the foreign zealots who would strive against it are astounded to find the power that foils their uttermost efforts indefinable as magnetism and invulnerable as air. Indeed, the wisest of our scholars have never yet been able to tell us what Shintō is. To some it appears to be merely ancestor-worship, to others ancestor - worship combined with nature-worship; to others, again, it seems to be no religion at all; to the missionary of the more ignorant class it is the worst form of heathenism. Doubtless the difficulty of explaining Shintō

has been due simply to the fact that the sinologists have sought for the source of it in books: in the Kojīki and the Nihongi, which are its histories; in the Norito, which are its prayers; in the commentaries of Motowori and Hirata, who were its greatest scholars. But the reality of Shinto lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spir itual force, the whole soul of a race, with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shintō is must learn to know that mys terious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and the magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, imminent, unconscious, instinc tive.

Trusting to learn something of that Oriental soul in whose joyous love of nature and of life even the unlearned may discern a strange kinship with the soul of the old Greek race, I trust also that I may presume some day to speak of the great living power of that faith now called Shintō, but more anciently Kami-no-michi, or "The Way of the Gods."

Lafcadio Hearn.

WHEN the world was younger and perhaps merrier, when people lived more and thought less, and when the curious

1 The Kojiki dates back, as a written work, only to A. D. 712. But its legends and records are known to have existed in the form of oral literature from a much more ancient time.

2 In certain provinces of Japan Buddhism

subtleties of an advanced civilization had not yet turned men's heads with conceit of their own enlightening progress

practically absorbed Shinto in other centuries, but in Izumo Shintō absorbed Buddhism; and now that Shinto is supported by the state there is a visible tendency to eliminate from its cult all elements of possible Buddhist origin.

from simple to serious things, poets had two recognized sources of inspiration, which were sufficient for themselves and for their unexacting audiences. They sang of love and they sang of war, of fair women and of brave men, of keen youthful passions and of the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosamonde lingers "in Woodstocke bower," and Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte; Annie of Lochroyan sails over the roughening seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Cheviot hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his back. It did not occur to the thick-headed generation who first listened to the ballad of Chevy Chase to hint that the game was hardly worth the candle, or that poaching on a large scale was as ethically reprehensible as poaching on a little one. This sort of insight was left for the nineteenth-century philosopher and the nineteenth-century moralist. In earlier, easier days, the last thing that a poet troubled himself about was a defensible motive for the battle in which his soul exulted. His business was to describe the fighting, not to justify it, which would have been a task of pure supererogation in that truculent age. Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie or Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the hard knocks they give and the stout men they lay low!

"Johnie 's set his back against an aik,
His foot against a stane;
And he has slain the Seven Foresters,
He has slain them a' but ane."

-

The last echo of this purely irresponsible spirit may be found in the WarSong of Dinas Vawr, where Peacock, always three hundred years behind his time, sings of slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which only his admirable versification can excuse:

"The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore thought it meeter
To carry off the latter.

We made an expedition;
We met an host and quelled it;

"We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,

His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow our chorus."

It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly narrated; but if the lines were a hair-breadth less mellifluous, I think we should call this a very barbarous method of campaigning.

When the old warlike spirit was dying out of English verse, when poets had begun to meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and to counsel man, the good gods gave to England, as a link with the days that were dead, Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton before or since has ever sung, of battlefields and the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds and midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brignall banks and the trooper shaking his silken bridle reins upon the river shore :

And adieu for evermore." These are not precisely the themes which enjoy unshaken popularity to-day, "the poet of battles fares ill in modern England," says Sir Francis Doyle,

and as a consequence there are many people who speak slightingly of Scott's poetry, and who appear to claim for themselves some inscrutable superiority by so doing. They give you to understand, without putting it too coarsely into words, that they are beyond that sort of thing, but that they liked it very well as children, and are pleased if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of unfortunates who, through no

apparent fault of their own, have ceased to take delight in Scott's novels, and who manifest a curious indignation because the characters in them go ahead and do things, instead of thinking and talking about them, which is the present approved fashion of evolving fiction. Why, what time have the good people in Quentin Durward for speculation and chatter? The rush of events carries them irresistibly into action. They plot, and fight, and run away, and scour the country, and meet with so many adventures and perform so many brave and cruel deeds that they have no chance for introspection and the joys of analysis. Naturally, those writers who pride themselves upon making a story out of nothing, and who are more concerned with excluding material than with telling their tales, have scant liking for Sir Walter, who thought little, and prated not at all, about the "art of fiction," but used the subjects which came to hand with the instinctive and unhesitating skill of a great artist. The battles in Quentin Durward and Old Mortality are, I think, as fine in their way as the battle of Flodden; and Flodden, says Andrew Lang, is the finest fight on record, "better even than the stand of Aias by the ships in the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers in the Odyssey."

tory and that sing themselves forever. He honestly felt himself to be a much smaller man than Wellington. He stood abashed in the presence of the soldier who had led large issues and controlled the fate of nations. He would have been sincerely amused to learn from Robert Elsmere what a delicious thing it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading Robert Elsmere! - that "the decisive events of the world take place in the intellect." The decisive events of the world, Scott held, take place in the field of action; on the plains of Marathon and Waterloo, rather than in the brain tissues of William Godwin. He knew what befell Athens when she could put forward no surer defense against Philip of Macedon than the most brilliant orations ever written in praise of freedom. It was better, he probably thought, to argue as the English did "in platoons." The schoolboy who fought with the heroic "Green-Breeks” in the streets of Edinburgh; the student who led the Tory youths in their gallant struggle with the riotous Irishmen, and drove them with stout cudgeling out of the theatre they had disgraced; the man who, broken in health and spirit, was yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with Gourgaud by giving that gentleman any satisfaction he desired, was consistent throughout to the simple principles of a bygone generation. "It is clear to me," he writes in his journal, "that what is least forgiven in a man of any mark or likeli hood is want of that article blackguardly called pluck. All the fine qualities of genius cannot make amends for it. We are told the genius of poets especially is irreconcilable with this mecies of grenadier accomplishment. chien de génie!”

▲▲ so, quel

Quel chien de génie indeed, and far beyond the compass of Scott, who, amid the growing sordidness and seriousness of an industrial and discontented age, struck a single resonant note that rings

in our hearts to-day like the echo of good and joyous things:

66

'Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name."

The same sentiments are put, it may be remembered, into admirable prose when Graham of Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his views on living and dying. At present, Philosophy and Philanthropy between them are hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the field. Even to the soldier, we are told, it should be a secondary consideration, or perhaps no consideration at all, his sense of duty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, like Homer, held somewhat different views, and absolutely declined to let "that jade Duty" have everything her own way. It is the plain duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare's side and guard her as they were bidden, instead of which they rush off, with Sir Walter's tacit approbation, to the fray.

"No longer Blount the view could bear :

By heaven and all its saints! I swear
I will not see it lost!

Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare
May bid your beads and patter prayer,
I gallop to the host.'"

It was this cheerful acknowledgment of human nature as a large factor in life which gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave imperfect men; which enabled him to draw with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le Balafré and Dugald Dalgetty and William of Deloraine. Le Balafré, indeed, with his thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own wisdom, his unswerving, almost unconscious courage, his readiness to risk his neck for a bride, and his reluctance to marry her,

is every as veracious as if he were the over-analyzed child of realism, instead of one of the many minor characters thrust with wanton prodigality into the pages of a romantic novel.

Alone among modern poets, Scott sings Homerically of strife. Others have

caught the note, but none have upheld it with such sustained force, such clear and joyous resonance. Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is always too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion. He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finest tribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs. Browning, who said she could not read the Lays lying down: they drew her irresistibly to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before my eyes.

I see

whether I want to or not a platform, and the poet's own beloved schoolboy declaiming with appropriate gestures those glowing and vigorous lines. When Scott sings of Flodden, I stand wraithlike in the thickest of the fray. I know how the Scottish ranks waver and reel before the charge of Stanley's men, how Tunstall's stainless banner sweeps the field, and how, in the gathering gloom,

66

The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
Each stepping where his comrade stood,
The instant that he fell."

There is none of this noble simplicity in the somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which read a little like old Kaiser William's war dispatches turned into verse. Better for me is the undaunted cheerfulness of that hearty knight Sir Nicholas, whom Praed has shown us fighting bravely for a lost cause on the field of Marston Moor.

"And now he wards a Roundhead's pike, and now he hums a stave,

And now he quotes a stage-play, and now he fells a knave."

Better, a thousand times better, are the splendid swing, the captivating enthusiasm, of Drayton's Agincourt, which hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were King Harry's soldiers straining at the leash. The ardor for strife, the staying power of quiet courage, all are here; and here, too, a feli