subject--the characteristic of Western civilization which to the East is
most puzzling, our attitude toward women. Hearn attempted in other essays
also to do full justice to this fascinating theme, but these illustrations
are typical of his method. To the Oriental it is strange to discover a
civilization in which the love of husband and wife altogether supersedes
the love of children for their parents, yet this is the civilization he
will meet in English and in most Western literatures. He can understand
the love of individual women, as we understand the love of individual men,
but he will not easily understand our worship of women as a sex, our
esteem of womankind, our chivalry, our way of taking woman as a religion.
How difficult, then, will he find such a poem as Tennyson's "Princess," or
most English novels. He will wonder why the majority of all Western
stories are love stories, and why in English literature the love story
takes place before marriage, whereas in French and other Continental
literatures it usually follows marriage. In Japan marriages are the
concern of the parents; with us they are the concern of the lovers, who
must choose their mates in competition more or less open with other
suitors. No wonder the rivalries and the precarious technique of
love-making are with us an obsession quite exotic to the Eastern mind. But
the Japanese reader, if he would understand us, must also learn how it is
that we have two ways of reckoning with love--a realistic way, which
occupies itself in portraying sex, the roots of the tree, as Hearn says,
and the idealistic way, which tries to fix and reproduce the beautiful
illusion of either happy or unhappy passion. And if the Japanese reader
has learned enough of our world to understand all this, he must yet
visualize our social system more clearly perhaps than most of us see it,
if he would know why so many of our love poems are addressed to the woman
we have not yet met. When we begin to sympathize with him in his efforts
to grasp the meaning of our literature, we are at last awakened ourselves
to some notion of what our civilization means, and as Hearn guides us