But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to
discern the true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or
emotional (since the one is woven into the other), it is equally
impossible for him to escape the conviction that, compared with
his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds delicate
potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise
so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost
supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable
manifestations. So judging, what a contrast between the emotional
and intellectual worlds of West and East! Far less striking that
between the frail wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the
tremendous solidity of a thoroughfare in Paris or London. When
one compares the utterances which West and East have given to
their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations,--a Gothic
cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by
Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a
Japanese poem,--how incalculable the difference in emotional
volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our
music is an essentially modern art; but in looking back through
all our past the difference in creative force is scarcely less
marked,--not surely in the period of Roman magnificence, of
marble amphitheatres and of aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in
the Greek period of the divine in sculpture and of the supreme in
literature.


And this leads to the subject of another wonderful fact in the
sudden development of Japanese power. Where are the outward
material signs of that immense new force she has been showing
both in productivity and in war? Nowhere! That which we miss in