How sweet Japanese woman is! All the possibilities of the race for goodness seem to be concentrated in her.
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man – that is to say, the strongest and cleverest – is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person.
In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.
The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.
A proof of really great art is that it is generally true – it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
Any idealism is a proper subject for art.
French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind.
The Shadow-maker shapes forever.
In order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand – or at least to learn to understand – the beauty of stone.
It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.
Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.
It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.