Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/306

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
284
OCCULT JAPAN.

male associates. Impulse possesses her for its own. There is in her a capacity for self-abandonment to an idea impossible to man. Lady Macbeth, once started, outdoes my lord in crime. She knows no hindering regard for self, no ghostly shapes of other thoughts to rise and cry to this one "Halt! enough!" So Japan. Decorous as was old Japan, young Japan, inoculated of foreign fancy, will cause even the rough and ready foreigner to start. Just as politeness stood personified—one may almost say petrified—in a Japanese gentleman of the old school, so rudeness incarnate jostles you in his son. A greater contrast could scarcely be offered than that between the pageant of an oldtime Japanese setting out upon a journey and a modern Japanese arrival from one by train; the polite eternity of self-deprecatory bows of the one, the scramble for the wicket of the other, where man, woman, and child bump and hustle their neighbors with an indifferent rudeness that, in any more personal land, would cause several free fights on the spot. That it does not do so here shows that though politeness has gone, personality has not yet come. Indeed, the impersonal