Again I found my prophet in a cottage.  It was a cottage overlooking rice fields and a lagoon.  From the Japanese scene outdoors I passed indoors to a new Japan.  Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Van Gogh, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake—­Yanagi has written a big book on Blake which is in a second edition—­hung within sight of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music[108].  Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places in the dwelling not occupied by Western pictures and the Western library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history of Eastern and Western mysticism.  An armful of books about Blake and Boehme, all Swedenborg, all Carlyle, all Emerson, all Whitman, all Shelley, all Maeterlinck, all Francis Thompson, and all Tagore, and plenty of other complete editions; early Christian mystics; much of William Law, Bergson, Eucken, Caird, James, Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Jefferies, Havelock Ellis, Carpenter, Strindberg, “AE,” Yeats, Synge and Shaw; not a little poetry of the fashion of Vaughan, Traherne and Crashaw; a well-thumbed Emily Bronte; all the great Russian novelists; numbers of books on art and artists—­it was an arresting collection to come on in a Japanese hamlet, and odd to sit down beside it in order to talk of “heathen.”

“Yes,” said Yanagi—­he speaks an English which reflects his wide reading—­“our young maid, on being shown the full moon the other night, bowed her head.  I find this natural instinct of some value.  Our people have much natural feeling towards Nature.  If modern Japanese art has degenerated it is because it does not sufficiently find out life in things.  The sough of the wind in the trees may have only a slight influence on character, but it is a vital influence.  I do not like, of course, the word ‘heathendom’ of which Uchimura seems so fond.  I dearly admire Christ, but most of the Christianity of to-day is not Christ.  It is largely Paul.  It is a mixture.  It is not the clear, pure, original thing.  Christians must reform their Christianity before it can satisfy us.  In the East we now see clearly enough to seek only the best that the West can offer.”

Yanagi said that the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions ought to be recognised.  “You will find Christians admiring Walt Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the prophet of naturalness.”  He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect of Buddhists.  Many of the Zen devotees were “noble and had a profound idea.”  He was unable to see “any difference at all” between the best part of Buddhism and the best part of Christianity.  He said that his own mysticism was based on science, art, religion and philosophy.  “My sincerest wish,” he declared, “is to produce a beautiful reconciliation of these four.  As it is, too often scientists and philosophers have no deep knowledge of religion or art, artists have no deep knowledge of religion or science, and the religious have no idea of art.  Surely the deepest religious idea is the deepest artistic and philosophic idea.  Perhaps our scientists are in the poorest state just now with no understanding of art or religion.  Our scientists are immersed in the problem of matter, our religious people in the problem of spirit, and our artists forget that in dealing with nature they are dealing with spirit as well as body.”