Yanagi, continuing, spoke of the direct contribution which the new artistic movement in Japan, under the influence of modern Western art, was making to the solution of political and social questions[113].  The interest of the younger generation in Post Impressionism was “quite disharmonious with the ordinary attitude towards militarism.”  European art broke down barriers in the Japanese mind.  When the younger generation, nourished on higher ideals, grew up, it would be the State, and there would be a more hopeful condition of affairs.  People generally supposed that social questions were the most practical; but religious, artistic, philosophic questions were, in the truest sense of the word, the most practical.

Yanagi went on to tell of his devotion to Blake.  He could not understand “why Englishmen are so cool to him.”  He asked me how it was that there was no word about Blake in Andrew Lang’s work on English literature.  “I cannot imagine,” he said, “why such an intelligent man could not appreciate Blake.”  Yanagi regarded Blake as “the artist of immense will, of immense desire, and a man in whom can be seen that affirmative attitude towards life, exhibited later by Whitman.”  Yanagi spoke also of “Anglo-Saxon nobility, liberty, depth of character and healthiness,” and of “a deep and noble character” in English literature which he did not find elsewhere.  Whitman, Emerson, Poe and William James were “the crown of America.”

As I close this chapter I recall Yanagi’s library, in the service of which, bettering Mark Pattison’s example, two-thirds of its owner’s income was for some time expended.  I remember the thatched dwelling overlooking the quiet reed-bound lagoon with its frosty sunrises, red moonrises and apparitions of Fuji above the clouds seventy miles away.  No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets West in harmony.  I have made note of his Western books but not of the classics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown.  I have not mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism to Japan; severe little gilt-bronze figures of deities from China, a little older; pottery figures of exquisite beauty from the tombs of Tang, a little later; Sung pottery, a dynasty farther on; Korai celadons from Korean tombs of the same epoch; and whites and blue and whites of Ming and Korean Richo.  On the wall a black and yellow tiger is “burning bright” on a strip of blood-red silk tapestry woven on a Chinese loom for a Taoist priest 500 years ago.  Cimabue’s portrait of St. Francis breathes over Yanagi’s writing desk from one side, while from the other Blake’s amazing life mask looks down “with its Egyptian power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism.”  These are Yanagi’s silent friends.  His less quiet friends of the flesh have felt that this room was a sanctuary and Yanagi a priest of eternal things, but a priest without priestcraft, a priest living joyously in the world.  Above his desk is inscribed the line of Blake: