第二部分
Indeed, as the one Latin word “virtus”----not virtue in the English sense, but the virtue of the Japanese Samurai----is a proof to those who understand Latin that the ancient Romans were a nation with a very noble civilization----so the English word “gentleman” alone, without any Shakespeare, is enough to show that the British nation is nation with even a finer civilization than the noble civilization of the ancient Romans, because it is a civilization which, tempered with the spirit and ideal of gentleness of Christianity, has produced a type of humanity called a “gentleman.” For the chief and one aim of civilization is not to make and teach men to be strong, but to make and teach men to be gentle; in other words, to develop and produce not what Kipling calls coarse, vulgar, “flannelled fools” who can yell as the American Y. M. C. A. in China now trying to do----but to develop and produce gentlemen, who, as we Chinese say, understand li-yo, courtesy, good manners or “good form,” as the Englishman calls it, and music.
Indeed, I may say here, it is because the ideal of the British or English civilization is to make a “gentleman” that the British people are the only modern people in the world today, as I have said, who can govern an Empire. The great Soldier-Gentleman of Japan, Tokugawa lyeyasy, after he had, with his sharp sword, cast the “devil of cruelty” out of old feudal Japan----just in the same way as the British “Unknow Warrior.” Whom they lately buried in Westminster Abbey in England, has now cast the “devil” called Furor Teutonicus out of feudal Germany----was on his death-bed, he sent for his grandson lyemistsu and said to him, “You are the man who one day will have to govern an empire. Remember, the way to govern an empire is to have a gentle and tender heart (the Latin alma as in alma mater, the extreme gentle tenderness of a mother).”
Now the reason, it seems to me, why the Japanese statesmen now find it so difficult to govern Korea, is because the modern Japanese, instead of reading and teaching their students the Guai Shi, now read and teach them the pragmatic philosophy and political science of Professor Deway, and have thus forgotten the essence of political science contained in those words of their great Shogun which I have just quoted.
In the same way, the reason why the British politicians now in England find it difficult to govern Ireland and India, is because modern Englishmen today do not know that it was not British democracy, the British Constitution or Parliamentarism, but the British or English civilization with the “gentleman” and its ideal; in short, that it was not the British mob, but the British or English gentleman who built up the great British Empire of today. But that is neither here nor there.
I have said that a nation is called a civilized nation only when it has a spiritual asset or “realized ideals.” Now let me ask, what “realized ideals” or spiritual asset have the Americans today to show in order to entitle them to be called a civilized nation? In literature I know only one great name in America and that is Emerson. But then even Emerson, as Matthew Arnold says, is not quite a great name in literature. Without speaking of Homer, Virgil Dante and Shakespeare, Emerson is not a great name in literature even as Plato, Cicero Bacon and Voltaire are great names in literature.
Of poetry again, which, like music, is the highest expression of spiritual life in a nation, I also know only one poem written by an American poet which can be truly called a real poem. By a real poem I mean a poem which is all poetry and nothing but poetry; a poem which becomes the spiritual asset of a nation and forms an important part of its civilization, such as Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne.” Poems like the poems of the English Lord Macaulay are, although in meter and rhyme, not poetry at all, but only rhetoric. Now, the poems of even famous American poets like Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier are for the most part also rhetoric, with some poetry in them: they are not all poetry, not real poems, which like Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne,” can become the spiritual as set of a nation. Indeed, as I have said, the only poem I know written by an American poet which can truly be called a real poem and can therefore become the spiritual asset of a nation, is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”