NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 9, 11 March 1925, Page 34

NOTES

The Japanese and their Dead Protestantism would cut us off from our

dead ruthlessly, telling us that to pray for them, even to imagine we can help them, is superstition. Catholics know that the dead are not separated from them and that in the Communion of Saints there is" a bond between living and dead that will last until all are united at the end of the world. However, Catholics as a rule are apt to be too unmindful of their duties to the dead, and in this respect they might well profit by the example of the Japanese, whose feeling for their dead is a wonderful thing. Lafcadie Hearn says:

“It is a feeling of grateful and reverential love. It is probably the mast profound and powerful of the emotions of the race, —that which especially directs national life and shapes national character. Patriotism be- - Jongs to it. Filial piety depends upon it. Family love is rooted in it. Loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a ‘hont oi Teikoku manzail; the sou or daughter who unmurmuring sacrifices all the happiness of existence for the sake, perhaps, of an undeserving or even cruel parent; the partisan who gives up friends, family, and..fortune rather than break the verbal promise made in other years to a now poverty-stricken master; the wife who. ceremoniously robes herself in white, utters a prayer and thrusts a sword into her throat to atone for a wrong done to strangers by her husband, — all these obey the will and hear the approval of invisible witnesses. Even among the sceptical . students of the new generation, this feeling survives many wrecks of faith, and the old sentiments are still uttered: Never must we cause shame to our ancestors’; ‘it is our duty to give honor to our ancestors.’ If We Remembered “Were there suddenly to arise within ns,” Hearn goes on, “the absolute certainty that our dead are still with ns, —seeing every act, knowing our every thought, hearing every word we utter, able to feel sympathy with us or anger against us, able to help us, able to love us and greatly needing our love, —it is quite certain that our conceptions of life and duty would he vastly changed. AVe should have to recognise our obligations to the past in a very solemn way. Now, with the man of the Far East, the constant presence of the dead has been a matter of conviction for thousands of years; he speaks to them daily; he tries to give them happiness; and, unless a professional criminal, he never quite forgets his duty towards them. ‘No one,’ says Hitata, ‘who constantly discharges that duty will ever he disrespectful to the gods or to his living parents. Such a man will also be loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle with his wife and children ; for the essence of this devotion is in truth filial piety.-’ . . . The Japanese never think of an ancestor as having become only a, memory, there dead are alive.”

We too have the certainty that our dead live. But unfortunately our conviction lacks reality. If we are asked do we believe, we unhesitatingly say we do; but if anybody observing us without bias were asked if we believed he would say he did not see any great reason to think so, at least as far as the practices of most of us go. Our belief in the Communion of Saints, like so many of our beliefs, badly needs treatment—treatment by prayer and meditation on the Last Things.

“The Book of Wonder” The publishers of “The Modern Library'’ have included in their list Lord Duusany’s Book of Wonder. The volume is published at 85 cents. The new publication will help to make known to a wider circle of readers the magic, singing, delicate prose of the head of the House of Plunket. Here once more is the enchantment of those other works of his that have fallen into our hands. Passages like the following are stamped with his genius and as unmistakable as lines of Dante or Vergil; “And many were moved to anger, for they hoped for some bloody quest; but the old lords chamberlain said, as they muttered among themselves in a far dark end of the chamber, that the quest was hard and wise, for that if she could ever weep she might also love. They had known her all her childhood; she had never sighed. Many men had she seen, suitors and courtiers,' and had never turned her head after one went by. Her beauty was as still as sunsets of bitter evenings when all the world is Lore, a wonder and ohi,L She was as a sin,-stricken mountain uplifted alone, all beautiful with me, a desolate and lonely radiance late at evening far up beyond the comfortable world not quite to be companioned by the stars’ the doom of the mountaineer.”' ’ “In the valley beyond Sidono there lies a garden of poppies, and where the poppies’ macs me all a-swing with summer breezes t nlf uo ** valley there lies • path well strewn with ocean shells. Over Sidono’s summit the birds come streaming to the late Imt lies in the valley of the garden, and hadot them rises the sun sending Sidono’s shadow as far as the edge of the lake. And own the path of many ocean shells when they if" to gleam in the sun, every -in,-, mg walks an aged mm clad in a silken robe' " ' til strange devices woven. A little temple "here the old man lives stands at the edge of the path. None worship there, for Zenladhn the old prophet, hath forsaken men t 0 walk among his poppies.” Three Irishmen in recent times have had wui g,tt of magic prose You find it in Abides plays and in his “De Profnndis.” ! ac * raic Pearse, whom Maxwell killed because lie loved his country, had it too— are pages in his plays that move the soul like fairy music, Dnnsany is the last of them and without a rival in his own sphere. They.a!e examples of what can be done with the

English, language when the Celtic magic is added to Saxon at its best. Do not forget that when Dunsany was asked the secret of his style he said that his mother made him read the' Bible as a boy and forbade him to read the daily papers. The influence of the Bible is plain in his pages; and to its "sweetness and light' he adds the true Celtic glamor. In the works of English writers there stands alone but one passage that can compare with the prose of the Irishmen. In that description of Monna Lisa, which you will find in Pater's Rennaissancc, there is the same ineffable charm, the same mastery over little words.