🥀 Love is not a mystery in Japan. It would not have been a mystery in Europe if a child—Dante—had not been in love. For mystery, religious and passionate alike, has its source and sanction in the heart of childhood. In like manner the love of Nature—of the landscape and the heavens—was a spiritual mystery in the boyish hearts of Vaughan and Traherne (repeated in that of their son and brother Wordsworth, the boy whom the cataract haunted like a passion). By these boyhoods, remembered very seriously in afterlife, European literature has been converted to two mystical passions which, century by century, are its very life. Without those boyhoods these two loves might have been fervent, exalting, poignant, but not mysterious, not spiritual with the “golden purity,” the ignorant spirituality of childhood.

🥀 It is said that our European manner of romantic love (strictly speaking romantic) is scandalous to the Japanese. They can have had no Dante. And, in spite of their pleasure in blossoms—their annual popular tryst with cherry and chrysanthemum—it is doubtful whether the love of Nature has ever taken an illustrious or mysterious form with these little people. Their landscape art is gay, observant, and arbitrary; but it is—as far as an Occidental student can interpret it—not passionate. For landscape that proves a passion for Nature and for mystery—both the legacies of man’s dead childhood—we must look to the great painters of two countries, France and England; to Turner, Wilson, Crome, and Corot, and thus especially to the country that produced the boyhoods of Vaughan, Traherne, and Wordsworth. Many a child of our race has received that early inspiration, and these men of early genius not only received and remembered but put it on such record as to make it thenceforward a part of our literature. It is accepted, it is orthodox, it is expected of our poets. And this orthodoxy, due to these great men, is due originally to these great boys.

🥀 But for them these wonders of childhood would have been forgotten, or put away as childish things, by sensitive spirits who had likewise experienced them. They would not, at any rate, have gained this high literary honour and this literary authority. As it is, we are not ashamed to remember what midsummer early morning was to us at nine years old, because literature gives us authority. The light to our adult eyes is lovely still, but the magic of its quality is gone, the memory remaining, or the memory of the memory, or perhaps no more than the grace of knowing that there was once a memory—

_Not to forget that I forget._

🥀 It is their own landscape, their own hour, that moves children not to words but to emotions. Great views, I think, give them a more ordinary and grown-up pleasure; they do not love formal gardens, even Italian formal gardens; and on this point certainly the child is not the father of the man. But hillsides in wild flower, calm summer seas, and those aspects and phases of landscape to which Tennyson gave his perfect word in return for a perfect emotion—these are wonderful to children. When Tennyson is restored, after the indiscriminate honour and the indiscriminate disesteem that have befallen him, to his own place, it will be because his sense of landscape, his sense of light and of sun, is like a child’s.

🥀 As to Dante’s love, the presence of an adult sentiment in a boy’s heart—one should rather say in his soul and in the topmost places of his soul—is a heavenly incident of human history and therefore may be subject to the worst parody. I find, for example, an exceeding vulgarity in the coquetting of boys and girls in certain kinds of American stories. It is not a corruption of things innocent to evil; but it is the corruption of an extreme and lofty wisdom, and that corruption, I think, is silly.

🥀 Let us place next to Dante’s sacred love for a child the love of a man not sacred but profane—a man in fiction as the great genius of Emily Brontë conceived him. Heathcliff’s tempestuous love for Catherine remains throughout the horrible story a child’s fresh love, even though Heathcliff is worse than a man. And, albeit Catherine dies a woman, it is to her childish ghost that he cries out of that window on the heights before his own death; the ghost of a child, and she has been long a dead woman, and he is old.