In spite of his valour, his passion for war, his thirst for revenge, the Samurai always preserved in his demeanour the utmost calm. Bushido ordained that a knight was never to show either joy or anger. And while remarking that the foreigner in Japan is struck by the often exaggerated politeness of the people, I should have added that he is certainly no less impressed by the inexpressiveness of their faces. Whether sad or joyful, they always wear the same conventional smile, which is sometimes cold as ice, sometimes nervous, or in cases of strong emotion passes into subdued laughter; but traces of really deep emotion are never visible. What a Baldasare Castiglione or a Lord Chesterfield attempted to exemplify in the West, was bred in the blood of these people as the highest form of good manners. I have seen weddings and witnessed funeral processions where the family on either occasion wore exactly the same expression. In emotions of any kind that conventional smile alone betrays their feelings. That same smile is on every countenance at great national festivals. With that smile wives took leave of their husbands, children of their fathers, mothers of their sons, when the troops started for the battle-field. The outward form and expression of it remains the same always. The face, or rather the mask that is worn on the stage of life, as in the theatre of ancient Greece, never changes. No matter if the piece enacted change in its course to be a comedy, tragedy, or a drama. So it was ordained by the code of Bushido, which, very likely because it was an unwritten law, came to be all the more binding. Bushido thus had its own ethical laws, its own religious tenets. As the knight of the Middle Ages created his own rules of life for use within his own turreted stronghold--a code which scarcely held good beyond the trenches of the castle, but which at the same time he magnified into a divine law, a "Gottesurtheil"--so also the Samurai created his own dogmas.