TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores
(_italics_) and small capitals are represented in upper case as in
SMALL CAPS.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
* * * * *
THE EAST I KNOW
THE EAST I KNOW
BY
PAUL CLAUDEL
“Look East, where whole new thousands are!”
BROWNING
TRANSLATED BY
TERESA FRANCES
AND
WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1914
First printed one thousand copies October, 1914
_Yale University Press_:
... _I should be most happy and honored if my
works could be brought to the attention of the American
public under the shelter and patronage of the
illustrious University of which you are a part._
Paul Claudel
March 28, 1914
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Paul Claudel_ vii
1895-1900
THE COCOA PALM 1
THE PAGODA 4
THE CITY AT NIGHT 12
GARDENS 17
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH 22
THOUGHTS ON THE SEA 25
CITIES 27
THE THEATER 29
TOMBS AND RUMORS 33
THE ENTRANCE TO THE EARTH 39
THE RELIGION OF LETTERS 42
THE BANYAN 47
TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN 49
THE GREAT SEA 52
THE TEMPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 54
OCTOBER 56
NOVEMBER 58
PAINTING 61
THE SOLITARY 62
DECEMBER 64
TEMPEST 66
THE PIG 68
THE SOURCE 70
DOORS 73
THE RIVER 76
THE RAIN 79
NIGHT ON THE VERANDAH 81
THE SPLENDOR OF THE MOON 83
DREAMS 85
HEAT 89
THE VISION OF A CITY 91
DESCENDING THE RIVER 93
THE BELL 95
THE TOMB 99
THE MELANCHOLY WATER 104
THE NIGHT VOYAGE 106
THE HALT ON THE CANAL 108
THE PINE-TREE 113
THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST 118
THE PEDESTRIAN 124
HERE AND THERE 127
THE SEDENTARY 138
THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA 142
SALUTATION 144
THE HANGING HOUSE 148
THE SPRING 150
THE TIDE AT NOON 153
THE PERIL OF THE SEA 156
ON LIGHT 159
HOURS IN THE GARDEN 162
THE BRAIN 167
LEAVING THE LAND 170
1900-1905
THE LAMP AND THE BELL 175
THE DELIVERANCE OF AMATERASU 178
A VISIT 187
THE RICE 189
THE PERIOD 191
THE TOAST TO A FUTURE DAY 193
THE DAY OF THE FEAST OF ALL THE RIVERS 194
THE GOLDEN HOUR 197
DISSOLUTION 198
_PAUL CLAUDEL_
_BY PIERRE CHAVANNES_
_Reprinted from “The New Statesman,” London, by the
courtesy of the Editor_
_Claudel worked for more than twenty years in silence in an
almost complete obscurity. Nobody ever mentioned him save a few
very independent artists--Mirbeau, Barrès, Schwob, Gide, Jammes,
Mauclair--who talked about him amongst themselves and sometimes even
dared to speak about him in public, without awakening an echo._
_Moreover, Claudel was usually far from France, Consul in various towns
of the Far East; he published his earlier works anonymously, lest their
Catholic character should damage his career, and for a long time his
work was only to be seen in the small literary reviews and in special
editions, of which a very small number of copies were printed; and he
never attempted to advertise himself. But in time he was saddened by
this great solitude. “One grows tired,” he wrote, “of speaking, as it
were, in impenetrable cotton-wool.”_
_These latter days Claudel’s glory, which had so long been obscured,
has suddenly blazed forth, if not to the great public, at least to
the public which reads and is interested in literature. The Théâtre
de l’Œuvre has played one of his dramas_--L’Annonce faite à Marie;
_the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier is about to play another_--L’Échange.
_The ordinary newspaper critics have begun talking about Claudel;
generally speaking, they refer to him with admiration, often with
astonishment and that kind of reserve which marks men who are not sure
that they understand, and, fearing that they are deceiving themselves,
do not wish completely to commit themselves. But in many young reviews
admiration is carried to a pitch of enthusiasm and almost of worship;
and today writers who are by no means young rank Claudel with the small
company of the very great: Æschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe._
_Reading Claudel, one can understand this long silence, this
admiration, and also this reserve. Claudel is not an easy poet: when
one penetrates his work one is transported as though into a foreign
country. He has a speech peculiar to himself; he has invented a form
which is neither prose, nor regular verse, nor ordinary_ vers libre;
_his work, created by a solitary man, is not bound up with our troubles
and our daily life; to love Claudel one must be initiated._
_He is a poet, in itself a thing rare in our time; but he is also,
and some would say primarily, a thinker. He has brought his dramatic
work together under the general title of_ L’Arbre, _just as Balzac
assembled his immense work under the title of_ La Comédie Humaine.
_By this title Claudel wants to indicate that his work has the sort
of natural profound living unity of the tree, which thrusts its roots
deep into the nourishing earth, and draws from it the sap which rises
in the branches to feed the remotest sunlit boughs. Each of his dramas
also is a drama of thought; they raise the greatest problems and often
suggest solutions. Tête d’Or is the chief, the commander of men, the
conqueror, who is driven to great deeds by an immense desire--as it
were, a predestination. The weak, whom Cébès symbolizes, the people,
give themselves to him; he carries them in his train until the day
when, undertaking an enterprise beyond mortal strength, he loses
his power and dies a new Prometheus on a high mountain._ La Ville
_presents contemporary society and the struggles that rend it, and the
great attitudes of the spirit confronting life: Isidore de Besme, the
engineer, the savant, is the realist, who has a knowledge of natural
forces and uses them to satisfy the needs of men. He dominates the
town, but he is unaware of the mystic quality of things; he wrongly
estimates the soul, and his science leads only to death. Lambert is
the man who seeks the end of life in the play of ideas and the love
of woman. Cœuvre, finally, is the poet who enters the inmost shrine
of truth by intuition and love, but is condemned to solitude by that
knowledge._ Le Repos du Septième Jour _is an ideologic drama: a Chinese
Emperor goes down into hell, and the roots of the moral world are
laid bare in a Dantesque vision, a kind of summary of good and evil._
L’Échange _and_ La Jeune Fille Violaine _are dramas of sentiment. In_
L’Échange _four characters are set against the brutal, realistic,
material background of America. There is Louis Laine, an adventurous,
but feeble, person who had stifled in the too rigid enclosure of
the old European society; there is his wife, the gentle Marthe, the
wife faithful through everything, who keeps close in her heart the
traditional virtues of the old Christian world; there is Lechy, the
violent woman who is the incarnation of disorder, and spreads it around
her and death with it; and there is Sir Pollock, the man of affairs,
who only lives for gold, convinced that anything can be bought with
it, and demands Louis Laine’s wife from him for a fistful of money._
La Jeune Fille Violaine _is the sublime poem of a holy soul which
enriches itself by stripping itself, and arrives through suffering and
renunciation to peace and the joy of an angelic death. In_ L’Otage, _we
have the eternal story of a conflict between that which remains and
that which passes_.
_It is impossible in a brief space to analyze dramas so laden with
ideas, but one can indicate the size and the unity of the work. The
tree that Claudel wants to show us is the tree of life. The roots
are in_ Le Repos du Septième Jour; _the sap, the desire, in_ Tête
d’Or; _the double-branching--the ideas of the mind in_ La Ville, _and
sentiment in_ L’Échange, La Jeune Fille Violaine, _and_ L’Otage.
_Claudel himself has formulated the theory and doctrine of his art in
three treatises brought together in his_ Art Poetique.
_It might be imagined that Claudel was a mere man of books, a thinker
in the abstract. He is nothing of the sort. This thinker is at the same
time the most concrete of poets. His thought is, as it were, swollen
with essential sap. And he expresses it in a flow of images taken
directly from things and exhibiting them in their reality. Claudel’s
originality lies in this double aspect: the unique blend of the highest
intellectuality with the richest realism. The man who meditates over
the greatest problems and expounds a profound logical doctrine to
justify his work is at the same time a primitive who works with his
fresh and eager eyes fixed on Nature. His dramas never lose touch
with the earth where men live, love, and suffer. His characters are
greater than Nature, and they express themselves quite naturally with a
biblical amplitude; but they never ring false and they often move us
deeply. For they are powerfully real types which exist and which one
often remembers. These two elements do not always mingle in a perfect
harmony; Claudel’s art is powerful, but it is not easy: it is like the
obscure and painful work of germination. His admirers themselves say
that Claudel’s works are like symphonies that one must hear several
times before grasping their meaning and their beauties, and that his
plays are beyond the capacity of the present-day public._
_Claudel is, finally, one must admit, a great religious poet, and it
is in that fact that the deepest unity of his work must be sought. His
work, it has been said, is a long pilgrimage towards God; and the road
has not been without its grievous strugglings, since the day when in
his youth he was suddenly converted and flung himself towards God, but
without winning light for his reason. “O my God,” he cries years after:_
_I remember the darkness where we two were face to face,
those gloomy winter afternoons in Notre-Dame._
_I, all alone below there, lit up the face of the great
bronze Christ with a twopenny-halfpenny taper._
_All men were then against us, science and reason; and I
replied nothing._
_Only the faith was in me, and I looked at You in silence
like a man who prefers his friend._
_I went down into Your sepulcher with You._
_Claudel’s whole life has been a struggle for the faith, for he is
one of those men for whom there is no life save in God, and who see
nothing outside faith in Him save despair, death, and annihilation. A
somber sadness burdens those first dramas which tell of man’s great
struggle to dispense with God and his check; but this gives way to
joy in proportion as Claudel’s faith strengthens and grow bright.
That pilgrimage towards God is also a pilgrimage towards joy; and that
joy breaks into great song, now austere, now delirious, in Claudel’s
properly lyrical work--the_ Hymnes _and the_ Cinq Grandes Odes. _Here
one hears only the most distant echoes of the great struggle; here are
only cries of joy and certitude._
_Blessed be Thou, my God, Who hast delivered me from death....
... He who believes not in God, believes not in Being, and he
Who hates being, hates his own existence.
Lord, I have found Thee.
Who finds Thee has no more tolerance of death._
_A strange phenomenon, this Christian poet, passionately,
uncompromisingly, almost fanatically Catholic, in the country where
Anatole France, the bantering and disillusioned master, holds
sway, where Renan and Voltaire reigned, and with them hard reason,
distrustful of the supernatural._
_France, as Kipling has justly said, is the country most faithful to
old things and most wildly enthusiastic about new ones. The present
fashion for Roman Catholicism counts for something in Claudel’s sudden
vogue, just as Claudel has done something to bring about the fashion.
Various writers, tired of wandering far from safe harbors, have “been
converted” by Claudel’s appeal; and the young men who reproached France
for withering life up, and for lacking the “sense of the divine” have
found in Claudel one of their masters. It is the perpetual oscillation
of the human spirit from pure reason to exalted sentiment. Claudel
stands head and shoulders above the little crowd which surrounds him,
and he will outlast them and their ways of thought. Most of us must
say to him, in the words of one of his own characters, “I cannot give
you my soul.” But we love the poet in him and admire the passionate
believer who compels us to question ourselves in the inner silence, the
man who made for himself this prayer:_
_Make me as one who sows solitude, and may he who hears my speech
Return home troubled and heavy._
1895-1900
THE EAST I KNOW
THE COCOA PALM
Our trees stand upright like men, but motionless; thrusting their roots
deep in earth, they flourish with outstretched arms. But here the
sacred banyan does not rise as a single stem; for the pendent threads,
through which it returns seeking the fruitful soil, make it seem a
marvelous temple self-created.
Observe only the cocoa palm. It has no branches. At the apex of the
trunk it raises a tuft of fronds.
Palm! The insignia of triumph. Aerial in the light, consummate bloom of
the crest, it soars, expands, rejoices,--and sinks beneath the weight
of its freedom.
Through the warm day and the long noon the cocoa palm expands. In an
ecstasy it spreads its happy leaves. Like infant heads the cocoanuts
appear, the great green fruit of the tree.
Thus does the cocoa palm gesture, revealing its heart; for the lower
leaves, unfolding from out their depth, reach pendulent to the earth;
and the leaves in the midst spread far on every side; and the leaves
above, uplifted like the hands of an awkward man or like one who
signals his complete submission, slowly wave and sign.
The trunk is nowhere rigid, but ringed; and like to the blades of the
grass, it is supple and long. It is swayed by the moods of the earth,
whether it strains toward the sun or bends its spreading plumes over
swift and turbid rivers, or between the sea and the sky.
One night, returning along the shore of the sea assaulted with
turbulent foam by the whole deep-thundering weight of the leonine
Indian Ocean beneath the south-western monsoon,--as I followed the
shore far-strewn with palms like the skeleton wrecks of boats and of
lesser and living things, I saw them upon my left! As I walked by that
forest empty beneath its dense-woven ceiling, the palms seemed enormous
spiders crawling obliquely across the peaceful twilight heaven!
Venus, like a moon drowned in divinest light, flickered a wide
reflection in the waters. And a palm-tree bent over the sea and the
mirrored planet, and its gesture offered its heart to the heavenly
fire.
I shall often remember that night when, afar, I yearn to return! I saw
the leafage hanging in heavy tresses, and across the high fane of the
forest, that sky where the storm, setting its feet on the sea, loomed
up like a mountain; and how low on the dark horizon the pale pearl of
the ocean gleamed!
Oh Ceylon, shall I ever forget thee,--thy fruits and thy flowers, and
thy people with melting eyes, naked beside those highways that are
hued like the mango’s flesh; and my rickshaw-man’s gift of nodding
rosy flowers which he placed on my knees when, with tears in my eyes,
crushed down by sorrow--but nibbling a leaf of cinnamon--I left thee at
last beneath thy rainy skies.
THE PAGODA
I descend from my carriage, and the sight of a hideous beggar marks the
beginning of my journey. With one bloodshot eye he leers at me, and
with a leprous lip reveals to their roots teeth bone-yellow and as long
as those of a rabbit. The rest of his face is eaten away.
Rows of other wretches are ranged on both sides of the highway, which
is thronged at this outlet of the city with pedestrians, messengers,
and wheelbarrows bearing women and their bundles. The oldest and
grossest of the men is called the King of the Beggars. They say that,
crazed by the death of his mother, he carries her head about with
him concealed in his clothes. The last that I notice, two very old
women, wrapped in swathings of rags, their faces black from the dust
of the roads where they prostrate themselves at times, sing one of
those plaints broken with long sighs and hiccoughs, which are the
professional expressions of despair among these outcasts. I can see the
pagoda afar off between thickets of bamboo; and, crossing the fields, I
take a short cut toward it.
The country is a vast cemetery. Everywhere there are coffins; on
hillocks covered with withered reeds, and in the dry grass, are rows
of little stone posts, mitered statues, or lions of stone, marking the
ancient sepulchers. Individual wealth or burial associations have built
these tombs surrounded by trees and hedges. I pass between a place
for animals and a pit filled with the skeletons of little girls whose
parents wished to be rid of them. They have choked it to the mouth. It
will soon be necessary to dig another.
The day is warm, the sky clear, I walk in the light of December.
The dogs see me, bark, and run away; I reach and pass the villages with
their black roofs; I cross the fields of cotton and beans; I cross the
rivulets by the old worn bridges, and, leaving on my right the great
empty buildings of a deserted powder-mill, I arrive at my goal. I hear
a noise of bells and a drum.
Before me is a tower of seven stories. An Indian with a golden turban,
and a Parsee wearing a plum-colored one twisted like a stovepipe, are
entering it. Two other figures move about on the highest balcony.
I must speak first of the pagoda itself.
It is composed of three courts and three temples, flanked by accessory
chapels and lesser buildings. Religion here does not, as in Europe,
barricade and segregate in loneliness the mystery of a faith walled
about by dogma. Its function is not to defend the absolute against
exterior aspects. It establishes a certain atmosphere; and, as
though suspended from heaven, the structure gathers all nature into
the offering that it constitutes. Multifold, all upon one level, it
expresses Space by the relations of height and distance between the
three arches of triumph or the temples which are consecrated to them;
and Buddha, Prince of Peace, inhabits it with all the gods.
Chinese architecture, as it were, suppresses the walls. It amplifies
and multiplies the roofs; and their exaggerated corners, lifting
themselves with an exquisite resilience, return toward the sky in
flowing curves. They remain suspended in air! The wider and heavier
the fabric of the roof, the more, by that very weight, does it give
an impression of lightness through every deep shadow projected below.
Hence the use of black tiles, that form deep grooves and strong copings
with high openings between them, makes the highest ridges detached and
distinct. Clear though intricate of outline, their frieze is lifted
through the lucid air. The temple is seen as a portico, a canopy, or a
tent, of which the uplifted corners are attached to the clouds; and in
its shade are installed the idols of the earth.
A fat, gilded fellow lives under the first portico. His right foot,
drawn beneath him, indicates the third attitude of meditation, where
consciousness still exists. His eyes are closed, but under his golden
skin can be seen the red lips of a distended mouth whose long rounded
opening stretches at the corners into the shape of an eight. He laughs,
and the laugh is that of a face asleep. At what does this obese ascetic
laugh? What does he see with those closed eyes?
On each side of the hall, two at the right and two at the left, the
four painted and varnished colossi, with short legs and enormous
torsos, are the demons who guard the four shores of Heaven. Beardless
as children, one brandishes serpents, one plays the viol, and one
shakes a cylindrical engine like a closed parasol or a firecracker.
I penetrate into the second court. A great brass incense-burner covered
with inscriptions is in the middle. I stand before the principal
pavilion. On the ridges of the roof little painted groups of figures
seem as though they were passing from one side to the other, or
ascending while engaged in conversation. At the angles of the coping
hang two pink fish, their long feelers curving tremulously, their tails
in the air; in the center two dragons are fighting for the mystic
jewel. I hear songs and the beating of bells, and through the open door
I see the evolutions of the bonzes.
The hall is high and spacious. Four or five colossal gilded statues
dominate the background. The largest is seated on a throne in the
middle. His eyes and mouth are closed, his feet drawn under him, and
one hand, held in the “gesture of witness,” points to the earth. Thus,
under the sacred tree, the perfect Buddha conceived himself. Escaped
from the wheel of life, he participates in his own Nirvana. Others
perched above him, with downcast eyes, contemplate their navels. These
are the Heavenly Buddhas seated on lotus flowers. They are Avalokhita,
Amitabha, the Buddha of the Light without Measure and the Buddha of
the Paradise of the West. At their feet the bonzes pursue their rites.
They have gray robes; large, somewhat rust-colored mantles attached
to the shoulder like togas; leggings of white linen; and, some of
them, a sort of mortar-board on their heads. Others bare their scalps,
where the white marks of _moxas_ show the number of their vows. One by
one, murmuring, they file past. The last who passes is a boy of twelve
years. By a side hall I reach the third court and see a third temple.
Four priests perched on stools are ranged inside the door. Their shoes
are left on the earth before them; and without the need of feet,
detached, imponderable, they are seated on their own thoughts. They
make no movement. Their mouths, their closed eyes, are one with the
creases and wrinkles in the wasted flesh of their faces, like the scar
of the navel. Consciousness of their inertia is sufficient for their
ruminating intelligence. Under a niche in the middle of the hall, I
distinguish the shining limbs of another Buddha. A confused company of
idols is ranged in the obscurity along the walls.
Returning, I see the central temple from the rear. High on the wall
of an embrasure a many-colored tympan represents some legend among
olive-trees. I re-enter. The back of the repository where the colossi
are exposed is a great painted sculpture: Amitofou mounting to Heaven
amid flames and demons. The setting sun, passing through the trellised
openings high in the wall, sweeps the somber boxlike hall with
horizontal rays.
The bonzes continue the ceremony. Kneeling now before the colossi,
they are intoning a chant, while the celebrant, standing before a bell
shaped like a cask, leads the measured beat of drums and bells. At each
verse he clashes the drum, drawing from its brazen belly a re-echoing
vibration. Then, facing each other in two lines, they recite some
litany.
The side buildings are the dwellings of the priests. One of them
enters, carrying a pail of water. I glance into the refectory where the
bowls of rice are placed two by two on the empty tables.
I am again before the tower.
Just as the pagoda expresses, by its system of courts and buildings,
the extent and the dimensions of Space; so the tower symbolizes Height.
Poised against the sky, it becomes the scale of it. The seven octagonal
stories are a plan of the seven mystic heavens. The architect has
narrowed their corners and lifted their borders with skill. Each story
casts its own shadow below it. At every angle of every roof a bell
is attached, and beside it hangs the clapper with which to strike it.
Their metallic syllables are the mysterious voice of each Heaven, and
their unuttered sound hangs suspended like a drop.
I have nothing more to say of the pagoda. I do not know its name.
THE CITY AT NIGHT
It is raining softly. The night has come. The policeman takes the
lead and turns to the left, ceasing his talk of the time when, as
a kitchen-boy in the invading army, he saw his Major installed in
the sanctuary of the “God of Long Life.” The road that we follow is
mysterious. By a series of alleys, of passages, stairs, and doorways,
we come out in the court of the temple, where buildings with clawlike
copings and hornlike peaks make a black frame to the night sky. A
smoldering fire flickers from the dark doorway. We penetrate the
blackness of the hall.
The cave is filled with incense, glowing with red light. One cannot
see the ceiling. A wooden grille separates the idol from his clients,
and from the table of offerings, where garlands of fruit and bowls of
food are deposited. The bearded face of a giant image can be vaguely
distinguished. The priests are dining, seated about a round table.
Against the wall is a drum as enormous as a tun, and a great gong in
the form of the ace of spades. Two red tapers, like square columns,
lose themselves in the smoke and the night, where vague pennants float.
Onward!
The narrow tangle of streets, where we are involved in the midst of
a shadowy crowd, is lit only by the deep open booths which border
it. These are the work-rooms of carpenters, engravers; the shops of
tailors, shoemakers, and venders of fur. From innumerable kitchens,
behind the display of bowls of noodles and soup, the sound of frying
escapes. In a dark recess some woman attends a crying child. Among
stacked-up coffins is the gleam of a pipe. A lamp, a sidewise flicker,
shows strange medleys. At the street corners, at the bends of heavy
little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be
seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in
the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind
alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood,
color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have
been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate
light. The door at our left is simply a round hole.
We reach a court. Here is another temple. It is a shadowy hall from
which exudes an odor of earth. It is enriched with idols, which,
disposed in two rows around three sides of the place, brandish swords,
lutes, roses, and branches of coral. They tell us that these are the
years of human life. While I try to find the twenty-seventh, I am left
behind; and, before leaving, the fancy takes me to look into a niche
that I find on the further side of the door. A brown demon with four
pairs of arms, his face convulsed by rage, is hidden there like an
assassin.
Forward! The roads become more and more miserable. We go past high
palisades of bamboo; and at last, emerging from the southern gate, we
turn toward the east. The road follows the base of a high crenellated
wall. On the other hand sink the deep trenches of a dried river-bed.
Below we see sampans lit by cooking fires. A shadowy people swarm there
like the spirits of the Inferno.
And undoubtedly this lamentable river-bank marks the end planned for
our exploration, because we retrace our steps. City of Lanterns, we
gaze again upon the chaos of thy ten thousand faces!
Seeking an explanation, a reason why this town where we loitered is
so distinct in our memories, we are struck at once with this fact:
there are no horses in the streets. The city is entirely of human
beings. It seems an article of faith with the Chinese not to employ an
animal or a machine for work by which a man may live. This explains the
narrowness of the streets, the stairs, the curved bridges, the houses
without fences, the sinuous windings of the alleys and passages. The
city forms a coherent whole, an industrious honeycomb communicating in
all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill. When the night comes, every
one barricades himself. During the day there are no doors, that is to
say no doors that close. The door here has no official function. It is
simply an opening. Not a wall but can by some fissure give passage to
an agile and slender person. The large streets necessary to general
traffic, and to an ordered mechanical life, would be of no use here.
Here merely collective alleys and passages are provided.
An opium den, a market of prostitutes, these last fill the framework of
my memory. The smoking den is a vast nave, empty all the height of two
stories which superimpose their balconies inside. The building is full
of blue smoke, one breathes an odor of burning chestnuts. It is a heavy
perfume, powerful, stagnant, strong as the beat of a gong. Sepulchral
smoke, it establishes between our air and dreams a middle atmosphere
which the seeker of these mysteries inhales. One sees across the haze
the fire of little opium lamps like the souls of the smokers. Later
they will arrive in greater numbers. Now it is too early.
On narrow benches, their heads helmed with flowers and pearls, clothed
in wide blouses of silk and full embroidered trousers, motionless, with
their hands on their knees, the prostitutes wait in the street like
beasts at a fair, in the pell-mell and the dust of passers-by. Beside
their mothers and dressed like them, also motionless, little girls are
seated on the same bench. Behind, a flare of petrol lights the opening
to the stairway.
I go. And I carry the memory of a life congested, naïve, restless;
of a city at the same time open and crowded, a single house with a
multifold family. I have seen the city of other days, when, free of
modern influences, men swarmed in an artless disorder; in fact it is
the fascination of all the past that I am leaving, when, issuing out
of the double gate in the hurly-burly of wheelbarrows and litters, in
the midst of lepers and epileptics, I see the electric lights of the
Concession shine.
GARDENS
It is half-past three: white mourning.[A] The sky is veiled as if with
white linen. The air is moist and raw. I go into the city. I am looking
for gardens.
I walk in a black gravy. Along the ditch whose crumbling border I
follow, the odor is so strong that it is like an explosive. There is
the smell of oil, garlic, filth, ashes, opium, and offal. I walk amid
a free and easy people who are shod with thick buskins or sandals of
straw, wearing long hoods or skullcaps of felt, their silk or linen
trousers tucked into leggings.
The wall winds and undulates, and its coping, an arrangement of bricks
and open-work tiles, imitates the back and body of a crawling dragon.
A sort of head terminates it, from which floats a cloud of smoke. This
is the place. I knock mysteriously at a little black door which opens.
Under the overhanging roofs I cross a succession of vestibules and
narrow corridors. I am in a strange place.
It is a garden of stones.... Like the ancient Italian and French
designers, the Chinese have understood that a garden, from the fact of
its inclosure, must be complete in itself and harmonious in all its
parts. Only so will nature adapt herself to our moods, and only so, by
a subtle harmony, will the master feel at home wherever he looks. Just
as a landscape does not consist simply of its grass and the color of
its foliage, but is distinguished by its outlines and the slope of the
ground, so the Chinese literally construct their gardens with stones.
They are sculptors instead of painters. Because it is susceptible of
elevation and depth, of contours and reliefs, through the variety of
its planes and surfaces, stone seems to them a more suitable medium for
creating a background for Man than are plants, which they reduce to
their normal place of decoration and ornament.
Nature herself has prepared the materials. The hand of Time, the frost,
the rain, wear away, work at the rock; perforating it, gashing it,
probing it with a searching finger. Faces, animals, skeletons, hands,
shells, bodies without heads, petrified wood like a congealed mass of
broken figures, mingled with leaves and fishes; Chinese art seizes
all these strange objects, imitates them, and arranges them with an
ingenious industry.
This garden represents a mountain cleft by a precipice, to which steep
paths give access. Its feet bathe in a little lake half covered with
green scum, where a zigzag bridge completes the bias outline. Built
upon a foundation of pink granite piles, the tea-house mirrors in the
greenish black waters of the basin its soaring double roofs, which seem
to lift it from the earth like outspread wings.
Below, driven straight into the earth like iron candlesticks, the
stripped trees bar the sky, their giant stature dominating the garden.
I wander among the stones by a long labyrinth whose windings and
turnings, ascents and evasions, amplify and complicate the scene,
simulating the mazes of a dream around the lake and the mountain.
Finally I attain the kiosk on the summit. The garden seems to sink
below me like a valley full of temples and pavilions, and among the
trees appears the poem of the roofs.
They are high and low, detached and massed, elongated like a pediment
or swelling like a bell. They are surmounted with ornamental friezes
decorated with centipedes and fishes. At the intersections of their
ridges the peaks display stags, storks, altars, vases, and wingèd
pomegranates--all symbolic. The roofs, lifted up at the corners like
arms which hold up a too ample robe, have a creamy whiteness or the
blackness of soot yellowed and sodden. The air is green, as when one
looks through old window-glass.
The other slope brings us before the great pavilion. The descent winds
slowly toward the lake by irregular steps leading to other surprises.
Coming out of an alley, I see pointing in disorder toward the sky
five or six horns of a roof whose building is hidden from me. Nothing
could paint the drunken toss of these fairy prows, the proud elegance
of these flowering stalks, holding up a lily to the envious clouds.
Bourgeoning with this flower, the strong framework lifts itself like a
branch that one lets spring.
I reach the border of the pond where the stalks of dead lotus flowers
lie across the still waters. The silence is as profound as the depth of
a winter forest. This harmonious place was built for the pleasure of
the members of a Syndicate of Commerce in beans and rice, who doubtless
come here in the spring nights to drink tea and watch the shore glimmer
under the moon.
The other garden is more singular.
It was almost night when, penetrating into its square enclosure, I saw
it filled to its walls with a vast landscape. Picture a mass of rocks,
a chaos, a confusion of overthrown blocks, heaped up together as if by
the force of the sea; a vision of madness, a country as ghastly as a
brain with its convolutions bared. The Chinese flay their landscapes.
Inexplicable as nature, this little corner seems also as vast and as
complex. Among these rocks rises a dark and twisted pine-tree. The
warped trunk, the color of its bristling tufts, the violent dislocation
of its limbs, the disproportion of this single tree with the artificial
country which it dominates,--like a dragon issuing from the earth in
smoke, combating the wind and the storms,--make this place unreal,
render it grotesque and fantastic. Here and there funereal foliage,
yews and arbor-vitæ, in their vigorous blackness, intensify this
cataclysm. In my amazement I ponder this melancholy document. And
in the middle of the enclosure one great rock stands in the dusk of
twilight like a monster,--a theme of reverie and enigma.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] White is the color of Chinese mourning.
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH
Ingots of paper are the money of the dead. From thin cards are cut the
figures of persons, houses, and animals. The dead man must be followed
by these fragile imitations, these patterns of living things; and, if
burned, they will accompany him where he goes. The flute guides such
souls, the beat of a gong assembles them like bees. In the shadowy
darkness, the brilliance of a flame soothes and satisfies them.
Along the bank of the river the prepared barges wait for the night to
come. Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether
the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters
from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously
under accumulated clouds,--still the torches flare at the prow, the
festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a
vivid note,--as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens
the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the
flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers explode, the three
boatmen lean to the long scull. The barge starts and tacks, leaving
in the wide sweep of its rudder a trail of fire. Some one is strewing
little lamps. Uncertain glimmers on the vast flow of the opaque waters,
these flicker a moment and perish. An arm seizes the tinsel streamer,
the ball of fire which sinks and flares in the smoke, and touches them
to the tomb of the waters; the illusory brightness of the light, like
the gleaming of fish, fascinates the cold drowned. Other illuminated
barges go and come. Far off are heard detonations, and on the war-ships
two bugles, answering one another, sound together the extinguishing of
the fires.
The loitering stranger who, from the shore, contemplates the vast night
open before him like a chart, will hear the return of the religious
barge. The torches are extinguished, the shrill hautboy has died away,
but, over a precipitate beating of drumsticks, dominated by a continual
rolling of drums, the funereal gong continues its tumult and its dance.
Who is it that beats? The sound rises and falls, ends, recommences, and
presently swells to a clamor as if impatient hands beat on the metal
hung between two worlds. Then solemnly, beneath the measured strokes,
the gong returns a deep reverberation. The boat approaches. It passes
the river-bank and the fleet of moored craft; and now, in the heavy
darkness of the opium barges, it is at my feet. I can see nothing; but
the funeral orchestra, which had died away for a long interval, now,
after the fashion of dogs that howl, explodes again in the darkness.
This is the feast of the seventh month when the earth enters into its
repose. Along the road the rickshaw-runners have stuck in the earth
between their feet sticks of incense and little red candle-ends. I must
return. Tomorrow I shall come to sit in the same place. It is all over;
and still, like the sightless dead sunk beneath an infinity of waves,
I hear the tone of the sepulchral sistrum, the clamor of iron drums
beaten with terrible blows in the close darkness.
THOUGHTS ON THE SEA
The boat makes her way between the islands; the sea is so calm that it
scarcely seems to exist. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and it is hard
to tell whether or not it is raining.
The thoughts of the voyager turn to the past year. He sees again his
trip across the ocean in the stormy night; the ports, the stations,
the arrival on Shrove Sunday, the trip to the house when, with a
cold eye, he scanned the sordid festivities of the crowd through the
mud-spattered windows of his carriage. His thoughts show him again his
parents, his friends, old scenes,--and then the new departure. Unhappy
retrospect! As if it were possible for anyone to retrieve his past.
It is this that makes the return sadder than the departure. The voyager
re-enters his home as a guest. He is a stranger to all, and all is
strange to him. (Servant, hang up the traveling cloak and do not carry
it away! Soon it will be necessary to depart once more.) Seated at the
family table he is a suspected guest, ill at ease. No, parents, it is
never the same! This is a passer-by whom you have received, his ears
filled with the fracas of trains and the clamor of the sea, like a man
who imagines that he still feels beneath his feet the profound movement
that lures him away. He is not the same man whom you conducted to the
fateful wharf. The separation has taken place and he has entered upon
the exile that follows it!
CITIES
As there are books on beehives, on colonies of birds’ nests, or on the
constitution of coral islands, why should we not study thus the cities
of humanity?
Paris, the capital of the Kingdom, uniform and concentric in its
development, expands, as it grows, into a larger likeness of the island
to which it was once confined. London is a juxtaposition of stores,
warehouses, and factories. New York is a railway terminal, built of
houses between tracks. It is a pier for landing, a great jetty flanked
by wharves and warehouses. Like the tongue, which receives and divides
its food, like the uvula at the back of the throat placed between two
channels, New York, between her two rivers, the North and the East,
has set her docks and her storehouses on one side, Long Island; on the
other, by Jersey City and the dozen railway lines which range their
depots on the embankment of the Hudson, she receives and sends out the
merchandise of all the Western continent. The active part of the city,
composed entirely of banks, exchanges, and offices, is on the tip of
this tongue, which--not to push this figure too far--moves incessantly
from one end to the other.
Boston is composed of two parts: the new city, pedantic and miserly,
like a man who, displaying his riches and his virtue, yet guards them
for himself,--where the streets, open on all sides to avenues, seem
to become more silent and longer in the cold, and to listen with more
spite to the step of the passer-by who follows them, grinding his teeth
in the blast; and the hill where the old city, like a snail-shell,
contains all the windings of traffic, debauchery, and hypocrisy.
The streets of Chinese cities are made for a people accustomed
to walking in single file; each individual takes his place in an
interminable, endless line. Between the houses resembling boxes with
one side knocked out, where the inhabitants sleep pell-mell among the
merchandise, these narrow fissures are insinuated.
Are there not special points for study? The geometry of streets, the
measurement of turnings, the calculus of crowded thoroughfares, the
disposition of avenues? Is not all movement parallel to these, and all
rest or pleasure perpendicular?
A book indeed!
THE THEATER
The palace of the Corporation of Canton has a niche for its golden
god,--an inner hall where great seats, placed solemnly about the
center, indicate rather than invite repose. And, as European clubs
would place a library, they have established a theater, with parade
and pomp, on the far side of the court which is in front of the whole
building. It is a terrace of stone deep in between two buildings.
Consisting only of a difference in level, the stage between the wings
and the crowd is simply a wide, flat space above their heads. A square
canopy like that of a dais shades and consecrates it. Another portico
in the foreground, framing it in four pillars of granite, confers on
it solemnity and distance. Here comedy develops, legends are told, the
vision of the things which are to be reveals itself in rolling thunder.
The curtain, comparable to that veil which divides us from the world
of dreams, does not exist here. But as if each soul, in discarding
its disguises, were held in an impenetrable tissue, whose colors and
elusive brightness are like the livery of night; each actor in his
silken draperies shows nothing of himself but the movement when he
stirs. Beneath the plumage of his part the golden headdress, the face
hidden under rouge and mask, he is no more than a gesture and a voice.
The emperor mourns over his lost kingdom, the unjustly accused princess
flees from monsters and savages, armies defile, combats take place, a
gesture effaces years and distances, debates proceed before the elders,
the gods descend, the genie arises from the jar. But never does any one
of the persons engaged in the execution of a chant or of a complicated
dance deviate from the rhythm and the harmonies which time the measure
and rule the evolutions, any more than he would throw off his clothes.
The orchestra at the back,--which throughout the piece continues its
evocatory tumult, as if, like swarms of bees that reassemble at the
beating of a caldron, the scenic phantoms would dissipate if there
were silence,--has less a musical rôle than the service of sustaining
the whole, playing (if we may call this prompting music) and answering
for a chorus of the populace. It is the music which accelerates or
moderates the movement, which heightens with an accent more acute the
discourse of the actor, or which, surging up behind him, brings to his
ears clamor and rumor. There are guitars, bits of wood that are beaten
like tympans, that are clashed like castanets; a sort of monochord
violin which, like a fountain in a solitary court, by the thread
of its plaintive melody, carries the development of the elegy; and
finally, in the heroic movements, the trumpet. It is a sort of bugle of
brass, of which the sound, charged with harmonies, has an incredible
brilliance and a terrible stridence. It is like the braying of an ass,
like a shout in the desert, a flourish to the sun, the clamor volleyed
from the diaphragm of an elephant. But the gongs and cymbals hold the
principal place. Their discordant racket excites and stimulates the
emotions, deafening thought, which in a sort of dream sees only the
spectacle before it. Meanwhile at one side of the scene, hung in a cage
of woven rushes, are two birds like turtledoves. These it seems are
_pelitze_ brought from Tientsin. Competing innocently with the uproar
in which they bathe, they jet a song of celestial sweetness.
The hall under the second portico, and the entire court, is stuffed as
full as a pie with living heads. Among them emerge the pillars, and
two lions of sandstone with froglike jaws whose heads are bonneted with
children. It is a pavement of skulls and round yellow faces, so closely
packed that the limbs and bodies cannot be seen. Pressed together, the
hearts of the crowd beat one against the other. It oscillates with but
one movement. Sometimes, stretching a row of arms, it surges against
the stone wall of the stage; sometimes, withdrawing, is hidden by the
sides. In the upper galleries, the wealthy and the mandarins smoke
their pipes and drink tea in cups with brass saucers, surveying like
gods both spectacle and spectators. As the actors themselves are hidden
in their robes, so, as it enters each bosom, does the drama stir under
the living stuff of the crowd.
TOMBS AND RUMORS
We climb and then descend; we pass by the great banyan which, like
Atlas, settling himself powerfully on his contorted haunches, seems
awaiting with knee and shoulder the burden of the sky. At his feet
there is a little edifice where are burned all papers marked with black
characters, as if a sacrifice of writing was offered to the god of the
tree.
We turn and turn again, and by a sinuous road we enter into a country
of tombs. Not, indeed, that they were not everywhere, because our steps
since our departure have been accompanied by them. The evening star,
like a saint praying in solitude, sees the sun disappear beneath her
under the deep and diaphanous waters. The funereal region that we scan
in the pallid light of a dreary, waning day, is covered with a rude and
yellow growth like the pelt of a tiger. From the base to the ridge are
hillocks between which our road winds; and, on the opposite side of the
valley, as far as the eye can reach, are mountains burrowed like a
rabbit-warren with tombs.
In China death holds as great a place as life. As soon as they have
gone the dead become more important and more to be suspected, enduring
as morose and malevolent powers whom it is well to conciliate. The
bonds between the living and the dead are broken with difficulty. The
rites continue and are perpetuated. The living must go frequently to
the family tomb. They burn incense, fire off crackers, and offer rice
and pork. In the shape of a scrap of paper they leave a visiting-card
held in place with a pebble. The dead in their thick coffins rest a
long time inside the house. Then they are carried out of doors and
piled up in low sheds, until the geomancer has found the proper site
and location. Then the final resting-place is determined on with great
particularity, for fear that the dissatisfied spirits should wander
elsewhere. They cut the tombs in the sides of mountains, in the solid
and primordial earth; and, while the living, in unhappy multitudes, are
crowded in valley-bottoms, in low and malarial plains, the dead open
their dwellings to sun and space in high and airy places.