a child balanced among the apples. From there, like a god on his
pinnacle, spectator of the theater of the world, I study with deep
consideration the relief and conformation of the earth, its disposition
of slopes and planes. With the piercing eye of a crow I peer up and
down the country spread out under my perch. I follow this road which,
appearing twice on the brow of little hills, finally loses itself in
the forest. I miss nothing: the direction of smoke, the qualities
of shadow and of light, the progress of the farmwork, a wagon which
lurches along the road, the shots of the hunters. No need of a paper
wherein I could only read the past! I have only to climb to this
branch, and, across the wall, all the present is before me. The moon
rises. I turn my face toward her, bathed with light in this house of
fruits. I remain motionless, and from time to time an apple from the
tree falls like a ripe and heavy thought.
HEAT
Today is more arduous than the Inferno. Out of doors is an overpowering
sun. A blinding splendor devours all the shade, a splendor so steady
that it seems solid. I see in everything around me less of immobility
than of stupor, an arrested effort. For the earth in these four moons
has completed her production. It is time that her spouse kill her, and,
unveiling the fire with which he burns, condemn her with an inexorable
kiss.
As for me, what shall I say? Ah, if this flaming heat is frightful to
my frailty, if my eye turns away, if my body sweats, if I sink on my
knees, I will blame this inert flesh; but the virile spirit will soar
free in an heroic transport! I feel it, my soul hesitates, but nothing
less than the supreme can satisfy this exquisite and terrible jealousy.
Let others hide under the earth, obstructing with care the least
fissure in their buildings; but a sublime heart, pressed against the
sharpness of love, will embrace fire and torture. Sun, redouble thy
flames! It is not enough to burn,--consume! My sorrow would be not to
suffer enough. May nothing impure escape from the furnace, no blindness
from the torture of the light!
THE VISION OF A CITY
At the hour when, urged by an exalted foreboding, such a man as I,
wifeless and childless, reaches the level of the setting sun; as he
attains the mountain’s crest high above the earth and its people, he
sees the mysterious representation of a splendid city hanging enormous
in the sky. It is a city of temples.
In modern cities we see the streets and the different quarters crowd
and center about various markets and exchanges, schools and municipal
buildings, whose high pinnacles and distributed masses stand out above
the uniform roofs; but here the poised image of an eternal city, built
by the evening in the form of a triple mountain, discloses not a single
earthly detail, and shows nothing in the infinite ramification of its
construction and the type of its architecture which is not appropriate
to the sublime service it renders, although accomplished without
preparation or practise.
And as the citizen of a kingdom, whose road leads to the capital, seeks
to understand the plan of the immense place; so the contemplative,
gazing at Jerusalem, fearing to enter it with soiled sandals, studies
the interpretation of its laws, and the conditions of a sojourn there.
Not a nave, not a single plan of cupola or portico, but responds to
the observances of a cult; not a movement or a detail of stairs and
terraces is disregarded in the development of ceremony. The moats of
towers, the superimposition of walls, the basilicas, circuses, and
reservoirs,--and even the tree-tops in the square gardens,--are molded
of the same snow; and the violet tinge of their shadows is perhaps only
such a color of mourning as irreparable distance adds.
Thus one evening a solitary city appeared for an instant before me.
DESCENDING THE RIVER
Well, let these men continue to sleep!
May the boat not yet arrive at its port! Thus shall my misery be made
to hear my last word, or I at least have said it.
Emerging from a night’s sleep, I am awakened in flames.
So much beauty compels my laughter. What splendor, what brilliance!
What a wealth of inextinguishable color! It is Aurora. Oh God, how much
refreshment this blue has for me! How tender the green is, how cool;
and, looking toward the furthest heaven, what peace to see it still so
dark that the stars twinkle there!
But how well you know, my friend, where to turn and what awaits you,
if, on lifting your eyes, you need not blush to behold this heavenly
brightness! Oh may it indeed be this color which I am given to
contemplate! Not red, and not the color of the sun, it is the fusing of
blood in gold. It is life consummated in victory. It is the perpetual
renewal of youth in eternity.
The thought that this is only the day arising does not diminish my
exaltation in the least; but the thing that embarrasses me like a
lover, that makes me tremble through my whole body, is the intention
hidden in such glory. It is my admission to it, it is my progress
toward meeting with this joy.
Drink, oh my heart, of these inexhaustible delights!
What do you fear? Do you not see how the current, accelerating the
movement of our boat, leads us on? Why doubt that we shall arrive, and
that endless day will respond to the brightness of such a promise? I
foresee that the sun will rise, and that I must prepare to sustain its
power. Oh light, drown all transitory things in the depth of thy abyss!
Let noon come, and it will be vouch-safed me to meditate, Summer, upon
thy reign, and to include the whole day in my perfected joy, as I sit
amid the peace of all the earth in the harvest solitudes.
THE BELL
While the air is rejoicing in perfect stillness, at the hour when the
sun is consummating the mystery of noon, then the great bell, with
its sonorous and concave expanse swung to the point of melody by the
blows of its cedarn hammer, rings with the rolling earth; and soon its
sound, receding and advancing, has crossed mountain and plain until a
wall which one can see on the far horizon, with a series of Cyclopean
doors piercing it at symmetrical intervals, hems in the volume of its
resounding thunder and forms the frontier of its clamor. In one corner
of this enclosure a city is built. The rest of the place is occupied
by fields, woods, and tombs; and here and there, under the shadow of
sycamores, the vibrations of a bronze gong far within a pagoda deflect
the echoes of the monster as they die away.
I have seen, near the observatory where Kangchi went to study the stars
of old age, the pavilion where the bell resides under the guard of an
old _bonze_, honored by offerings and inscriptions. The outstretched
arms of an average man are the measure of its width. I knock with a
finger upon its surface, which sings through a six-inch thickness
at the least shock. For a long time I lend an ear. And I recall the
history of the molder.
That cord of silk or catgut should resound under the curve of the bow,
that wood, having been instructed by the winds, should lend itself to
music,--in these phenomena the artisan found nothing singular; but to
attack the very element, to extort the musical scale from primitive
soil, seemed to him the means of properly making Man resonant and
awakening his clay. So his art was the casting of bells.
His first bell was carried up to heaven in a storm. The second, when
they had loaded it on a boat, fell into the deep and muddy waters
of the Kiang. The man resolved to make a third before he died, and
this time he wished to gather into one deep vessel the soul and the
whole voice of the nourishing and productive earth, and pack into one
thunderous vibration the fulness of all sound. This was the plan that
he conceived, and the day that he commenced his enterprise, a daughter
was born to him.
Fifteen years he labored at this work. But it was in vain that, having
conceived the idea of his bell, he planned with a subtle art the
dimensions, curves, and caliber; or that, having extracted from the
most secret metals whatever listens and trembles, he made sheets so
sensitive that they would vibrate at the mere approach of a hand; or
that, from a sonorous instrument placed among them, he deeply studied
properties and harmonies. When a pure and faultless bell had issued
from the mold of sand, the copper side would never respond the expected
answer to his interrogation; or, if the double beat balanced itself in
even intervals, it was his misery never to feel life in them,--that
indefinable mellowness and moisture which is given to words formed in
the human mouth.
Meanwhile the girl grew with her father’s despair; and, when she saw
that the old man was consumed by his mania and no longer searched for
new alloys, but threw into his crucibles blades of wheat and the sap of
aloes, and milk and the blood from his own veins,--then a great pity
was born in the heart of the maiden, for which women come to the bell
today to venerate her image of painted wood. Having said her prayer to
the subterranean god, she clothed herself in wedding garments; and,
like a dedicated victim, having fastened a stalk of straw about her
neck, she threw herself into the molten metal. So the bell was given
a soul; and the resounding elementary forces gained this feminine,
virginal grace, and the ineffable liquid note.
Then the old man, having kissed the still warm bronze, struck it
powerfully with his mallet; and so lively was the invasion of joy at
the perfection he heard, and the victory of its magnificence, that his
heart languished within him; and, sinking upon his knees, he could not
keep from dying.
Since then, and since the day when a city was born of its widespread
summons, the metal has cracked and gives only a dying echo of its
former self. But the wise, with a vigilant heart, still hear at the
break of day, when a faint, cold wind comes from skies the color
of apricots and of hop-flowers, the first bell--in the celestial
spaces--and, at the somber set of sun, the second bell--in the depths
of the immense and muddy Kiang.
THE TOMB
On the pediment of the funereal portal I read an order to alight. On
my right are some broken statues in the reeds, and an inscription on a
formidable pillar of black granite gives with wearisome detail the laws
relating to sepulchers; half obliterated by moss a threat forbids the
breaking of vases, loud cries, or the spoiling of ceremonial basins.
It is certainly later than two o’clock, because I see that the dim,
round sun is already a third of the way down a dull and lurid sky.
I can only mount straight onward, to survey the arrangement of the
cemetery; and, preparing my heart, I start out on the road the funerals
follow across this home of the dead, in itself lifeless. First come,
one after another, two square mountains of brick. Their hollow centers
open by four arches on the four points of the compass. The first of
these halls is empty. In the second a giant tortoise of marble, so high
that I can scarcely reach his mustached head with my hand, supports a
panegyric column. “This is the porch and apprenticeship of the earth,”
I thought. “Here Death halted between the double thresholds, and here
the master of the world received supreme homage between the four
horizons and the sky.”
But scarcely have I gone out by the Northern door (it is not vainly
that I leap this rivulet!) than I see open out before me the country of
the shades.
Forming an avenue of alternate couples, monstrous animals appear before
me, facing each other, successively repeated kneeling and standing in
pairs; rams, horses, unicorns, camels, elephants; until, at the turning
where the last of the procession disappears, these enormous and ugly
shapes loom out against the straggling grass. Further off are ranged
civil and military mandarins. These stones are sent to ceremonial
funerals in the place of animals and men; and, as the dead have
crossed the threshold of life, it would not be suitable to give closer
likenesses to such replicas.
Here, where this large cairn--hiding, they say, the treasures and
bones of a very ancient dynasty--ceases to bar the passage, the way
turns toward the East. I am walking now among soldiers and ministers.
Some are intact and standing, others lie on their faces. One warrior
without a head still clasps the hilt of a sword in his fist. By a
triple-arched bridge the path crosses the second canal.
Now, by a series of stairs where the central hand-rail still shows the
imperial dragon, I cross the ravaged site of terraces and courts. These
are the walks of Memory, the fugitive traces of lives which, leaving
the earth, serve only to enrich it by decay; the steps of sacrifices,
the awful garden where what is destroyed attests its whilom existence
in the presence of what still remains. In the center a throne supports,
a baldachin still shelters, the inscription of a dynasty. All about,
temples and guest-houses have become a confused rubbish among the
briars.
And the tomb is before me.
Between massive projections of the square bastions which flank it,
behind the deep-cut channel of the third stream, is a wall which
assures us that the end of our journey must be here. A wall and nothing
but a wall, a hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide. Eroded by
the use of centuries, the inexorable barrier presents a blind face of
masonry. A single round hole shows in the center of the base, the mouth
of an oven or the oubliette of a dungeon. This wall forms the front
of a sort of trapezoid formation, detached from the mountain which
overhangs it. A low molding, ending beneath an overhanging cornice,
stands out from the wall like a console. No corpse is so suspect as to
require such a mass being placed upon him. This is the throne of Death
itself, the regal exaltation of sepulture.
A straight alley, remounting the sloping plain, crosses a level
plateau. At the end there is only the same mountain whose steep slope
conceals in its depths the ancient Ming.
And I understand that this is the sepulcher of the Atheist. Time has
scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only
the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The
pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the
dead. The cortège of his vanished glory cannot retard him. He crosses
the three rivers, he traverses the manifold courts filled with incense;
nor is the monument that has been prepared for him sufficient to hold
him. He cleaves his way further, and enters into the very body and
bones of primitive earth. It is merely an animal interment, the mixing
of crude flesh with inert and compact clay. The king and peasant are
forever consolidated into this death without a dream or an awakening.
But the shadow of evening spreads over this cruel place. Oh ruins,
the tomb has survived you! And the brutal stolidity of this bulk is a
perfect symbol of death itself.
As I return among the colossal statues of stone, I see in the dried
grass the decaying corpse of a horse, which a dog is tearing. The beast
looks at me as he licks the blood which trickles down his chops; then,
applying his paws again to the red carcass, he tears off a long strip
of flesh. The mangled remains are spread about.
THE MELANCHOLY WATER
There is an intelligence in joy, I admit it. There is a vision in
laughter. But that you may comprehend, my friend, this medley of
blessedness and bitterness which the act of creation includes, now that
the melancholy season begins I shall explain to you the sadness of
water.
The same tear falls from the sky that overflows from the eyelid. Do not
think to accuse the cloud of your melancholy, nor this veil of vague
showers. Shut your eyes; listen! The rain falls.
Nor does the monotony of this constant sound suffice to explain it.
It is a weary mourning whose cause is within itself. It is the
self-absorption of love; it is the effort in labor. The heavens weep
over the fruitful earth. Not only Autumn, and the future fall of fruit
whose seed she nourishes, draws these tears from the wintry cloud.
Sorrow is in the Summer; in the flower of life is the blossoming of
death.
At the moment when the hour before noon is ended, as I descend into
the valley filled with the murmur of various fountains, I pause
enchanted by the gloom. How abundant are these waters! And if tears,
like blood, have their perpetual source in us, how refreshing it is,
listening to this liquid choir of voices, deep or shrill, to harmonize
from them all the shades of grief! There is no passion but could borrow
of your tears, oh fountain! And since the brightness of this single
drop, falling from on high into the basin upon the image of the moon,
satisfies my particular desire, not in vain shall I have learned to
love your sanctuary through many dreamy afternoons, oh sorrowful valley!
I return to the plain. On the doorsill of his hut,--where, in the inner
darkness, gleams a candle lit for some rustic fête,-a man sits, holding
in his hand a dusty cymbal. It rains heavily. In the midst of this damp
solitude, I hear only the cry of a goose.
THE NIGHT VOYAGE
I have forgotten why I undertook this voyage, and what matter I was to
negotiate, as Confucius did when he went to carry his doctrine to the
Prince of Ou. Seated all day in the depths of my varnished cabin, my
urgency, on these calm waters, does not outrun the swanlike progress of
the little boat. Only occasionally in the evening I come out to look at
the aspect of the country.
Our winter here has no severity. Season dear to the philosopher, these
bare trees, this yellow grass, sufficiently attest the passing of the
time, without atrocious cold or unnecessary violence. In this twelfth
month, cemeteries and kitchen gardens, and a country mounded everywhere
with tombs, spread out in dull productivity. The clumps of blue bamboo,
the somber pines above the sepulchers, the gray-green reed-grass,
arrest and satisfy one’s gaze. The yellow flowers of the New Year’s
Candlestick and the waxen berries of the Soot Tree give a real beauty
to the somber picture. I proceed in peace across this temperate region.
Now it is night. It would be vain to wait, stationed in the bow of this
junk, for the reflection of our wooden anchor to trace on the beatified
water the image of that waning moon which only midnight holds for us.
All is dark; but as we move on, propelled by the scull which steers
our prow, we need not fear mistaking our way. These canals permit of
numberless detours. Let us pursue the voyage with tranquillity, our
eyes on yonder solitary star.
THE HALT ON THE CANAL
Now,--passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from
their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts
made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,--encountering
waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may
fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and
rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city
and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with
evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside;
by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass,
the crude material of epitaphs.
With day our investigation begins. We become entangled in a maze of
Chinese streets, murky and moist with domestic odors. For a long time
we follow the narrow footpath in the turmoil of the market-place, in
the midst of a people mixed in with their dwellings as bees are with
their wax and honey. I recall a little girl winding a skein of green
silk, a barber cleaning the ear of his client with a fine pincer like
the antennæ of a crawfish; a little donkey turning a millstone near
an oil warehouse, the dark quiet of a pharmacy within whose depths,
through the gilded frame of a moon-shaped door, two red candles flame
before the name of the apothecary. We traverse many courts, more than a
hundred bridges.
Winding through narrow alleys bordered by great sepia-colored walls,
we reach the richer quarter. If these closed doors should open to us,
they would show vestibules flagged with stone, a reception hall with
its large bed-table, a little peach-tree flowering in a pot, and smoky
passages whose rafters are hung with hams and bundles. Hidden behind
this wall, in a little court we find a monster of a wisteria plant. Its
hundred creepers interlace, interweave, tie themselves in knots, and
twine into a kind of manifold, tortuous cable, which, thrusting out its
woody, serpentine length on all sides, spreads over the trellis, hiding
its trench in a thick sky of mauve clusters. Let us traverse the ruins
of this long suburb where naked men are weaving silk in the débris.
We shall gain a deserted space which occupies the south side of the
enclosure.
Here, they say, was formerly the imperial residence; and in fact
the triple grating and quadruple framework of the consecutive doors
bar, with their granite outlines, the wide flagged road on which
we walk. The enclosure contains nothing but rank herbage; and,--at
the place where the “Four Ways” meet, which diverge toward the four
cardinal points under triumphal arches,--with an inscription like a
map displayed to the whole Kingdom, the imperial stele, defaced by the
fissures in its marble, slants on the decapitated tortoise which is its
base.
The Chinese show everywhere representations of that inherent emptiness
whose necessity they emphasize. “Let us honor,” says the _Tao teh
King_, “Vacuity, which gives to the wheel its utility and to the lute
its harmony!” These ruins and these fallow tracts which are found in
the same enclosure close to the densest multitudes, these sterile
mountains shouldering the most meticulous culture, and the wide expanse
of the cemeteries, do not impress the mind with a false idea; for,
in the density and mass of this coherent people, administration and
justice, religion and monarchy, disclose by contrasts no less strange
the same yawning vacancy of vain phantoms and ruins.
China is not, like Europe, elaborated into compartments. No boundaries,
no special statutes, oppose any resistance throughout her immense
area to the spread of her surging humanity. That is why, powerless
as is the sea to foresee its agitations, this nation which can only
be saved from destruction by its plasticity, shows everywhere, like
Nature itself, an antique and provisory aspect,--unstable, full of
hazards, possibilities, and deficiencies. The present always contains
the influences of the past and the future. Man has not made an absolute
conquest of the soil, a final and methodical arrangement. The multitude
still graze upon grass.
Suddenly a lugubrious cry overwhelms us! The guardian of the enclosure,
at the foot of one of the gates designed like an upright letter which
frame the field, sounds on the long Chinese trumpet; and we see the
horn of thin brass quiver under the force of the sound which fills it.
Raucous and rumbling, if he declines the trumpet toward the earth; and
strident if he lifts it; without inflection and without cadences, the
dreary blaring noise culminates in the reverberance of a frightful
uproar,--do fa, do fa! The harsh call of a peacock would not startle
more the drowsiness of this abandoned garden. It is the horn of the
shepherd, and not the bugle, which speaks and commands. This is not the
singing trumpet which leads armies on,--it is the collective voice of
beasts; and the herd or the flocks confusedly assemble at its sound.
But we are alone; and for nothing living does the Mongol trumpet at
this mysterious crossing of the Ways.
When we return to our boat, it is almost night. At sunset, all down
the horizon the clouds seem tinted with blue, and on the dim earth the
fields of _colzas_ shine like blows of light.
THE PINE-TREE
In Nature, only the tree is upright as man is, and for a symbolic
reason.
A man holds himself erect by preserving his balance, and his two arms,
hanging at his sides, are no part of his unity. But, though attached to
the earth by the collective grasp of its roots, the tree raises itself
with an effort; its multifold and divergent parts, spreading out into
a fragile and sensitive tissue of leaves, by which it seeks for some
support in the very air and light, constitute no mere gesture but the
very essential act and condition of its growth.