perceive not only a ramification of the trunk into branches, but also
their articulation on a stem that rises straight and single,--an
articulation which gradually multiplies into threadlike leaves. The
fir-tree is typical of such a class, with the symmetrical intersections
of its branches, whose essential plan is simply a perpendicular crossed
by a graded series of horizontal lines.
This type includes many variations in the different regions of the
world. The most interesting is that of the pines I studied in Japan.
Rather than the rigidity usual to wood, the trunk appears to have a
fleshy elasticity. Under the tension on the strong, cylindrical stem
of compact fibers, its sheath splits and the rough bark, divided
into pentagonal scales,--with deep cracks between them from which
resin oozes abundantly,--expands in tough layers. And if, through the
suppleness of its jointless body, the trunk yields to the exterior
forces which violently assail it or seductively allure it, the tree
resists by its inherent energy; and the drama of its pathetic struggle
is written in the tormented twisting of its boughs.
Thus, along the tragic old road to Tokkaido, I have seen the pines
sustain the onslaught of the powers of the air. In vain the wind of the
ocean lays them low. Clinging with every root to the stony soil, the
invincible trees writhe, twist upon themselves, and,--like a man braced
on all fours, who butts with his head, kicks in all directions, and
hunches himself together,--they seem to grapple with the antagonist,
to re-establish themselves, and to straighten up under the Protean
assaults of the monster who would overcome them. All along the solemn
beach I have passed their heroic lines in review on this somber
evening, and watched all the vicissitudes of the battle. One leans
backward, and stretches toward the sky a monstrous panoply of halberds
and shields which he brandishes in Briarean fists; another, full of
wounds, mutilated as by blows of clubs, and bristling on all sides with
jagged stumps, still wars and waves a few feeble boughs; another, which
seems thrown upon its back, still battling against the dust, maintains
itself on the powerful buttress of its gathered haunches; and finally,
I saw giants and princes who, massively settling upon their muscular
loins, by the reiterated efforts of their Herculean arms, continued to
hold their ground on all sides against the tumultuous enemy.
I have still to speak of the foliage.
If I compare to the pines the species of trees that flourish in fertile
earth, in rich and mellow soil, I discover these four characteristics
in them; that the proportion of leaf to wood is greater; that the leaf
is deciduous; that, flattened, it shows an obverse and reverse side;
and, finally, that the foliage, growing upon the boughs, diverging
from a common center, is arranged like a single bouquet.
The pine grows in dry and stony soil; therefore its absorption of
the elements which nourish it is less immediate, and necessitates on
its part a stronger and completer elaboration, a greater functional
activity,--and, if I may so put it, more personal. As it is limited
in its supply of water, it does not expand like a chalice. This one
that I observe divides its foliage, spreads a handful on every side.
Instead of leaves which receive the rain, these are tufts of little
tubes which reach into the surrounding dampness and absorb it. And that
is why,--independent of the seasons, sensitive to more continuous and
subtle influences,--the pine shows a perennial foliage.
Thus I explain the aerial character of its foliage, fragmentarily
suspended. As the pine lends the irregular outline of its boughs to
the lines of the harmonious landscape, better to enhance the charm
and the brilliancy of Nature, it also spreads everywhere the shadow
of its singular tufts; over the power and the glory of Ocean, blue in
the sun; over the harvest fields; and obstructing the design of the
constellations or the dawn upon the sky. It sweeps its branches beneath
azalea bushes flaming near the surface of lakes blue as gentian, or
above the steep embankments of the imperial city, close to the silver,
grass-grown waters of the canals; and the evening on which I saw Fuji
like a colossus, like a virgin throned in the clarity of the Infinite,
the dark tuft of a pine was silhouetted against the dove-colored
mountain.
THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST
When I left Yeddo the great sun was flaming in the clear sky. Toward
the end of the afternoon, arriving at the junction of Utsonomiya, I
perceive that a shadow has darkened all the sunset. Composed of huge,
heaped-up clouds, it presents that tumultuous and chaotic aspect
that a sky sometimes shows when, like the veiled fire of footlights,
a gleaming streak on the horizon throws long shadows across the dim
fields, bringing out each object in clear relief. Drowsing on the wharf
just now, and for a long time in the train moving westward, I have
been a spectator of the decline of day and the gradual deepening of
darkness. With one glance I have caught the whole plan of the country.
In the background, deep forests and the folds of cumbrous mountains;
in the foreground, detached footpaths which bar the way, one behind
the other, like spaced and parallel barriers. Where the trenches we
follow show us a cross-section of the earth, we see first a fine mold,
black as coal; then yellow sand; and finally clay, red with sulphur or
cinnabar. Avernus spreads out before us! Does not this scorching sun,
this low sky, this surrounding harshness of volcanoes and fir-trees,
correspond to that black abyss from which the visions of dreams arise?
Indeed it was with a royal wisdom that the ancient shogun, Ieyasu,
chose this place for his disembodied spirit to enter the kingdom of
shades, and, by dissolving in silence into their shadows, transmute
death into godhead as a temple is created of a tomb.
The forest of cryptomeria is truly a temple.
Often before, at this hour of somber twilight, I had crossed the double
avenue of these giant trees,--which extends twenty leagues to conduct
from the red bridge the annual ambassador who bears Imperial presents
to this ancestral shrine,--but this morning, at the hour when the
first rays of the sun turned the banks of somber verdure above me to
rose color in the golden wind which swept them, I penetrated into the
colossal nave, deliciously filled with a resinous odor, after the cold
night.
The cryptomeria belong to the family of pines, and the Japanese have
named it sengui. It is a very tall tree, whose trunk, free of twists
and knots, maintains an inviolable rectitude. There are no branches,
but indicated here and there, as is the way with pines, not by detail
and relief but by mass and contour, the leaves float like tatters of
black smoke about the mystic pillar; and the forest of these tall
trunks, all of the same height, loses itself in the tangled canopy of
shadowy, inextricable foliage. The place is simultaneously limitless
and confined, filled and empty.
The marvelous houses are scattered among these trees that have been
parked for centuries.
I shall not describe the whole plan of the shaded city, though it is
marked on my fan to the minutest detail. In the middle of the dedicated
forest I have followed enormous avenues that a scarlet torii bars.
At a bronze basin, under a roof inlaid with the moon, I have filled
my mouth with lustral waters; I have climbed the stairs; among many
pilgrims I have passed indescribable opulence and space, the entrance
to an enclosure that is like a dream formed of a confusion of flowers
and birds; barefoot, I have penetrated to its innermost golden heart.
I have seen the priests with haughty faces,--with head-dresses of
horsehair, and clothed with ample trousers of green silk,--offer the
morning sacrifice to the sound of flute and mouth-organ. And for me the
sacred _kagura_,--his face framed in white linen, holding the tasseled
bough of the pine devoutly between his hands,--has executed the dance
which consists of continual advance and retreat.
As Chinese architecture has for its chief element the baldachin;
stories being raised as on the poles of a pastoral tent; so, in Japan,
the roofs made of tiles, or those made of a substance as powerful,
strong, and light as a thick felt, show but a slight curve; they are no
more, in their elegant power, than a cover; and all this construction
evolves from the idea of a box.
Since the time when Jingô Tennô conquered the isles of the rising sun
with his fleet, the Japanese have everywhere preserved some signs of
the sea: the habit of tucking up their clothes to the waist, these low
cabins which are their homes under an uncertain sun, the multitude
of neat little objects and their careful stowage, the absence of
furniture,--do they not all betray the confined life of the sailor on
his precarious deck? And these wooden houses are themselves nothing
more than the enlarged cabin of a galley, or the box of a palanquin.
The extensions, intersected by carpentry; the oblique shafts, of which
the figured heads jut out at four angles; still recall the quality of
being portable. Among the columns of the temple, arches seem the means
by which it may be lifted.
Houses? Yes. Here the very sanctuary is a house. They have relegated
the bones, sealed in a cylinder of bronze, to the high mountainside;
but in this room, seated on the unalterable name, the soul of the
dead continues a spectral habitation in obscure and secret splendor.
Reversing the procedure which employs wood and stone and makes them
of value without adding any strange element to their own properties,
artifice has existed here only to annihilate its material. These
enclosures, the sides of these boxes, these floors and ceilings, are no
longer made of beams and planks but of certain opaque images conjured
forth. Color decorates and adorns the wood, lacquer drowns it under
impenetrable waters, paint covers it with enchantments, sculpture
deeply undermines and transfigures it. An end of timber--the least
spike appearing on the magic surface--is covered with arabesques and
interlacing lines; but, as on screens we see trees in flower and
mountains steeped in a radiant glow, these palaces emerge entirely
golden. On the roofs, on the façades, which strike the full light of
day, only the ridges are burnished with scattered brightness; but the
sides are brightened in vast surfaces through the shadow; and inside
also, the six walls of the box are painted with the splendors of hidden
treasure, flaming brilliance revealed by numerous mirrors.
Thus the magnificent shogun does not inhabit a house of mere wood, but
his dwelling in the center of the forest is in the light of setting
suns; and ambrosial incense abides beneath these sweeping boughs.
Through the immense spaces of this region, deeply slumbering like a god
amid its sea of trees, an occasional dazzling cascade plashes between
the leaves, mingling with their ceaseless whisper.
THE PEDESTRIAN
In June, with a gnarled stick in my hand (like the god Bishamon), I am
that mysterious passer-by who crosses the path of groups of simple,
ruddy peasants; and, at six in the evening, while the storm-cloud in
the sky endlessly continues its monstrous assault on the mountain, I am
that lonely man one sees upon this abandoned road.
I am going nowhere in particular. My wanderings are without end and
without profit. The itinerary of the soldier or the merchant, the piety
of the sterile woman who, with hopeful humility, seven times makes a
tour of the holy peak,--these have nothing in common with my travels.
The footprint pointed in the usual direction does not allure my own
far enough to lead me astray; and soon, urged by the intimacy there
is in treading this moss through the heart of the woods, to pick the
black leaf of a camellia by the weeping of a secret waterfall,--I flee
suddenly, like an awkward deer. Then, amid the silence of growing
things, poised on one foot, I await the echo. How fresh and comic the
song of this little bird seems to me! And how the cry of the rooks
below delights me! Each tree has its personality, each little beast
his part, each voice its place in the symphony; as they say music is
comprehended, so I comprehend Nature.
It is like a story of many details, where only the proper names are
given. As my walk--and the day--proceeds, I advance also in the
development of a philosophy. Already I have discovered with delight
that all things exist in a certain accord; and, though believing
this secret relationship, by which the blackness of this pine below
espouses the clear green of these maples, it is my purified sight only
which establishes it; so, because of this restoration of the original
design, I call my visit a Revision. I am the Inspector of Creation,
the Verifier of all present things. The reality of this world is the
cause of my beatitude. In ordinary hours we employ things for their
usefulness, forgetting their purer value: that they should exist at
all. But when, after a long effort, pushing through branches and
briars, I place my hand on the burning shoulder of this heavy rock in
the heart of a glade, the entry of Alexander into Jerusalem is alone
comparable to the sublimity of my achievement.
And I go on and on! Each one of us contains in himself the autonomous
power of motion by which he moves toward his food and his work. As for
me, the even motion of my legs serves to measure for me the intensity
of more subtle appeals. The allurement of everything! I feel it in the
silence of my soul. I understand the harmony of the world. When shall I
surprise its melody?
HERE AND THERE
In the street called Nihon Bashi, near the merchants of books and
lanterns, of embroideries and bronzes, miniature gardens are sold;
and, as a studious idler amid this fantastic display, I mentally
compare these little fragments of the world. The artists have subtly
shown themselves masters of the exquisite laws by which the lines of a
landscape are composed, like those of a physiognomy. Instead of drawing
nature they reproduce it, constructing their counterfeits from the very
elements of the original, which they borrow--as a rule is illustrated
by an example. These images are usually exact and perfect replicas.
All sorts and kinds of pines, for instance, are offered me to choose
from; and their position in the jar, with their height as a scale,
proportionately shows the dimensions of their original territory. Here
is a rice-field in Springtime; in the distance is a hill fringed with
trees (they are made of moss). Here is the sea, with its archipelago
and its capes! By the artifice of two stones, one black, one red, and
rather worn and porous, they have represented two islands that appear
to be joined together, whose difference in distance is shown only by
their different colors, apparently due to the light of the setting sun.
And even the many-colored sunset is represented by this bed of motley
pebbles covered with the contents of two carafes.
Now, to amplify my thought!
The European artist copies nature according to the sentiment that
he has for it. The Japanese imitates it according to the materials
with which it furnishes him. One expresses himself, the other
expresses nature. One creates, the other mimics. One paints, the other
constructs. One is a student; the other, in a way, a master. One
reproduces in its detail the spectacle that he surveys with a searching
and subtle gaze; the other disengages its law with a flash of the
eye, in the freedom of his fancy; and applies it with a scriptural
conciseness.
Here the first inspiration of the artist is the material on which
he exercises his hand. Good-humoredly, he consults its intrinsic
properties, its tints; and, appropriating the soul of the brute thing,
he constitutes himself its interpreter. Of all the things that he might
say, he expresses only the essential and significant characteristics;
and, merely making a few shy indications here and there, leaves to the
paper the task of concealing all those infinite complexities which
are implied freely because they are taken for granted. It is a frolic
of certitude, it is caprice with restraint; and the underlying idea,
snared by such a method of argument, imposes itself upon us with an
insidious conviction.
Now, first of all, to speak of Color! We note that the Japanese
artist has reduced his palette to a limited number of general and
predetermined tones. He understands that the beauty of a color
resides less in its intrinsic quality than in its implicit accord
with contrasted tones. And because of the unmodified blending of two
values laid on in equal quantities, he repairs the omission of the many
intermediate shades by the vivacity that he gives to the juxtaposition
of the essential notes; calmly indicating one repetition or two. He
knows that the value of a tone results more from its position than
from its intensity; master of keys, he transposes them as he will.
Furthermore, as color is nothing less than the particular homage that
all visible things render to the universal light, everything fitly
takes its place within the frame through the power of color, in accord
with the theme that the artist has chosen.
But now the roving eye remains fixed; and, instead of contemplating,
it interrogates. Color is the passion of matter; it signalizes the
participation of each object in the common source of glory. Design
expresses the energy proper to each being; his action, his rhythm,
his postures. The one makes manifest his relations to space, the
other fixes his movement in time. One gives the form, the other gives
the sense. And as the Japanese, careless of relief, paints only by
contour and mass, the chief characteristic of his design is a schematic
stroke. While the tones are in contrast, the lines are in unity; and
while the painting is a harmony, the design is an idea; and if the
interpretation of this idea comes in a flash of recognition, complete
and instantaneous, the design has a satisfactory abstract significance
and expresses the idea in all its purity, just as well as might a word
made of letters. Each form, each movement, each group furnishes its
hieroglyph.
I understand this when I revel among these bundles of Japanese prints.
At Shidzuoka, among the ex-votos of the temple, I have seen many
admirable examples of this art. A warrior leaps from the vermilion
wood like a frantic exclamation. This prancing or kicking thing is no
longer the picture of a horse, but the symbol of his revolt against
bondage; a sort of reversed figure 6, equipped with a mane and tail,
represents his repose in the grass. Embraces, battles, landscapes,
crowds, fitted into a small space, resemble the designs on seals. This
man bursts into laughter; and, falling, he no longer seems a man, but
immediately becomes his own character in writing.
With horrible and careless crudity, the French or English construct
barbarous barracks; pitiless toward the earth they disfigure, concerned
only with their expansion, seizing upon all possible space with their
eyes, if not with their hands. They exploit a view as they would a
waterfall. The Oriental knows enough to flee from vast landscapes,
where multifold aspects and divergent lines do not lend themselves
to that exquisite co-ordination between the eye and the view which
alone makes a sojourn possible for him. His home is not open to all
the winds. Choosing a retreat in some peaceful valley, his care is
to achieve a perfect location where his view composes so harmonious
a landscape that it is impossible to imagine seeing it otherwise.
His eyes furnish him with all the elements of happiness, and he
replaces furniture with open windows. Inside, the art of the painter,
ingeniously tracing his visions upon a fictitiously transparent window,
multiplies the imaginary openings. In the ancient imperial palace that
I visited, its magnificent and movable treasures had been carried away,
and there remained only the pictorial decorations arranged in a black
room,--the familiar visions of its august inhabitant.
The paper dwelling is composed of successive apartments, divided by
partitions which slide on moldings. A single theme of decoration has
been chosen for each of the series, and it is introduced by screens
similar to the wings of a theater. I can prolong or shorten my
contemplation at will. I am less the spectator of the painter than his
host; each subject is expressed by a choice in harmony with the tone
of the paper, a color representing the opposite end of the gamut. It
is so at Gosho. An indigo and cream motif suffices for the room called
“Freshness and Purity,” seeming all filled with sky and water. But at
Nijo the imperial habitation is done in gold alone. Emerging from the
matting-covered rafters, painted life-size, crowns of the pine-tree
extend their grotesque boughs along the sunlit walls. The Prince, upon
his seat, saw only great bands of tawny fire; and his sensation was of
floating on the evening sky with awful sunset fires beneath him.
At Shidzuoka, at the time of Rinzainji, I saw a landscape made of
colored dust. They had put it under glass, for fear that a breath would
blow it away.
Before the golden Buddha in the leaves, time is measured by the burning
of a little candle; and in the depth of this ravine, by the dripping of
a triple fountain.
Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible
sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength
clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he
accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure,
and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their
common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature; and, by
means of a concrete image which symbolizes them like a syllable, still
mysteriously conscious in his abasement of the superior authority of
the Word, he calls upon it in his necessities. Thus, like a child who
constructs the history of his doll from everything around him, humanity
in its memories unites all that it discovers with all that it dreams,
and so composes the romance of mythology.
Here beside me is this poor little old woman, who makes her salutation
by striking her hands carefully together before a colossal female
statue, in whose bosom an ancient prince, when led by a toothache and a
dream to honor the skull of an ancestor, inserted the worn sphere after
finding it wedged by the jawbone in the roots of a willow. At my right
and at my left, all the length of the dark cavern, the three thousand
golden Kwannon, each one resembling the others in the embellishment of
arms that frame it, are aligned in rows of a hundred, in ranks fifteen
deep. A ray of sunlight flickers over this barrier built of goddesses.
Seeking the reason for uniformity in this multitude, and from what bulb
all these identical stalks have sprung, I find that the worshiper here
doubtless wishes a wider sounding-board for his prayers, and imagines
that in multiplying the object of his entreaty he increases its
efficacy.
But not for long did the sages rest their eyes on the eyes of these
crude likenesses. Having perceived the unity of all things, they found
the basis of their philosophy in that fact. Though each individual
were transitory and capricious, the richness of the common fund
remained inexhaustible. No need that Man should apply his hatchet to
the tree, or his cleaver to the rock; in the grain of millet and the
egg, alike in the immobility and the convulsions of sun and sea, he
found the same principle of plastic energy; and the earth sufficed for
the construction of its own idols. Further, admitting that the whole
is formed of homogeneous parts; if, to better pursue their analysis,
the Sages turned it back upon themselves, they discovered that the
fugitive, blameworthy, unjustifiable thing in them was the fact of
their presence in the world,--and that the element in them which was
free of space and limitless of duration was the very conception they
had formed of this contingent character.