The Horse of Bronze, however, is far from being the only statue in Izumo
which is believed to run about occasionally at night: at least a score
of other artistic things are, or have been, credited with similar
ghastly inclinations. The great carven dragon which writhes above the
entrance of the Kitzuki haiden used, I am told, to crawl about the roofs
at night--until a carpenter was summoned to cut its wooden throat with
a chisel, after which it ceased its perambulations. You can see for
yourself the mark of the chisel on its throat! At the splendid Shinto
temple of Kasuga, in Matsue, there are two pretty life-size bronze
deer--stag and doe--the heads of which seemed to me to have been
separately cast, and subsequently riveted very deftly to the bodies.
Nevertheless I have been assured by some good country-folk that each
figure was originally a single casting, but that it was afterwards found
necessary to cut off the heads of the deer to make them keep quiet at
night. But the most unpleasant customer of all this uncanny fraternity
to have encountered after dark was certainly the monster tortoise of
Gesshoji temple in Matsue, where the tombs of the Matsudairas are. This
stone colossus is almost seventeen feet in length and lifts its head six
feet from the ground. On its now broken back stands a prodigious cubic
monolith about nine feet high, bearing a half-obliterated inscription.
Fancy--as Izumo folks did--this mortuary incubus staggering abroad at
midnight, and its hideous attempts to swim in the neighbouring lotus-
pond! Well, the legend runs that its neck had to be broken in
consequence of this awful misbehaviour. But really the thing looks as if
it could only have been broken by an earthquake.
Sec. 8 KITZUKI, July 25th. At the Oho-yashiro it is the annual festival
of the God of Scholarship, the God of Calligraphy--Tenjin. Here in
Kitzuki, the festival of the Divine Scribe, the Tenjin-Matsuri, is still
observed according to the beautiful old custom which is being forgotten
elsewhere. Long ranges of temporary booths have been erected within the
outer court of the temple; and in these are suspended hundreds of long
white tablets, bearing specimens of calligraphy. Every schoolboy in
Kitzuki has a sample of his best writing on exhibition. The texts are
written only in Chinese characters--not in hirakana or katakana--and are
mostly drawn from the works of Confucius or Mencius.
To me this display of ideographs seems a marvellous thing of
beauty--almost a miracle, indeed, since it is all the work of very,
very young boys. Rightly enough, the word 'to write' (kaku) in Japanese
signifies also to 'paint' in the best artistic sense. I once had an
opportunity of studying the result of an attempt to teach English
children the art of writing Japanese. These children were instructed by
a Japanese writing-master; they sat upon the same bench with Japanese
pupils of their own age, beginners likewise. But they could never
learn like the Japanese children. The ancestral tendencies within them
rendered vain the efforts of the instructor to teach them the secret of
a shapely stroke with the brush. It is not the Japanese boy alone who
writes; the fingers of the dead move his brush, guide his strokes.
Beautiful, however, as this writing seems to me, it is far from winning
the commendation of my Japanese companion, himself a much experienced
teacher. 'The greater part of this work,' he declares, 'is very bad.'
While I am still bewildered by this sweeping criticism, he points out to
me one tablet inscribed with rather small characters, adding: 'Only that
is tolerably good.'
'Why,' I venture to observe, 'that one would seem to have cost much less
trouble; the characters are so small.'
'Oh, the size of the characters has nothing to do with the matter,'
interrupts the master, 'it is a question of form.'
'Then I cannot understand. What you call very bad seems to me
exquisitely beautiful.'
'Of course you cannot understand,' the critic replies; 'it would take
you many years of study to understand. And even then--
'And even then?'
'Well, even then you could only partly understand.'
Thereafter I hold my peace on the topic of calligraphy.