I returned by another way, through a quarter which I had never seen
before,--all temples. A district of great spaces,--vast and beautiful
and hushed as by enchantment. No dwellings or shops. Pale yellow walls
only, sloping back from the roadway on both sides, like fortress
walls, but coped with a coping or rootlet of blue tiles; and above
these yellow sloping walls (pierced with elfish gates at long, long
intervals), great soft hilly masses of foliage--cedar and pine and
bamboo--with superbly curved roofs sweeping up through them. Each
vista of those silent streets of temples, bathed in the gold of the
autumn afternoon, gave me just such a thrill of pleasure as one feels
on finding in some poem the perfect utterance of a thought one has
tried for years in vain to express.
Yet what was the charm made with? The wonderful walls were but
painted mud; the gates and the temples only frames of wood supporting
tiles; the shrubbery, the stonework, the lotus-ponds, mere
landscape-gardening. Nothing solid, nothing enduring; but a combination
so beautiful of lines and colors and shadows that no speech could
paint it. Nay! even were those earthen walls turned into lemon-colored
marble, and their tiling into amethyst; even were the material of the
temples transformed into substance precious as that of the palace
described in the Sutra of the Great King of Glory,--still the aesthetic
suggestion, the dreamy repose, the mellow loveliness and softness of
the scene, could not be in the least enhanced. Perhaps it is just
because the material of such creation is so frail that its art is
so marvelous. The most wonderful architecture, the most entrancing
landscapes, are formed with substance the most imponderable,--the
substance of clouds.
But those who think of beauty only in connection with costliness,
with stability, with "firm reality," should never look for it in
this land,--well called the Land of Sunrise, for sunrise is the hour
of illusions. Nothing is more lovely than a Japanese village among
the hills or by the coast when seen just after sunrise,--through the
slowly lifting blue mists of a spring or autumn morning. But for the
matter-of-fact observer, the enchantment passes with the vapors: in the
raw, clear light he can find no palaces of amethyst, no sails of gold,
but only flimsy sheds of wood and thatch and the unpainted queerness of
wooden junks.
So perhaps it is with all that makes life beautiful in any land. To
view men or nature with delight, we must see them through illusions,
subjective or objective. How they appear to us depends upon the ethical
conditions within us. Nevertheless, the real and the unreal are
equally illusive in themselves. The vulgar and the rare, the seemingly
transient and the seemingly enduring, are all alike mere ghostliness.
Happiest he who, from birth to death, sees ever through some beautiful
haze of the soul,--best of all, that haze of love which, like the
radiance of this Orient day, turns common things to gold.