for line. Whether this has something to do with the climate, which is
clear, and the landscape, which is mountainous, I do not know; but
compare the purity of outline in the Italian painters, more especially
in the Tuscan and the Umbrian, Botticelli and Perugino, with the
Netherlands School, Rembrandt and Rubens, where light and shadow, and
colour as colour, play so great a part. But whether it is due to the
landscape or not, personally I should be inclined to attach a great
deal of importance to the artistic value of Fujiyama, a mountain
whose exquisite outlines, visible from thirteen provinces, have simply
permeated Japanese art; but landscape or no, the desire for line is a
fact. The Japanese draw with everything; with the mud embankments of
their rice-fields, with the granite stones of their walls, with the
trees in their gardens, with the flowers in their vases. The whole
essence of flower arrangement is not colour mass, but line drawing. It
is the same with their trees, the dwarf trees in their pots, or the
grown trees in their gardens. Both are trained and educated to produce
a beautiful outline, and they succeed. It is perhaps interesting in
this connection to notice the number of illustrations in Japanese books
where the trees are simply silhouettes washed in in Indian ink on a
blank background. We should have, I think, a great disinclination to
treat our trees in this way.
The feeling for line is very strong, and it is perhaps perpetuated by
the daily use of those dead pictures, the Chinese ideographs. Several
hundred years ago the Japanese invented the phonetic syllabaries called
_kana_. It is interesting from an artistic point of view to compare
them with our alphabet. A very short contemplation of the alphabet as
used in our books and handwriting will show that it is mainly composed
of straight lines, often parallel, with a certain admixture of circles.
Now, although a straight line is the nearest way between two points, it
is rarely or never the most beautiful; did not some one once say, “The
line of beauty is a curve”? I do not think any one’s artistic soul has
received much nourishment from a contemplation of the letter “m,” three
parallel lines, or “t.” Compare them with the corresponding _kana_, and
the difference will be felt at once. Indeed, we are all unconsciously
well aware of the artistic failing of our ordinary alphabet, for
directly we carve or write an inscription, or introduce it in any way
into something which claims to be an object of art, then we discard it
altogether, and either fall back on the Gothic letters, or adopt some
kind of fancy alphabet. As the average Japanese child is taught writing
four hours a week for the first three years, and three hours for the
next two, and as their writing is really painting, their feeling for
line has at least a chance of development.
Of the thoroughness of Japanese workmanship I do not think anybody
would disagree; when the wing of the stork on your rice-bowl is
finished inside, when the chrysanthemum petals on your wooden tray
curl over the edge, when the bottom of your flower vase has a design
as well as the outside, you are convinced that the Japanese knew
Ruskin’s dictum long before he said it. I have seen the feet of a
bronze statuette, the feet which were entirely hidden under the folds
of the _kimono_ from in front, carefully finished off underneath. The
statuette in question cost 50 _sen_ (1_s._), and was sold by a street
hawker. Nobody really sees the designs on the _kuruma_ axle-heads,
not unless they look for them, except perhaps the _kurumaya_ himself,
when he squats on the ground waiting for a fare; but they give a
thoroughness of finish to the _’ricksha_ which it would miss without.
Most people are agreed, I think, upon the thoroughness of workmanship,
but sobriety of taste is a more disputed point. We are very fond of
talking of the “gorgeous colouring of the East,” and using terms like
“barbaric splendour” and “oriental luxury.” These terms may have had
some truth as applied to the art of India, but because Japan is also
situated in the East, they do not necessarily apply to her. We do
not sufficiently realise over here that there is considerably more
difference between China and Japan, let alone India and Japan, than
there is between any two European countries whatsoever, be they Greeks
or Dutch, or what you will; that they are not of the same race, nor do
they belong to the same linguistic family. Therefore, to transfer an
adjective applicable to India to Japan, just because both are Oriental,
is like applying an adjective suitable to the Turks or the Laps to the
English, on the ground that both are European. This is, I think, one
source of error; the others are more subtle. There is first of all
the climate. Now a colour, any colour, under a bright blue sky in a
dazzling yellow sunshine, will always look more subdued than that same
colour under a grey sky and in a cloudy atmosphere. This is simply an
effect of contrast. Therefore, Japanese colouring must be judged as it
is seen in Japan, not as it may look when transferred to England. And,
again, a study of the actual colour itself will show that the Japanese
have learnt how to make the very brightest colours soft in tone. This
fact has been well rubbed into me lately, for I have tried both in
Paris and in London to match certain Japanese stuffs, or at least to
find something in the same note of colour which would go with them.
It was quite impossible. All our soft colours, the so-called artistic
shades, are too dull in tone, while none of our bright ones are soft
enough; by the side of the Japanese colours they look simply crude.
These are all quite material reasons, objective facts, but there is
another which only those who have stood and looked at the glorious
splendour of a Japanese temple such as Nikkō or Shiba, where the whole
rainbow is resplendent in carved wood and gilded lacquer, and that is
their matchless power of combination and of background. The temples of
Nikkō or Shiba are both built in the midst of a wood; the dark, deep,
sober forms of the giant pine-trees stand all around. This is the
setting; then between each gorgeous gateway comes a still clear space
of court, paved with quiet grey pebbles; and when the glory culminates
in the temple’s interior the building is of unstained, unpainted wood,
soft as the dust-brown carpet of the beech-leaves when the sun’s
rays are level. But the temples, supreme in their way among all the
products of Japanese art, are exceptional. The average Japanese room
is colourless, luminous, but practically colourless. The floor is of
the palest yellow matting, the one or two solid walls of the room are
washed in the softest of bark browns, the wood of the _tokonoma_ is
dark and polished, and the other walls are _shōji_, that is, composed
entirely of small panes of rice-paper. Through this paper the sunlight
comes luminous but colourless. To sit in that room is like living in
the heart of the plum-blossom, or within the petals of a warm white
rose.
In their dress the Japanese are equally subdued: the men wear mostly
grey or dust-coloured silks, the women soft mauves, blues and greys.
It is only the children who are dressed in bright colours and gay
patterns. All the working classes, both men and women, wear a dark
indigo blue. The Japanese wear no jewellery. Precious stones they have,
exquisite mauve and purple amethysts, crystals of blood-red splendour
or soft and milky as flushing pearl. And the rich man buys these,
not to wear, but to look at, as works of art, as exquisite natural
objects. He never hangs them round his own neck, or enmeshes his
womankind in them. The Japanese are, I believe, the only nation on the
earth who know and value precious stones, and yet wear no jewellery.
Might not this be considered convincing evidence of their essential
sobriety of taste? Even the landscape, though supremely beautiful and
sunny, is never flaunting. There are too many sober green pine-trees,
and pale, bewitching bamboos for that. I have never seen anywhere in
Japan, in the poorest house, in the cheapest shop, anything that was
tawdry or even “loud,” except in that part of porcelain and other
factories which supply goods, mostly from “foreign” patterns, for the
European market.
In this enumeration of the characteristics of Japanese art, you will
perhaps wonder why I have omitted the very popular one of their love of
the little, the small, the minute. I have left it out simply because
I do not believe it exists as such. Many writers have exclaimed in
paragraphs sprinkled with interjections on this passion for the little
which they say the Japanese possess; and they have apparently seen in
it nothing but a blind unreasoning prejudice for the something small as
opposed to the something great. I think this opinion is mostly due to
the “little knowledge” of the tourist or the restricted knowledge of
the specialist. It leaves also entirely unexplained and inexplicable
the _Dai Butsu_ of Kamakura, a bronze statue of Buddha, fifty feet
high and of the most exquisite workmanship; the Buddhas of Kyoto and
of Nara; the big bronze bell of Kyoto, the largest hanging bell in the
world, besides that at Chion-in, the second largest, and at Nara, the
third; the _Hongwanji_ at Kyoto, the walls of the castle at Osaka--and
the battle of Mukden. A wider acquaintance with the Japanese people
and the realities of their daily life will show, I think, that this
so-called love of the little is really a highly cultivated and acute
sense of proportion, where it is not purely ethical.
The Japanese beer-glass, you will remember, was the size of a doll’s
tumbler. “Why?” “Oh, because they have a passion for little things”
is certainly the easiest and most obvious answer. But follow that
glass to its home on its Japanese dinner tray, in its Japanese room,
and you will see that its littleness is in exact proportion to the
tray and the room. Nor are the rooms so small, but because we insist
on bringing our encumbering “foreign” ideas into them. There is no
furniture in a Japanese room, no furniture of any kind whatsoever. Two
kneeling-cushions and a round box, a brazier, are the only possible
objects which could come under that heading, therefore the whole space
within the four walls of a room is space for movement. If a measurement
were taken of the actual feet of free space in many a modern European
drawing-room, I believe that it would be found to be something _less_
than that in the “tiny” Japanese apartment.
Another thing to be borne in mind is that life in Japan is lived, not
above the floor on chairs, but on the floor itself. Try living on the
floor and you will find the whole horizon of a room opening out in the
most astonishing way. What we call a stool, for instance, represents
the same level as a table. The actual difference in the height of the
eyes sitting on one’s heels on a Japanese floor and on a chair is
really between two and three feet, while it must also be remembered
that Japanese eyes, belonging as they do to a body shorter on the
average than our own, come still nearer to the ground.
Thus a careful examination of the things which are small in Japan,
which they have deliberately chosen to make small, copied smaller than
the foreign originals, will show, I think, that it is due to their
acute sense of fitness and proportion. There is also another reason,
which is not artistic but ethical.
The Japanese are a sober and abstemious race, a race of high culture
and of ancient civilisation. When we were running about clad in the
inadequate skin, gorging off half-raw oxen, and drunken with seven-day
feasts of mead, they lived already under an ordered and an organised
government with most, if not all, of the essentials of civilisation.
And after all, is not one of the hall-marks of real civilisation the
learning to take “a little” instead of “a lot,” in extracting from each
atom the whole of its use, enjoyment and pleasure? Children and savages
are always wasteful. We do not now try to eat whole oxen or drink mead
for seven days, we have learnt to get as much if not more pleasure out
of one glass of wine and one slice of beef, and the reason is that we
are slowly learning _not_ to gulp. If you watch the working man drink
his beer, or the working woman her tea, you will see that they usually
gulp it down in big draughts, imagining, I suppose, that it is sheer
quantity which produces flavour. They have not yet learnt that profound
ethical truth, expressed by the old epicure when he said approvingly of
some young man that he “had already learned to sip his wine and not to
gulp it.” The Japanese have learnt to sip. Their wine-glasses, which
are china bowls, hold perhaps two tablespoonfuls, their tea-cups three,
their pipes just three fleeting whiffs. Drunkenness is exceedingly
rare; it does exist, but with a glass holding two tablespoonfuls there
is time for reflection. It is also more economical than the foreign
variety, the actual quantity required to produce intoxication when
taken in small doses being, I believe, considerably less.
There is always another side to a people’s art, a side which is
frequently overlooked, and that is the art, not in the object, but in
the workman. A people’s art will show itself, not only in the actual
object produced, but in the life of the producer and in the conditions
of production.
In the cloisonné works of Nagoya, an industrial centre of a quarter of
a million of inhabitants, the workers sat in peace and solitude, not a
sound of the busy streets penetrated to the long series of matted rooms
where they worked. Each room and each workman looked towards a quiet
garden, cool with running water, and still with the deep mystery of the
pines. In the modern porcelain factory, dedicated to the production of
goods for the “foreign” market, the long white room looked out through
open doors upon the waving rice-fields, and each potter’s wheel was
turned to see the branch of purple iris standing in its yellow vase.
There is a cotton factory in Japan which is a positive addition to the
beauty of the landscape.
Nor is it only the big and wealthy workmen who produce good art.
Some of the most beautiful silver enamel-ware in Tokyo was made by a
little man who owned the smallest and poorest of general shops, where
halfpenny tooth brushes and farthing sheets of paper formed the richest
portions of his stock. All this beautiful silver enamel-work was done
in the back parlour, and at no time could he have had more than ten
_yen_ (£1) worth of such goods in hand. Yet he was an artist to the
tips of his fingers, and the sheen and colour of his enamelled silver
lotus flowers were a joy to the beholder.
In Nikkō there was a carpenter who made wooden trays for the
inhabitants. His stall, the merest shanty, was the littlest imaginable,
yet he carved me a wooden box with a design in chrysanthemums which was
skilled artistic work, and even his cheap wooden trays had the stamp of
art. He did them with a penknife, and the whole surface of the tray was
grooved in shallow curving lines.
And the worker himself? If there is art in the product and in the
conditions of production, what of the producer? Is there art in his
life and his tastes? Is there art in the life of the labourer, of the
coolie and the _’ricksha_ man? Is there art in the daily life of the
common people as well as in the things they use?
A man’s tastes are known by his pleasures. When the common people
of Tokyo make “Bank Holiday” they go to see a handful of pink
cherry-blossoms against the blue of an April sky. They walk politely,
looking up at the trees, and though the crowd is thick, endless, nobody
pushes or fights or swears. No special posse of policemen is turned
out to keep order. Down the long two-mile avenue of cherry-trees at
Mukojima the crowd wanders amiably, and the municipality of Tokyo has
never thought to invent a single penalty for the destruction of young
trees and shrubs. The world stares contentedly, drinks tea, and goes
home again. And this is considered to be the rowdiest crowd at the most
popular resort on the favourite “Bank Holiday” of the year.
The blossoming of all the other flowers, plum, peach, azalea, peony,
wistaria, iris, lotus, convolvulus, maple, chrysanthemum, are equally
visited, and advertised daily in the newspapers. The people of Japan
take few holidays, but those they do take are almost always at the time
of the flower festivals.
When they can afford something more expensive they go to the “Royal
Academy,” which opens its doors twice in the year for the aristocratic
sum of 3 _sen_ (¾_d._) _gheta_ (wooden clogs) and umbrellas
left outside, 5 _rin_ (10 _rin_ make ¼_d._). The other picture
exhibitions, not having the status of the Tokyo “Royal Academy,” are
more moderate, averaging 1 to 2 _sen_ for admission, and _gheta_, free.
The entrance to the exhibitions of bronze, lacquer, porcelain and
other arts is the same. Even on the basis of Japanese incomes, where a
General earns £300 a year, the Headmaster of a Public School £160 and
a coolie 6_d._ a day, the charges are exceedingly moderate. And the
people, the real working people, go. I should be curious to find out
how many working men have paid at the turnstiles of Burlington House.
Besides art exhibitions, Japanese workmen go to the theatre, but this
is a taste they share with many other nations; what is all their own is
their love of pilgrimages, not only to temples of religious repute, but
to places of celebrated beauty. Fujiyama is yearly ascended by hundreds
of thousands of pilgrims. Here religion and beauty are mingled. For
the great mountain is sacred. So is almost every spot in Japan that
is particularly beautiful. As one journeys through the country, the
traveller will always find that the most beautiful point of view,
the grandest scene, the loveliest nook, has a temple, or at least a
wayside shrine, set up by the common people and tended by them. There
never was a nation since the days of Ancient Greece who so entirely
believed that beauty is sacred, or who so entirely disbelieved that
art can be divorced from ethics. They have the love of beauty innate
and inalienable. A man I knew was once crossing Tokyo in a _’ricksha_;
he was a prosperous, commercial being with a vast contempt for the
“heathen.” It was late afternoon. His _kurumaya_, after looking round
at him several times, suddenly stopped short, and waving his hand to
the west said respectfully but firmly:
“Honourably please to observe the unusual glory of the sunset.”
“And I told him to jolly well get on,” was the end of the story as I
heard it.
A favourite pastime of the _’ricksha_ men on the cab-stands as they
wait for a fare is to draw in the dust of the roadway one against the
other. If sand has been spilled from a cart anywhere within reach
the whole _’ricksha_ stand migrates and has the happiest time. I
have seen really good outlines of Fujiyama and of flying birds, or
blossoming flowers, all on the roadways by the _’ricksha_ stands. And
whatever their faults, they at least had life, for the _’ricksha_ man
has knowledge, knowledge based on intelligent observation and on the
inherited training of his race.
In the Japanese language there is a word, _edaburi_, which means “the
formation or the arrangement of the branches of a tree.” Merely to
possess such a word shows the long training in art and observation
which the nation must have undergone. But this word is not a technical
term used only by artists and the cultured classes; it is a living,
breathing expression, part of the vocabulary of every Japanese, even
the Board School educated. _Kurumaya_ discuss _edaburi_ in the streets
of Tokyo. Railway porters at wayside stations argue the matter with
the stationmaster. Every peasant knows, understands, and talks of the
matter as though he had brought himself up on long courses of Ruskin.
It has often been a subject of great regret to me that Ruskin did not
know the Japanese, for in them he would have found the living proof of
so much of his teaching.
But the people of Japan not only discuss _edaburi_, they write poetry.
There is an exceedingly simple form of poetry called _hokku_. It
consists of only three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and
is written in the language of daily life. The _hokku_ was invented by
a man called Bashō, for the definite ethical purpose of cultivating
the taste and improving the morals of the people. He believed in the
composition of poetry as an ethical force, and he wished to bring
it from the home of the educated into the lives of the poor. He
succeeded. Not because the _hokku_ is a so much easier form of poetry
than the English couplet, but because the people have taste, and art,
and civilisation in the very cells of their brains. Every one writes
poetry, even the typical _jinricksha_ man, who is to the Japanese
what the _charbonnier_ is to the French or the coster to us. When
the _kurumaya_ and his wife go to visit their relations the whole
party amuses itself by composing these tiny poems. On all occasions
of joy and grief, on birth, death and marriage, at the time of each
flower festival, or of any other happening, the people compose poetry.
Literary composition has always been inculcated as the best medicine
for sorrow, and as such is practised daily.
This is a little poem taken from the diary of a woman who died in
Tokyo a year or two ago. She lived with her husband, a doorkeeper, on
an income of £1 a month, and she was very delicate. She bore him three
children, who all died shortly after birth; then the poor mother died
herself. Her diary came into the possession of Lafcadio Hearn, who
translated it under the title of “A Woman’s Tragedy.” This poem was
composed on the death of the third baby and runs:
“Tanoshimi mo
Samété haka nashi.
Haru no yumé.”
“All my delight has perished, and hopeless I remain.
It was a dream, a dream of spring.”
Here is another poem which is more typically Japanese. It was composed
by the same woman after the death of her second baby, and runs:
“Sami daré ya
Shimerigachi naru
Sodé no tamoto wo.”
“Oh, the month of rain; all things have become damp;
the ends of my sleeve are wet.”
Which being interpreted is: “Oh! the time of grief. All things now seem
sad. The sleeves of my robe are moist with tears.”[1]
[1] The long sleeve of a Japanese _kimono_ is always held before the
face to hide emotion.
It is this very allusiveness, this saying of something simple and
commonplace, and hiding behind it a whole meaning of intense emotion,
which makes this poem so typically Japanese, for Japanese art is always
suggestive, it always needs the observer to bring his share of thought
and mind to its interpretation.
It is interesting to speculate how much the two most universally
recognised characteristics of the Japanese, politeness and cleanliness,
owe to their sense of art. If one looks into the psychology of the
race, one sees, of course, that this national trait of exquisite
politeness was built up, or at least assisted, in many ways. There was
that stern training of the _samurai_ which taught eternal, never-ending
self-control. There is the whole Buddhistic teaching, which is one
long gospel of unselfishness and kindness. But other nations have had
training in self-control, we ourselves among the number--think for a
moment of the Puritans and our public schools. And other religions
preach kindness and unselfishness, our own again, and yet there is no
other nation so widely recognised, even by the snappiest of tourists
who ever wrote his “memoirs,” as universally polite from the Emperor to
the coolie in the streets. It is a hypothesis which I put forward with
some hesitation, because the origins of national psychology are not for
the amateur, but I do think that a certain stress is to be laid upon
this innate and instinctive, but much cultivated sense of art. Has not
the politeness something to do with that love of a beautiful outline,
that desire for a perfect curve in the relations between man and man
as well as between man’s eye and his drawing? Is not, in fact, a rude
action a something inartistic in the social whole, a blot of crude
colour that jars?
The whole of the _cha-no-yu_, or tea ceremony, one of the few Japanese
things of which Europeans have heard more or less vaguely, is an
illustration in point. The tea ceremony, divested of its subsidiary
and attendant growths, is in essence nothing more than the proper
making and the proper drinking of a simple cup of tea. This, in the
course of centuries, has been elaborated into an imposing and very
complicated ceremonial. Nowadays the _cha-no-yu_ is regarded mainly as
a useful reservoir of etiquette and politeness, and is taught as such.
But the whole idea on which it rests is that for every given action
there is always one, and only one, right and proper attitude, that is
to say, the most graceful. So that the curve of every finger in the
mere passing of a tea-cup is the result of careful thought and long
experience. Everything has to be considered, the room, the person, the
relation of the body to the arm, of the arm to the hand, of the hand
to the tea-cup, the position of the person serving, and of the person
served, the place of the tea-cups, of the teapot, and the tea-kettle;
all have been taken into consideration by the tea ceremonialists, and
the proper, the most graceful attitude carefully evolved.