I may say that the _kurumaya_ when they run into one another at the
corners, the coolies hauling carts when they collide, bow profoundly
and beg one another’s pardon.
And the exquisite cleanliness? Some one once defined dirt as “matter
out of place.” Is not much of art just the putting of things in their
right places, in their best and most appropriate and consequently their
most beautiful place; in the putting of a thing in such a place that
you feel it never could have been otherwise. As the child said when
lost in admiration of his birthday cake, “It’s so beautiful I think God
must have made it.” It is this cleanliness, this neatness, which the
Japanese possess, a neatness which has passed beyond mere precision,
passed on into its essence--grace.
All this may perhaps sound far-fetched to English ears. If we are
clean and polite it is on sanitary or on ethical grounds, not for
æsthetic reasons, because “it is healthy or right,” not “because it is
more beautiful,” and we make a broad distinction between ethics and
æsthetics. In Japan, on the contrary, there is the most intimate of
relations between them. The whole modern controversy of “art for art’s
sake,” all the dearly cherished views of French critics that art has
nothing to do with morals, is simply unmeaning to them. You might as
well say that the sun had no relation to light.
I have already mentioned how the _hokku_ form of verse arose as a moral
influence, how literary composition is always recommended as the best
medicine for sorrow; but what of a nation whose gardens are arranged to
express an ethical abstraction such as courage, resignation, obedience,
or to suggest a saying of Buddha, the Blessed One; whose dwarf trees
are not merely grown to make a design, but also to express an idea
and suggest a reflection; where every single tree, and flower, and
bird, and beast is a moral symbol and is commonly used as such; where
a simple candlestick of a stork standing on a tortoise and holding
the stem of a convolvulus in its mouth is a whole philosophy: the
stork, representing Life, standing upon the tortoise, Eternity, and
holding in its mouth the Morning Glory, a flower whose brief life, only
blooming for the few hours after dawn, is typical of mortality, and
the impermanence of all things. From Life based upon Eternity springs
Mortality, whose joys are fleeting. Here is the kernel of the whole
Buddhistic faith. The impermanence of phenomena and the eternity of
law, that is, cause and effect.
Even such an ordinary art as that of arranging flowers is deeply
ethical. The whole of Chinese philosophy is bound up with it. Each stem
is known by the name of some tenet in this philosophy, and at the end
of the lesson on flower arrangement the teacher sits down and talks to
the class of the underlying ethical ideas.
I do not think there is any art in the world into which so much thought
and meaning has been poured as into that of the Japanese. Every design,
even the simplest, even the most stereotyped, has behind it a whole
world of symbol, of suggestion which speaks to the mind of the beholder
as the outlines to his eye. And this is the reason why no design is
ever unmeaning, haphazard, as it so often is with us. It is there not
only because it is beautiful, but because it is appropriate to the
place and the occasion, because it has some connection with the object
it decorates, with the person who gives or the person who receives
it, with the time and the circumstances of the giving. Their art, in
fact, regarded from the ethical point of view, is often a sort of moral
shorthand, a very beautiful, finely wrought shorthand, which men can
take away and think upon.
And this brings me to my last point. John Addington Symonds, in one of
his wonderful essays on the Italian Renaissance, says that painting
inevitably fell from its high estate among men because modern life
is too complex to be expressed by it. That just in the same way as
the Renaissance required something less simple than the sculpture of
the Greeks to translate its thoughts and feelings into outward form,
so we in this century cannot express our own more subtle and complex
thought in terms of painting, and therefore never again can we hope
to rival the perfection of that old Renaissance art. And he concludes
by remarking that it is in music, more plastic and suggestive, that
we must seek our best expression. Now Japanese art is not dead but
intensely living, and it has always seemed to me that it lives, it
holds its place in their life, thought and culture just because it has
learnt to express those complex and subtle emotions which make up our
world to-day. And it does it, not by imaging them forth defined and
definite as our painting seeks to do, but just as our music would by
suggestion.
To every Japanese painting a man must bring his own soul and his own
thoughts, and where he has none or little, then he will turn away
complacently, saying, “Here, there is nothing.” For his are not the
eyes to see all the dim eternal problems, all the vistas of unwritten
poetry which the artist has but shadowed forth; the artist whose part
is not to portray, but infinitely to suggest.
SCENES IN RAIN AND SUNSHINE
“What it is
That dwelleth here
I know not;
Yet my heart is full of gratitude,
And the tears trickle down.”
SAIGIO.
“Japanese Literature,” by W. G. Aston.
I
THE MOAT
It is winter, and yet a summer sky of clearest blue, faint and pure. A
white sun rides in the southern sky, winning me to believe it summer
until the cold northern wind lifts the edge of my cloak, and I know it
winter.
It is warm here in the corner of the bridge, full in the sunlight, and
I linger. The dark, still waters of the moat creep stealthily along
on either side of me; in the distance I can see the rounded arch of a
bridge, so arched is the span and so white that I could believe the
people had stolen the young crescent of the moon to span their waters.
I lean on my bamboo parapet and look. The dark still waters run between
brown stone walls all overhung with the twisted limbs of the fir-trees,
such big strong branches lying almost along the ground, and twisted as
if in a vain endeavour to get back to the earth beneath. I watch the
thick strong branches, soberly green, the masses of foliage riotously
so, a green line and its shadow.
The stone banks of the moat are unhewn and uncemented, but their
surface is one unbroken line of sober brown; and I look at the long
wave of muddy finger-marks traced by the tide’s edge, and now high up
the wall, and drop my eyes to the deep mud-brown of the waters below.
* * * * *
The bamboo parapet grows hot, hotter. I wonder who laid those stones,
and who keeps them so free of grass and weeds. On the whole they are
not more silent and solid than the big limbs of the trees above. Past
the bridge in the distance is an unkempt space of yellow grass, then
a tall red building shoots abruptly into the sky. The small brown
policeman, hidden by his military cloak and sword, stands motionless as
I. Am I dreaming that this is a city of a million souls?
Blue, green, brown, black; sky, trees, stones, water; a white sun, a
white bridge--and suddenly the two seem to meet in a whirl of dust,
my scale of colours vanishes and with it the dreamy quiet and the
summer sun. A clatter of _gheta_ on the bridge, two _kuruma_ past the
policeman, a boat on the moat, the voice of the _tōfu_ man following
his bell along the road, the shadow of the tall house over the
world--and I awake to winter and the town.
II
A RAINY DAY
Rain!
And the world lies like an impressionist picture washed in with
white. Shut up in my miniature hansom, with the apron up to my eyes
and the roof down to the brim of my hat, it passes before me in misty
unreality. But for an occasional bob of the black mushroom hat of my
_kurumaya_ as he pulls the _’ricksha_ out of a hole, I am drawn by an
invisible force.
It has rained for a week, and the streets are bogs, the puddles--ponds.
The wind drives the rain with a murmured “_ssssh_” against the
tarpaulin sides of the _kuruma_, but in front there is no rain, only an
intangible, shadowy whiteness between the world and me.
The green bank of the moat, the dark water, even the fir-trees whose
green arms stretch down long fingers into the water, are uncertain
and swollen as the world to sleepy eyes. Black _kuruma_ splash past
me, with the large glass eye in their aprons shadowly suggestive. The
coolie in his straw raincoat, just a walking sheaf finishing in two
bare brown legs, plods on, a golden figure against the grey. A long
string of carts pass by me, long narrow carts drawn by long thin
horses; cart and horses hidden under a structure of yellow oil-paper,
until they look like huge golden bats or mythical dragons. And with his
back to the head of the horse, a halter in one hand, a yellow paper
umbrella in the other, his bare brown legs lost in the mud, the walking
sheaf moves on.
All the world to-day is four inches higher than its wont; and the
stilt-like _gheta_ seem an uncertain footing for their owners. Bare to
the thigh is the _kurumaya_, and his brown legs look like the statues
of Greece sunned into life, so perfect are their outlines.
Down the vanishing road are two pale yellow umbrellas, gold on grey,
and I marvel at the beauty of the colour. Suddenly round the bend of
the street comes a third--foreign, _black_--and in a flash the beauty
goes; a muddy road in the drenching rain alone is left, cold, prosaic.
And I shiver in my _kuruma_.
III
MMÉ (PLUM-BLOSSOMS)
They lay in fleece-white purity down the hillside, and the brooding
stillness of that garden was as a sheltering wing above the world.
Beneath one’s feet the six-sided tiles set in the brown earth were
clean with a Dutch cleanliness, and the soil all around had been raked
with the same quaint precision. Not a fallen leaf, nor the foot-mark of
a bird, marred the soft brown surface--only the narrow line of glazed
tiles ran on and on under the trees.
On every side the curve of the hill sloped upwards, outwards, drawing
the white garden nearer as a mother draws her child close within her
arms.
A hot sweet scent is in the air, delicate as honeysuckle, fragrant as
the pine, half-soft, half-spiced--the scent of the blossoming plum,
_mmé_, the emblem of chastity, of womanly purity and strength.
The pale grey stems of the trees are bent and old; some are covered
with a grey-green moss, and between their silvered stems I walk as in
the cloistered calm of ruined abbeys.
Up through the white fleece of blossom overhead bright stars of blue
shine down. The sun-warmed presence of the living earth draws her
children near. In all the world there is no sound....
“Like as a hen gathereth her chickens.” ...
Is not that the white wing of the eternal mother overhead? And the
warm, sweet fragrance of herself is all around.
IV
WET LEAVES
It had rained all night and all day; big, solid drops of rain that
fell as compactly through the air as battalions of small shot, but at
twilight the raindrops dwindled, slackened, dwindled, ceased.
The clear, colourless sky, which the whole day long had shot down
its drops of rain, drew together in grey clouds, growing momentarily
greyer, thicker and more grey, and shining with a pale light as though
far away behind those thick coverings a great white light was burning.
The stones on the pathway were all wet and shining and crunched down
into little pools of water under one’s heels. The trees were dripping
raindrops at each leaf, the trunks of all the pines were a dark brown
with wet.
In the garden there was peace, a peace of plants weighed down with
raindrops, and very tired. Up on the damp hillside the note of a
solitary bird sounded forlornly. _Uguisu_, the Japanese nightingale was
calling. One sweet short song, and then a greater silence.
Above the little grey shrine to Inari, the Fox God, two golden oranges
swayed out against the dark green bush. The raindrops on their under
sides trickled slowly over the little temple, and down the miniature
steps, while those on the upper sides stood out in little clusters
growing larger and larger until an imperceptible stir of the heavy
fruit sent them chasing their fellows down the temple’s roof.
And the sky above grew greyer. The golden oranges, larger for the
raindrops, swayed mysteriously out, bright yellow against dark green,
in a damp, dark world.
At the path’s edge another pathway of clear water encircled the temple
and the orange trees; a water so clear that it hardly seemed to exist,
while the brown banks and the brown stones showed wet and dark as the
pathway under foot. And round the temple and the orange trees in ever
silent motion along the brown pathway swam strange fishes; bright blue
carp with black sides and designs in creamy white, large orange carp
with tracings in silver, golden carp with six or seven waving tails,
and solitary in their midst one white patriarch whom age had turned to
driven snow.
And the damp, dark world turned slowly darker. The wet hillside grew
a black, blurred line; the light behind the cloud was going out; the
trees had lost their colour.
All silently the blue carp moved along the dark pathway, and the golden
orange globes dripped above the little temple. Bright blue, orange; the
light behind the clouds was out.
V
ASAMAYAMA
We were to climb Asamayama. The plan seemed simple and delightful;
to take horses in the cool of the evening and ride by moonlight to
the last green frill of trees upon the mountain side: to climb the
nine thousand feet to the very edge of the crater; and then in those
blackest hours before the dawn to look into the volcano’s mysterious
depths, all red and glowing, where flame and smoke strive ever for the
mastery, where the long orange tongues leap up through rolling purple
masses of the smoke; and all around and all below, as far as eye can
pierce, is lurid glowing red. And still on the crater’s treacherous
sides which hold smoke and flame unsteadily as a drunkard holds his
cup, to look down fascinated until they crumble beneath one’s feet, and
the thrill of terror bites in the memory of the mighty force indelible.
Then to breakfast under the sheltering walls of the old crater; to
watch the darkness melt before the coming day, to see the sun rise
swiftly in his strength, and the long circle of the hills stand clear
and blue and liquid on the upland plain; to see the giant ridges of the
mountains stretching from sea to sea with the faint white cone of Fuji
a dream upon the distant sky; to look in the freshness of the morning
upon the beauty of the land, and standing on the cinder slopes of
Asama to trace the tortured lava beds stretching like long grey snakes
among the green till the trees grow over and the forest engulfs them.
And still in the first hours of the dawn to ride back slowly with the
memory of the crater and the sunrise making pictures in one’s mind,
tired but contented.
The programme was delightful, perfect, it only remained to carry it
out. So we started, on the sorry horses of the upland regions of Japan,
and the full moon fitful behind thick clouds shone sadly. It was
distinctly chilly, for the table land of Karuizawa is 3000 feet above
sea level, and in the air was the damp shiver of coming rain. Still
we started, out of the village and along the wide still plain where
the dark shadow of a hill showed round as a basin on our right. This
was Asama’s satellite, born of her fires, made of her ashes, a round,
smooth, green hill, cruelly deceitful.
The empty plain stretched dark to the edge of the misty clouds and
diffused through it was a pale grey light that shimmered, trembling.
Over the plain and the mountain, through the air and the shadows, the
light filtered mistily, swaying and rounding the outlines till they
looked like solid bodies seen through a vast perspective of clear
water. As we plodded on, the paper lanterns held by each boy at the
horses’ heads turned all the wet black path to shining silver pools
which gleamed as the light fell on them, quivered like spreading veins
of ore, and disappeared into the blackness. The limpid flowing air that
swayed above the plain, all luminous and clear, grew darker, shrank as
it were together, lost its liquid light, turned slowly into rain, and
came down steadily.
We passed through a second village, and went on, over a rutty road,
between high banks, persistently upwards. All the sounds of the world
had died away, and the life of the woods, the rustle of leaves and of
grasses, the long thick hum of the insects was dead. Nothing moved.
Even the rain made no sound as it fell in great wet clouds upon the
ground.
High up on the rutty road we halted, while the two boys plunging
downward through the bushes in the darkness drank of a silent stream
which flowed below, the last water we should pass that night. The
leaves of the bushes cut sharp green silhouettes upon the blackness,
stiff and metallic as tinfoil, as the boys, lantern in hand, plunged
downward. But we did not go, for the soft cloud of rain was falling
thicker, wetter, and we were cold. When each had drunk his fill, and
the metal green leaves of the bushes had flashed back into darkness
again, we plodded on, over the common, under the trees, along another
piece of road, looser, more rutty than the last, and definitely among
the dripping trees we climbed upward.
The moon was gone now, hidden deep behind the falling layers of cloud.
And there was a hush, a stagnancy upon all things as though an unseen,
unknown force were terrorising life to stillness. Not a tree had leave
to stir. The branches huddled dumbly, and all the seething insect
life which makes the woods so full of sound lay stricken, lay dumb,
paralysed; and among the damp trees we journeyed on.
* * * * *
At midnight the horses stopped, in a fold of the hills on the edge of
the trees, where the blackness lay solid, and we slid down. One boy
tied the horses together and sat down patiently to await our return
next morning. The other snuffed the candle in his paper lantern and
prepared to lead the way. By this time it was raining hard, in distinct
material drops, which splashed sharply on face and hands, and it was
pitch dark. The boy, lantern in hand, went first, and all the light of
the lantern so carefully trimmed was cut off from us by his stout round
body. We knew by the crunch there were cinders under foot, by the cold
wet dabs that ghost-like pressed our hands that there were bushes, and
that we climbed.
From time to time the boy would sway his lantern to one side or the
other, and stunted shrubs like London laurel trees would start into
being, and disappear. With each swing of the lantern the stunted shrubs
grew scarcer and more stunted, till they dwindled to bushes, to mere
green weeds like dandelions, to nothingness. Then the light fell on
cinder, piled up, half-burnt cinder with ends of broken brickbats,
and all the rubbish of a dust-heap. And at each step the wind came up
and up; colder, stronger, wetter it tore down the bare steep slopes
driving us backwards. Then we would sit down upon the cinders, our
backs to the mountain, our feet on the brickbats, and pant. It was
distinctly exhausting. Each footstep was a launch into the unknown,
and a searching for a foothold, each pause an adding to the weight of
cinders that drifted down boots and clothing. And it rained with fierce
splashes when the wind blew, with dull persistency when it died away,
but still unceasingly. And that sense of an unseen, unknown force,
paralysing all things, grew with each footstep. The chill of a dumb
terror lay upon the world, and the utter desolation struck colder than
the wind.
We rested again while the icy wind rushed screeching through the
cinders; and, as it died away, the chirp of a Japanese grasshopper came
into the stillness. We were far above the weeds now, in the region of
perpetual cinder, and still that grasshopper chirped weakly. But the
spell was too real, the terror too deathly; the unseen, unknown force
took a step nearer in the darkness, and the weak wee chirp seemed only
the voice of the horror, the breath of the dumbness giving it life.
The cinders grew looser and looser as we climbed, more difficult to
tread, and the stagnant silence was filled and filled with sulphur.
It did not come in breaths or gusts, or driving before the wind, it
was there in the silence, part of it, and it wrapped us round. If dead
silence can grow more deathly, then did that stillness die again. The
dumb terror tightened on the world, and the unknown force came nearer.
From far below the sound of pouring heavy stones drove up and up. The
mountain rumbled in its depths, rumbled and was still. The presence of
that unseen force was manifest. Before it terror crouched still as a
bird beneath the swooping shadow of the hawk.
We climbed up heavily, up through the thick sulphur and the loose
steep cinders, up till we turned, and the full force of the wind came
sweeping round the side of the mountain. We were walking on the edge,
the real edge over which you could fall, and it was all of lava, sticky
as clay and crossed with deep black cracks that had no bottom. The wind
swept down here undisturbed, the gusts of rain broke sharply on the
paper lantern as it swayed from side to side to peer out a way. The
sticky lava softened rapidly until it sucked around our feet, drawing
them down. Then a long fierce gust blew out the lantern and we stood
still.
“Honourably please stand very still,” called the boy quickly.
And we stayed dead still.
The gust of wind rushed by us, rushed on. Then another blew till we
cowered on the sinking lava. It was so long in passing that the moments
seemed as hours. We stood like statues. Insidiously the lava crept
above our feet, crept stealthily, and motionless we waited.
The gust died down but the wind still blew, still blew. A light
quivered for a moment in the darkness and went out. The boy had lit
a match. He struck another. It flickered in little yellow leaps that
showed the lantern and his face and went abruptly out. Again the tiny
mandorla of light shot up, the boy was holding the lantern in his hand
all ready. We could see the flame double as the candle caught, then
both went swiftly out, for again the wind came rushing down. It blew
and blew. Then it blew so fiercely that to blow again it stopped to
take its breath. Quickly in the second’s pause the match flared up, the
lantern lit, and we could move.
As we drew out our feet the wicked sticking lava sucked, and the boy
held the lantern low to peer out the cracks. Then he turned sharply to
the left, and the wind was gone.
We stood in a narrow roofless cave whose sides were overhanging rock,
whose floor was lava ash, wet with big rain pools. This was the old
crater. Asama has three craters, and two are at present in disuse. We
were sheltering in one of these. It was a still haven of refuge after
the fury of the wind outside, and a sure. There were no cracks, no
sticky sucking lava here. With relief as from a heavy burden we sat
down upon the wet ash to rest and eat, the lantern in our midst.
It was now 3 o’clock. Since midnight we had been climbing, our clothes
were soaked and heavy with rain and cinders, and we were very tired.
The boy prosaically unpacked the hamper, and by the flickering light
he set out plates and food. But before we could take one mouthful, the
wind rushed down the roofless cave, upset the hamper, swept the lantern
along the ash before it, tore like a whirlwind from end to end, and
left us in an unearthly livid darkness that lighted nothing.
For a moment we all stayed numbed, then the boy sought the remnants of
his lantern and we the remnants of our meal. They were both embedded in
thick lava dust.
We could not go on up the crater now, for every minute the wind blew
fiercer, and the paper lantern was torn in several places. We must wait
for the dawn to show us the way. So we huddled under the shelter of the
overhanging rock and waited.
The livid darkness that lay upon the mountain grew more livid and less
dark to our watching eyes, till we could distinguish the faint outlines
of things, though not the things themselves. It was, oh! so cold, and
that sense of stagnant terror, dispersed for a little by the wind and
the food, crept back and back, intenser, dumber than before.
* * * * *