Rosherville with Stonehenge. The trees which line the broad
Sumidagawa are beautiful but modern; their festal boughs are
familiarised and a little vulgarised by the loud merry-making of
cockney crowds; all this shouting and laughing recall a barbarian’s
bank-holiday. Far westward, on the ridges of Yoshino, where
no modern city disturbs the silence of the imperial _tumuli_,
encircled by a low granite fence and enclosing dusty gold relics of
dead kings, grow the Thousand Cherry-Trees of immemorial renown.
Motoöri sang of them; Hiroshigi painted them; Jimmu. Tenno, the
first of the Mikados, in his mausoleum fifteen miles away, is
hardly more venerable than they. Every year pilgrims pass through
the bronze gateway of the Zo-o-do Temple and climb the mountain
side to rest beneath the canopy of tender, billowy blossom, which
broods like an ever-renascent cloud of beauty above the Yamato
plain, endeared by thirteen centuries of history and romance. Many
pleasure-seekers mix with the white-robed pilgrims, who belong
for the most part to distant villages and look on religion as
an excellent excuse for change of interest and change of scene.
Heedless of theology and harassed by no conviction of original
sin, they return, like happy children from a picnic, with eyes
brightened by the sea of colour and spirits clarified by pure
mountain air. Soon the green hills are carpeted with flakes of
soft flowerage; the brief splendour of the Thousand Trees is
over; the scattered hamlets and holy mounds resume their ordinary
quietude.
At Kyōto the cult of the national flower culminates in an annual
celebration, the Miyako-odori, a spectacular ballet with choric
interludes. For many years the same poet, an old resident, has been
assigned the task of composing appropriate lyrics, in which the
glories of some historic or legendary hero blend with the praises
of the blushing _sakura_. Musicians, painters, dancers, are engaged
to elaborate with auxiliary sound, design, and movement the series
of dream-pictures which his fancy has evoked. But words and notes
are really subsidiary to the dancing: the tale of the poet is
chiefly told by the winding feet and waving arms, the ever-changing
pose and mimicry, of the most highly trained geisha in Japan.
These number as many as seventy, of whom eighteen combine the
functions of choir and orchestra, now chanting, now accompanying
on drum and mandoline the statuesque or processional development
of the choregraphic theme. The Hanami-Kōji, specially set apart
for such representations, is not easy to find. Though within the
precincts of the theatrical quarter, it stands a little apart from
the other houses, such as the Gion-za Theatre, and is far less
capacious; in fact, it bears about the same proportion to its huge,
banner-flaunting brethren as the smaller Queen’s Hall to Drury
Lane. The structure, too, is entirely different from theirs. Three
sides of the building are reserved for the performers. Instead of
the parallel _hana-michi_, trisecting the audience and sloping
from stage to entrance, two dancing platforms skirt the “pit” on
left and right and join the extremities of the scene: on them
sit the singing-girls, concealed at first by cotton curtains. No
room remains for the public but the floor between the platforms
and a gallery, which faces the drop-scene of the stage proper. As
the performance only lasts an hour, it is repeated four or five
times in the afternoon and evening of twenty days, and the price
of admission to the best (gallery) seats is fifty _sen_, about
one shilling, for economy and simplicity are conspicuous in this
essentially popular entertainment.
The dance is preceded by a ceremonious reception of great interest
to the foreign visitor. He is conducted to an ante-room and
requested to participate in _O Cha-no-yu_, an august tea-making.
The preparation of this aristocratic refreshment must be conducted
in accordance with inviolable rules, invented or rather modified
by the great Taikō himself, who, not content with military glory,
desired to regulate the boudoir as imperiously as the State, in
this resembling Queen Anne, who “would sometimes counsel take and
sometimes tea.” The twelve utensils employed must be separately
cleansed and waved in air by the demure but smart damsel who
presides with becoming dignity and science, every gesture, every
operation of her deft hands being prescribed by rigid etiquette.
After twenty minutes of silent incantation, as it seems, the dainty
sorceress has brewed her potion. Then a careful sub-sorceress, who
has attentively waited on the principal witch, prostrates herself
at the feet of each of the guests, touches the floor with her
forehead, and, as she presents a cup of thick, green _bouillon_,
murmurs, “Oh, gracious stranger, deign to taste this honourable
tea!” Long as the tea ceremonies appear to the uninitiated,
they are considerably shortened and imperfectly observed by the
tea-drinkers, who, it is feared, break a thousand and one rules in
uncouth efforts to copy the better educated Japanese.
As seen from the strangers’ gallery (for the majority of humble
coolies and small shopkeepers have been waiting in patient line
until the august tea has been absorbed by their betters, and now
sit, packed in tiny compartments, on the floor of the pit) this
liliputian theatre has much in common with the galanty-show which
first kindled a passion for the stage in distant childhood. The
drop-scenes are scarcely more than nine feet high, and of such
thin material that through their pale pattern of willow and pine
the shining of candles is discerned. It would not surprise me if
they grew gradually whiter and brighter, serving at last as the
medium for a droll shadow-pantomime of fantastic silhouettes. But
even the children would not have come to see that, since their eyes
have often followed at home the ingenious shadow-play of parental
hands behind the paper-panelled _shōji_. Rarer and more exotic
must be the show to please this easily amused but quickly sated
audience. Suddenly the curtains on either side lift, disclosing
to the left nine geisha, holding _taiko_ or _tzuzumi_, circular
drums and drums conical, beaten with batons or smacked with open
palm; to the right, nine more, with _koto_ and _samisen_, plucking
the strings with curved finger or ivory plectrum: all are much
powdered and painted, but soberly attired in black and gold. The
prelude lacks melody, lacks harmony, as we understand them, but the
sharp, staccato cries, emphasised by drum-taps, the antiphonal,
diminishing shrieks, which seem to punctuate a nasal, wailing
recitative, insensibly induce a nervous tension of disquieting
suspense. The time is most exact: the drums rattle, the zithers
clang, in perfect unison. Then along the narrow platforms in front
of the musicians issue simultaneously from beneath the gallery two
slender files of geisha, whose pink and blue _kimono_ suggest the
hues of cherry-blossom and the else cloudless sky. Like running
ribbons, they wind towards the stage, festooning at last into a
momentary bow before the famous gate, called O Kuru-ma-yose, of
which the curiously carven peonies and phœnixes are admirably
reproduced, evoking instant recognition. While the dancers
disappear through that pictured portal and the curtain falls on the
first figure of the dance, let me briefly indicate the subject and
intention of this year’s fantasy.
Its hero is Hideyoshi, often entitled Taikō (the retired regent),
next to Iyeyasu perhaps the most notable name in all Japanese
history--so proverbially notable that Cromwell and Napoleon are
not more vividly impressed on the memory of their countrymen.
His dramatic rise from rung to rung of the feudal ladder, from
peasant’s hut to a regent’s palace, which none but a noble
had occupied before him; the contrast of his mean appearance,
which caused him to be dubbed “The Monkey,” with his grandiose
achievements, which included the commercial supremacy of Ōsaka and
the subjugation of Corea; his dreams of world-empire; the patronage
of art, which led him to summon a congress of tea-drinkers and to
take an active part in the presentation of _Nō_ plays; the adroit
concentration of power in his own person, despite the jealousy of
patricians and the victories of contemporary generals; these and
many other circumstances of his career loom large in patriotic
tradition. He was eclipsed by Iyeyasu in statesmanship, for the
latter founded a constitution and established a dynasty, which
lasted two hundred years, and might have lasted longer but for
foreign intervention; yet Hideyoshi’s is the more picturesque,
the more striking personality. Perhaps it would not be straining
an historical parallel to allege that the great soldier of Kyōto
prepared the way for the great legislator of Yedo as effectively
as Julius Cæsar prepared the way for Augustus. Be this so or not,
it is plain that the beginning of the seventeenth century after
Christ in Japan and the end of the last century before Christ in
Italy coincided with similar transitions from militant anarchy to
peaceful despotism. The golden age of the Tokugawa may be cited as
an argument for imperial rule with the _pax Romana_ of the Cæsars.
It might be supposed that the names of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi have
no more virtue as a rallying-cry for their descendants than the
watchwords of Roundhead and Cavalier have for us. But such is not
the case. Subtly reincarnate in the cities which they glorified in
life, their spirits still give battle after death in the bloodless
field of civic rivalry. Tōkyō is still Yedo, the Petersburg of
the empire, created by a despot’s will and the centre of law, of
authority, of administration; but it is to Kyōto, as to Moscow,
the holy city, that lovers of art and of religion are inevitably
attracted. Hers are still the finer temples, the lovelier fabrics,
the nobler legacies of Old Japan. One thing, however, she has not,
which the capital has--a fitting monument of her greatest citizen.
Whereas the mausoleum of Iyeyasu at Nikkō is such a masterpiece of
commemorative gratitude, expressed in the language of plastic and
decorative art, that “whoever has not seen Nikkō [so runs the saw]
has no right to use the word _kekkō_ (splendid),” the conqueror
of Corea, the arbiter of august tea-making, lacks the tribute of
a monumental tomb. This stain on the scutcheon of Kyōto is to be
speedily wiped out. Now that the Emperor has transferred his court
to the eastern capital and made the Tokugawa citadel his own, the
western merchants are eager to redress the balance by building
on the heights of Maruyama for the glory of Hideyoshi and the
bewilderment of tourists such a triumph of memorial architecture
that Iyeyasu shall at last he outshone and the connotation of
_kekkō_ be fraught with ampler meaning. The plans are drawn,
the work begun, patriots and pilgrims have subscribed thousands
of _yen_, the best modern artists in wood and bronze have been
charged with the heavy privilege of surpassing their illustrious
predecessors. Whether they succeed or not, the Hideyoshi monument
was a subject so rich in suggestion, so popular in itself, so
complex in its appeal, that the poet of the Miyako-odori could
not wish for a better or more burning theme. And that is why the
pink-and-blue geisha made their first exit through O Kuruma-yose,
which Hidari Jingoro, the immortal left-handed carpenter, adorned
with marvellous birds and flowers when commissioned to carve a
royal gateway for his master’s, the Taikō’s, palace at Fushimi.
The next scene represented Hideyoshi’s garden. It is no ordinary
garden, whatever foreigners may think, who merely see in it an
appropriate background for the swaying flower-like bodies of the
dancing-girls. It is a masterpiece of the celebrated æsthete,
Kobori Enshu, and the artful disposition of lake and lantern,
pebble and pine, may symbolise, for all I know, a divine truth
or philosophic precept. My neighbour (a Buddhist neophyte,
whose enthusiasm is tempered by erudition) points out to me the
Moon-Washing Fountain, the Stone of Ecstatic Contemplation, and
the Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortals, but it seems that the
exigencies of scenic space have so fatally curtailed the Mound
facing the Moon that the exact meaning of the parabolic design is
made obscure, if not heretical. It is not in my power to reassure
him, so I welcome with relief the reappearance of the dancers, who,
bearing flowers in one hand and a fan in the other, step gaily out
of the garden and, posing, perching, pirouetting, flutter with
deliberate grace through a maze of correlated motions. I do not
dare to ask if their gestures point a moral: it is wiser to assume
with Keats that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and to follow with
undistracted eye the solemn prettiness of these human dragon-flies.
For their gauzy _kimono_ sleeves and red-pepper-coloured _obi_
recall the wings and hue of a giant dragon-fly, which dominates
in its pride of national emblem the principal bridge over the
Kamogawa. And, whether they poise flower on fan or fan on flower,
or revolve with open fan extended behind their triple-tressed
coiffure, they dart here and settle there with almost the
unconscious, automatic smoothness of bird or insect. Proximity
destroys this illusion. Watched from the subjacent vantage of the
floor, the features of these tiny _coryphées_ are seen to wear that
fixity of resolute attention which few children when engrossed in
a performance are able to repress. The art of concealing art is
hard to learn. Their elder sisters smile continually behind _taiko_
and _samisen_, but the gravity of the childish troupe is more in
keeping with the poet’s retrospective vision.
I hope the stage-carpenter atoned for his unorthodox abbreviation
of Enshu’s lesson in landscape by the exquisite view of the
monastery of Uji Bridge. Nestling in the lap of pine-forested
hills, this ancient temple of Byōdō-in has been for at least six
hundred years the protective centre of vast tea-plantations where
is grown the finest tea for native taste, called Gyokuro, or
Jewelled Dew. But Uji Bridge is famous also for its fire-flies,
which on warm nights flash like living jewels beside the stream,
to the joy of countless sightseers, eager to catch and cage them.
Throughout the ensuing dance many eyes were diverted from the
geisha to the sparkling play of emerald motes across the mimic
Ujigawa. This time the girls wore kerchiefs such as peasant women
wear when, with heads thus guarded and skirts rolled upward to the
knee, they toil among the tea-plants. Then, unfolding and waving
the kerchiefs, while a soloist intoned a rhapsody in honour of
“the Great Councillor, whose memory lives for ever in the fragrant
sweetness of the Jewelled Dew,” they moved in pairs along the
platform, alternately kneeling and rising, with arms extended or
intertwined, their gradual retrocession signifying, as I learn, the
reluctant withdrawal of summer.
Autumn succeeds. Momiji-Yama, or Maple Mountain, deeply mantled
in myriads of reddening leaves, gives the cue to the now
melancholy, almost stationary languor of gliding figures: no longer
dragon-flies or humming-birds, they drift slowly, one by one, into
the crimson gorge, and are lost among the maple-leaves. At this
point the floral march of the seasons is abruptly broken, as if to
forbid too hasty interpretation, by the fall of tricolour curtains,
richly embroidered in scarlet, blue, and gold with Hideyoshi’s
crest, the large fan-like leaf of the _Pawlonia Imperialis_.
The five-storeyed pagoda of Omuro Gosho, outlined in snow against
the wintry landscape, signalises an ascent from temporal to eternal
beauty. To this monastic palace ex-mikados came after abdication;
it had no abbots but those of imperial blood. And the next scene,
presenting the Daibutsu, or great Buddha of Hideyoshi, is elegantly
illustrative of the Buddhist teaching of permanence in transition.
The first wooden image, 160 feet high, erected by the Taiko in
1588, was destroyed by earthquake in 1596. After his death his
widow constructed a second in bronze, which was almost completed
save for the casting of the head when fire devoured it in 1603.
Lastly, his son, Hideyori, persuaded by perfidious Ieyaysu to
waste his substance in rearing a yet more colossal figure, was
forbidden to consecrate it by a message from the Shōgun, who chose
to discover in the Chinese inscription on the bell (“On the east I
welcome the bright moon, on the west I bid farewell to the setting
sun”) a prophecy of his own waning and Hideyoshi’s waxing radiance.
A second earthquake in 1662, corrosive lightnings in 1775 and 1798,
consumed successive Buddhas in the same shrine, but the present
god, whose gilded head and shoulders alone are visible, scaling
fifty-eight feet from ground to ceiling, has defied the strokes
of fate for ninety-nine years, and recalls to pious beholders
the original builder’s piety, triumphant at last through the
irresistible resurrection of deity.
Resurrection--the recurrence of spring and the renovation of
fame--crowns the final movement of this transcendental ballet.
The Hideyoshi monument, as it partly is and wholly shall be,
rises tier above tier on heaven-scaling stairs, approached by
temples and groves which will one day vie in splendour with the
carven gateways, the gigantic cryptomerias of Nikkō. In a joyous
finale the dancers pose, wreathed about the central summit of the
monument, while cascades of red and green fire play on them from
the wings; then, strewing the steps with cherry-blossom and waving
provocative clusters in the faces of the spectators as they pass,
the double stream of geisha flows back with graceful whirls and
eddies between banks of deafening minstrelsy; the curtains rustle
down, the fires flicker out; the Miyako-odori is no more.
As I ponder on this fascinating little spectacle, planned by
artists and presented by fairies, the memory returns of a ballet,
incalculably more magnificent, which the rich municipality of
Moscow organised in honour of Nicholas II., Emperor of all the
Russias, on the occasion of his coronation. I remember that
thousands of roubles were expended; that the decorations and
costumes blazed with ostentation; that armies of half-dressed
women performed acrobatic feats in searching electric light. If
any flowers of imagination had bloomed in the contriver’s mind,
they had been pitilessly crushed by costumiers, scene-painters, and
ballet-masters. The result was a meretricious chaos of meaningless
display. Hidden from the eyes of Moscow merchants and revealed to
the patient artisans of Kyōto is that spirit of beauty, which,
out of cotton and paper and Bengal lights can fashion a poem, so
lovely that its simple schemes of form and colour haunt the memory
like music, so profound that the deepest instincts of the beholder
may be stirred by communion with the faith in which his fathers
laboured and died.
It may well have been, however, that the shaven stripling beside me
who so kindly unravelled threads of occasional doctrine from the
glistening web of Terpsichore was almost alone in his desire to be
edified. As he formally took his leave, most of the pittites rushed
with laughter up the hill to the Chionin Temple, before which
stands a marvellous and patriarchal cherry-tree. Lamps were hung in
its far-reaching boughs, and all night long the light-hearted Kyōto
citizens chattered and sang beneath its multitudinous blossom.
The connection between Buddhism and geishadom was recalled to me
in a much less poetic setting by a peculiar play, which for seven
nights filled the commodious theatre of Tsuruga, a delightful port
overlooking the finest harbour on the Sea of Japan. The piece was
called “Shimazomasa,” and the audience was moved to extraordinary
demonstrations of delight by a very long soliloquy delivered for
at least ten minutes by a Buddhist priest, who, seated on a mat in
the centre of the stage and tapping his knees with a fan, excited
my liveliest curiosity as to the purport of his tirade. Could
it be a parody on pulpit eloquence? Would these pious townsmen,
whose bay was lined with temples, tolerate such mockery of sacred
things? The curtain fell and drew up again: the actor was forced
to repeat his glib soliloquy. Then, to my extreme bewilderment,
the priest was no more seen, and a tortuous but intelligible
melodrama ensued, revealing the thefts and treacheries of a geisha,
who came in the last act to a miserable end. The next night I
returned, and being in time for the first act, which I had missed
on the previous occasion, discovered that the plausible preacher
was the geisha disguised. She had escaped from prison, and was
recounting to herself the advantages which she expected to reap
from the garb of a friar. “Young girls will come to me, craving
amulets and charms for their lovers. Thus I shall know the names of
honourable young men, who will not be slow to make my acquaintance.
And, when we have sipped tea and talked of many pleasant things
together, at the right time I shall whisper that it is no priest
who is honoured by their august friendship, but Shimazomasa, the
geisha. Moreover, I am sure to succeed, for a preacher ought to
be a good-looking man. It is then easier for the hearers to keep
their eyes fixed on his face; otherwise their eyes wander and
they forget to listen.” It has been pointed out to me since that
passages in this delectable sermon were taken bodily from the
“Makura Zoshi” (“Pillow Sketches”), the work of a lady-novelist
of the eleventh century. But plagiarism is no sin in the eyes of
a Japanese dramatist, and the great merit was to have hit on an
original situation. The manager of the theatre was so conscious of
this, that, when a second play, entitled “Pistorigoto” (“Robbery
under Arms”), failed to draw as well as its predecessor, he boldly
transferred the incident without rhyme or reason to the plot, which
was neither improved nor worsened by the addition. I was grateful,
too, to the author of “Shimazomasa” for a touch of fancy, which
redeemed the realism of his sensational story. During a love scene
between three suitors and the heroine, who had regained for a time
prestige and prosperity, a symbolic geisha, bearing no relation to
the personages of the piece, chanted in an upper barred chamber,
adjoining the outer wall of the tea-house in which the action was
proceeding, snatches of erotic song, praising the joys of love but
foretelling the heavy Nemesis which, sooner or later, overtakes
light women. In a play of Æschylus this would have been Erinyes
on the Atridean roof, terrible and invisible, presaging doom. But
I fear that he who wrote “Shimazomasa” had no deeper design than
the interpolation of a taking song, since popular drama is as
untroubled as the popular mind by haunting shadows of death and
destiny.
VULGAR SONGS
VULGAR SONGS
“As for the common people, they have songs of their own, which
conform as far as possible to classical models, but are much
mixed with colloquialisms, and are accordingly despised by all
well-bred persons. The ditties sung by singing-girls to the
twanging of the guitar belong to this class.”--B. H. CHAMBERLAIN.