Kyoto, April 16.
The wooden shutters before my little room in the hotel are pushed
away; and the morning sun immediately paints upon my shoji,
across squares of gold light, the perfect sharp shadow of a
little peach-tree. No mortal artist--not even a Japanese--could
surpass that silhouette! Limned in dark blue against the yellow
glow, the marvelous image even shows stronger or fainter tones
according to the varying distance of the unseen branches outside.
it sets me thinking about the possible influence on Japanese art
of the use of paper for house-lighting purposes.
By night a Japanese house with only its shoji closed looks like a
great paper-sided lantern,--a magic-lantern making moving shadows
within, instead of without itself. By day the shadows on the
shoji are from outside only; but they may be very wonderful at
the first rising of the sun, if his beams are leveled, as in this
instance, across a space of quaint garden.
There is certainly nothing absurd in that old Greek story which
finds the origin of art in the first untaught attempt to trace
upon some wall the outline of a lover's shadow. Very possibly all
sense of art, as well as all sense of the supernatural, had its
simple beginnings in the study of shadows. But shadows on shoji
are so remarkable as to suggest explanation of certain Japanese
faculties of drawing by no means primitive, but developed beyond
all parallel, and otherwise difficult to account for. Of course,
the quality of Japanese paper, which takes shadows better than
any frosted glass, must be considered, and also the character of
the shadows themselves. Western vegetation, for example, could
scarcely furnish silhouettes so gracious as those of Japanese
garden-trees, all trained by centuries of caressing care to look
as lovely as Nature allows.
I wish the paper of my shoji could have been, like a photographic
plate, sensitive to that first delicious impression cast by a
level sun. I am already regretting distortions: the beautiful
silhouette has begun to lengthen.