rows of dark cryptomeria, that are planted on banks faced with
stones,--for here the road divides into three different grades of ascent
by enormous steps,--shine the high white walls of the temple grounds,
edged with a red-lacquered fence and a black roofed gate of red and
gold. In the open space before it, with wide roads diverging through
high walls, crowned with scarlet fences, stands a granite Torii, some
thirty feet high, whose transverse stones are crossed by a great black
tablet, marked with the gilded divine name of Iyéyasŭ. On one side a
five-storied pagoda, graceful and tall, certainly one hundred feet high,
blood-red and gold in the sunlight, and green, white, and gold in the
shadows of its five rows of eaves, rises free from the trees around it
and sends a tall spear, encircled with nine gilded rings, into the
unbroken sky. Bindings and edges of copper, bright green with
weathering, sparkle on its black roofs, and from their twenty corners
hang bells of bright green copper. Above the steep steps, against the
white wall, we pass through the first gate. It is recessed, and two
gigantic columns of trees stand in the corners. Two monsters of
uncertain lion-form occupy the niches on each side. From the upper side
of the red pillars, as supports for the engaged lintel, stretch out the
gilded heads of tapirs,--protectors against pestilence,--of lions and
elephants, and great bunches of the petals of the peony. Above, the
architrave and frieze are painted flat with many colors and with gold,
and the ends of the many beams which support the roofing are gilded.
Everywhere, even to the ends of the bronze tiles of the black roof, the
crest of Iyéyasŭ's family, the Tokugawa, is stamped in gilded metal.
At the inside corner of the gate stands a gigantic cedar, said to have
grown to this height since the time when Iyéyasŭ carried it about with
him in his palanquin. Opposite to three red buildings, which are
storehouses for the memorial treasures of the temple, stands, closer to
the wall, a charming building, mostly gray,--partly owing to the wearing
of the black lacquer with time,--and decorated with carved panels, which
make a frieze or string-course all around its sides. Above this line of
green, red, blue, white, and gold, a large space of gray wood, spotted
with gilt metal where the framework of the outer beams is joined,
spreads up to the pediment under the eaves, which is all carved and
painted on a ground of green. The heavy roof above is of black bronze
and gilded metal and is spotted with the golden Tokugawa crest. Below
the colored band, midway, the black wall has gratings with golden
hinges, for this delicate splendor is given to a stable--the stable of
the sacred horse of the god Iyéyasŭ. The patient little cream-colored
pony has no look of carrying such honors; and I can scarcely imagine his
little form galloping out in the silence of the night under the terrible
rider.
[Illustration: SACRED FONT.]
A gentle splashing of water, which mingles with the rustling of the
trees and the quiet echoes of the pavement, comes from the end of the
court where its edge is a descent filled with high forest trees. This
lapping sound comes from the temple font, a great wet mass of stone,
looking like solid water. It has been so exactly balanced on its base
that the clear mountain stream overflows its sides and top in a
perfectly fitting liquid sheet. This sacred well-basin has a canopy with
great black bronze-and-gold roof, supported by white stone pillars,
three on each corner, that are set in bronze sockets and strapped with
gilded metal. The pediment and the brackets which cap the pillars are
brilliantly painted, and the recessed space below the curved roof-beam
is filled with palm-like curves of carved waves and winged dragons. Next
to this, and at right angles to it, is a heavy bronze Torii, through
which we go up to another court, turning away from the buildings we have
seen. On the dark surface of the Torii glisten the golden Tokugawa
crests; on the great tie-beam, the upper pillars, and the central
upright. Near us, the eaves of its lower roof continuing the lines of
the water-tank pavilion, is the closed library, red, delicately adorned
with color under the eaves, and with the same heavy black roofing of
bronze dotted with gold which all the buildings have in a heavy
monotony. The steps lead us to another court, spotted with different
buildings, among tremendous trees--a bronze pavilion with a hanging
bell, a bell tower, and a drum tower, closed in with sloping walls of
red lacquer, and a large lantern of bronze under a bronze pavilion,
whose curious, European, semi-Gothic details contrast suddenly with all
this alien art, and prove its origin a tribute from trading Christian
Holland to the mortal deity worshiped here. On one side, where the
forest slopes down in sun and shadow, stands a Buddhist temple, sole
survivor of the faith in this place, now turned over to the official and
native worship. The latticed gold-and-black screens were all closed,
except in the center, through which we could see the haze and occasional
glitter of the gold of gods and altar ornaments, and the paleness of the
mats. On its red veranda stood a young Buddhist priest, whom our
companions knew; a slight, elegant figure, a type of modesty and
refinement. Farther back, on the other side of the veranda, an older
companion looked down the valley at some girls whose voices we could
hear among the trees.
[Illustration: YOUNG PRIEST.]
The main entrance rises above the high steps to a little esplanade with
heavy railing, on the level of a higher embankment. The court that we
were in was full of broken shadows from its own tall trees, and from all
this accumulation of buildings, red-lacquered and gilded,
black-and-bronze roofed, spotted and stained with moss and lichens, or
glittering here and there in their many metals. Long lines of light
trickled down the gray trunks and made a light gray haze over all these
miscellaneous treasures. Great lanterns (toro) of stone, capped with
green and yellow moss, metal ones of bronze and iron, stand in files
together here and in the lower court, or are disposed in rows along the
great stone wall, which is streaked by the weather and spotted with
white and purple lichens. Along its upper edge runs the red-lacquered
wall, heavily roofed, of the cloister which surrounds the farther court
above. Its face is paneled between the metal-fastened beams and posts
with two rows of deep carvings of innumerable birds and trees and waves
and clouds and flowers. All these are painted and gilded, as are the
frieze above and the intervals between the gilded rafters.
On all this space, and on the great white gate, the "Gate Magnificent,"
the full sun embroidered the red and white and colored surfaces with
millions of stitches of light and shadow.
The gate, or triumphal arch, is a two-storied building with heavy
bronze-tiled roof, capped and edged, like all the rest, with gilded
metal, and spotted with the gilded crest of the Tokugawa. Its front
toward us rises in the well-known curve, shadowing a pediment, full of
painted sculpture. Eight white pillars embroidered with delicate reliefs
support the white lintel, which is embossed with great divine monsters
and strapped with gilded metal. In the niches on each side are seated
two repellant painted images, inside of white walls, which are trellises
of deeply-carved floral ornament. These figures are warriors on guard,
in ancient and Japanese costume, armed with bows and quivers of arrows,
whose white, wrinkled, and crafty faces look no welcome to the intruder,
and recall the cruel, doubtful look of the guardian statues of foxes
that protect the entrances of the primitive shrines of the land-god
Inari. The far-projecting white capitals are the half-bodies of
lion-like monsters with open mouths and stretched-out paws. Above these,
below the carved balcony which marks the second story, the cornice is
made of a wilderness of tenfold brackets, black lacquered and patterned
with gold, and from each of the ten highest ones a gilded lion's head
frowns with narrowed eyes.
The balcony is one long set of panels--of little panels carved and
painted on its white line with children playing among flowers. Above,
again, as many white pillars as below; along their sides a wild fringe
of ramping dragons and the pointed leaves of the bamboo. This time the
pillars are crowned with the fabulous dragon-horse, with gilded hoofs
dropping into air, and lengthy processes of horns receding far back into
the upper bracketings of the roof. Upon the center of the white-and-gold
lintel, so delicately carved with waves as to seem smooth in this
delirium of sculpture, is stretched between two of the monster capitals
a great white dragon with gilded claws and gigantic protruding head. But
all these beasts are tame if compared with the wild army of dragons that
cover and people the innumerable brackets which make the cornice and
support the complicated rafters under the roof. Tier upon tier hang
farther and farther out, like some great mass of vampires about to fall.
They are gilded; their jaws are lacquered red far down into their
throats, against which their white teeth glitter. Far into the shade
spreads a nightmare of frowning eyebrows, and pointed fangs and
outstretched claws extended toward the intruder. It would be terrible
did not one feel the coldness of the unbelieving imagination which
perhaps merely copied these duplicates of earlier terrors.
[Illustration: DETAILS OF BASES OF CLOISTER WALLS, INNER COURT.]
So it is, at least, in this bright, reasonable morning light; but I can
fancy that late in autumn evenings, or in winter moonlight, or lighted
by dubious torches, one might believe in the threats of these blinking
eyes and grinning jaws, and fear that the golden terrors might cease
clinging to the golden beams. It is steadying to the eye to meet at last
the plain gold-and-black checker pattern of the ends of the final
rafters below the roof, and to see against the sky peaceful bells like
inverted tulips, with gilded clappers for pistils, hanging from the
corners of the great bronze roof.
And as we pass through the gate we are made to see how ill omen was
turned from the Luck of the Tokugawa by an "evil-averting pillar," which
has its pattern carved upside down as a sacrifice of otherwise finished
perfection.
I noticed also that a childish realism has furnished the lower monsters
of the gate with real bristles for their distended nostrils; and this
trifle recalls again the taint of the unbelieving imagination, which
insists upon small points of truth as a sort of legal protection for its
failing in the greater ones.
Within this third cloistered court which we now entered is an inclosed
terrace, some fifty yards square. Inside of its walls are the oratory
and the final shrine, to which we can pass through another smaller gate,
this time with lower steps. The base of the terrace, which makes the
level of the innermost court, is cased with large blocks of cemented
stone. Above it is a fence or wall with heavy roof and projecting gilded
rafters. Great black brackets support the roof. Between them all is
carved and colored in birds and flowers and leaves, almost real in the
shadow. Between the decorated string-courses the wall is pierced with
gilded screens, through which play the lights and darks, the colors and
the gilding of the shrine inside. At the very bottom, touching the stone
plinth, carved and painted sculptures in high relief project and cast
the shadows of leaves and birds upon the brilliant granite.
Beyond this inclosure and the shrine within it the court is abruptly
ended by a lofty stone wall, high as the temple roof, and built into the
face of the mountain. From its very edge the great slope is covered with
tall trees that look down upon this basin filled with gilding and
lacquers, with carvings and bronze, with all that is most artificial,
delicate, labored, and transitory in the art of man.
It is in this contrast, insisted upon with consummate skill, that lies
the secret beauty of the art of the men who did all this. The very
lavishness of finish and of detail, the heaped-up exaggerations of
refinement and civilization, bring out the more the simplicity and quiet
of the nature about them. Up to the very edges of the carvings and the
lacquers grow the lichens and mosses and small things of the forest. The
gilded temples stand hidden in everlasting hills and trees, open above
to the upper sky which lights them, and to the changing weather with
which their meaning changes. Nothing could recall more completely the
lessons of death, the permanence of change, and the transitoriness of
man.
We went up the steps of the recessed gate, which repeats the former
theme of white and gold and black in forms of an elegance that touches
the limits of good taste. Its heavy black roof, whose four ridges are
crowned by long bronze dragons and crawling lions, opens in a high curve
on the front and sides to show under the bent white-and-gold ridge-beams
a pediment strapped and intersected by spaces of small carvings, white
and tinted, relieved by red perpendiculars of beams.
[Illustration: DETAIL OF CLOISTER WALLS, INNER COURT.]
White and gold shine in the great brackets and the recesses of the
rafters. Below the white frieze, carved with many small figures of
Chinese story, the pillars and the lintel are inlaid in many carved
woods, ornaments of dragons, plants, and diapered patterns on the
whitened ground. The opened doors repeat the same faint tones of wood,
and of white and gold, and of gilded metals. The walls, which are open
at the base, are merely lattice screens. Their exquisite flowered
patterns fluctuate with gilded accents of whites, greens, lavenders, and
blues.
[Illustration: LINTEL, BRACKET CAPITAL.]
The gate inside is, therefore, nothing but an ornamented trellis, made
still lighter by contrast with the solid white doors, trellised at top,
but whose lower panels are exquisitely embellished with inlaid carved
woods and chiseled golden metal. We took off our shoes, and ascended the
bronze-covered steps of the oratory and shrine, which come down from the
red-lacquered veranda, behind the four carved white pillars of the
descending porch. Great white dragons with spiky claws project from the
pillars, and crawl in and out of the double transom. In the shadow of
the roof golden monsters hang from the complex brackets. The friezes and
bands of the temple face are filled with carving, delicate as embossed
tapestry, while the panels, deeply cut into auspicious forms of birds
and flowers, carry full color and gold far up into the golden rafters.
* * * * *
All recesses and openings are filled with half-realities, as if to
suggest a dread or a delicious interior, as flowers might pass through
palings, or great beasts, types of power, might show great limbs through
confining barriers. The long building, indeed, is a great framework,
strongly marked, dropped on a solid base, and weighted down by a heavy
roofing. The white pillars or posts which divide its face and corners
stand clear between the black-and-gold latticed screens, partly lifted,
which make almost all its wall.
Strips of the sacramental white paper hang from the lower lintel
against the golden shade of the interior. Inside, pale mats cover the
black-lacquer floor. Exquisite plain gold pillars, recalling Egyptian
shapes, divide the gilded central walls. Here and there on the gilded
tie-beams curved lines of emerald-green or crimson, like tendrils, mark
with exquisite sobriety a few chamfered cuttings. On either side of the
long room (fifty feet) are two recesses with large gold panels on which
symbolic forms are freely sketched, and carved inlays of emblematic
birds fill their farthest walls. Their ceilings are carved, inlaid, and
painted with imperial flowers, mystic birds, and flying figures, and the
pervading crest of the Tokugawa. For these were the waiting-rooms of the
family, and, as A---- remarked, the impression is that of a princess's
exquisite apartment, as if the Tartar tent had grown into greater
fixity, and had been touched by a fairy's wand.
[Illustration: INSIDE THE "CAT GATE"--GATE TO THE TOMB.]
All was bare except for an occasional sacred mirror, or hanging gilded
ornament, or the hanging papers of the native worship; and this absence
of the Buddhist images and implements of worship left clear and distinct
the sense of a personal residence--the residence of a divinized spirit,
not unlike the one that he was used to in life.
Even more, on the outside of the building the curved stone base, like a
great pedestal, with pierced niches filled with flowers carved and
painted between the great brackets that support the veranda, makes the
temple seem as if only deposited for a time, however long that time may
be.
We merely looked at the central passage, that, dividing the building,
leads down and then up to the shrine itself, and waited for the time
when we shall get further permission, and I shall be allowed to sketch
and photograph. As for me, I was wearied with the pleasure of the
endless detail; for even now, with all my talk, I have been able to note
but a little of what I can remember.
We withdrew, put on our shoes again at the gate, and turned below to
the east side of the court. We passed the Hall of Perfumes, where
incense was once burned while the monks chanted prayers in the court, as
they did when Iyéyasŭ was buried. We passed the Hall of the Sacred
Dances, whose open front makes a large, shady, dim stage, with a great
red railing on its projecting edge. Within it moved a white shadow, the
figure of a woman-dancer. And then we came to a white-and-gold gate,
inside of the roofed cloister wall. Above the open door that leads to it
sleeps a carved white cat, in high relief, said to have been the work of
a famous left-handed sculptor, carpenter, and architect. Its cautious
rest may not have been so far from the habits of the living Iyéyasŭ, to
whose tomb, farther on, this is the entrance.
Framed by the gold and white of the gate and of the half-opened door
rise the steps built into the hillside and all carpeted with brilliant
green mosses. The stone railings, which for two hundred feet higher up
accompany the steps, are also cushioned with this green velvet, and our
steps were as noiseless as if those of the white cat herself. All is
green, the dark trees descending in sunlight to our right and rising on
the bank to our left, until we reach an open space above, with a bank of
rocky wall inclosing the clearing.
Here is the small final shrine, and behind it a stone esplanade with a
stone fence, within which stands, in the extreme of costly simplicity,
the bronze tomb of Iyéyasŭ. A large bronze gate, roofed in bronze, of
apparently a single casting, with bronze doors, closes the entrance.
Before the monument, on a low stone table, are the Buddhist
ornaments--the storks, the lotus, and the lion-covered vases, all of
brass and of great size.
The tomb itself is of pale golden bronze, in form like an Indian shrine:
a domed cylinder surmounted by a great projecting roof which rises from
a necking that separates and connects them above--the roof a finial in
the shape of a forked flame. Five bronze steps, or bases, support this
emblematic combination of the cube, the cylinder, and the globe.
The crest of the Tokugawa, ten times repeated, seals the door upon the
burnt ashes of the man who crystallized the past of his country for more
than centuries, and left Japan as Perry found it. All his precautions,
all his elaborate political conservatism, have been scattered to the
winds with the Luck of the Tokugawa, and the hated foreigner leans in
sightseeing curiosity upon the railing of his tomb.
[Illustration: TOMB OF IYÉYASŬ TOKUGAWA.]
But the solemnity of the resting-place cannot be broken. It lies apart
from all associations of history, in this extreme of cost and of refined
simplicity, in face of the surrounding powers of nature. There is here
no defiance of time, no apparent attempt at an equal permanency; it is
like a courteous acceptance of the eternal peace, the eternal
nothingness of the tomb.
We leaned against the stone rails and talked of Iyéyasŭ--of his good
nature, of his habit of chatting after battle, of his fraudulent
pretensions to great descent; and of the deadening influence of the
Tokugawa rule, of its belittling the classes whose energies were the
true life of the country. We recognized, indeed, that the rulers of
Iyéyasŭ's time might have perceived the dangers of change for so
impressionable a race, but none of us asked whether the loss of hundreds
of thousands of lives of courageous Christians had been made up in the
strength of the remaining blood.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF IYÉMITSŬ.]
Far away the sounds of pilgrims' clogs echoed from the steps of distant
temples; we heard the running of many waters. Above us a few crows,
frequenters of temples, spotted the light for a moment, and their cries
faded with them through the branches. A great, heavy, ugly caterpillar
crept along the mossy edge of the balustrade, like the fresh incarnation
of a soul which had to begin it all anew.
[3] The Samurai, the entire warrior class of the feudal days;
therefore, also, the gentry.
IYÉMITSŬ
We were told by our good friends that the temple of Iyémitsŭ, the
grandson of Iyéyasŭ, far less pretentious than the shrine of the
grandfather and founder, would show us less of the defects which
accompanied our enjoyment of yesterday. The successors of Iyémitsŭ were
patrons of art, sybarites, of those born to enjoy what their ancestors
have sown. The end of the seventeenth century has a peculiar turn with
us, a something of show and decadence, of luxury and want of morals; and
the same marks belong to it even in Japan. Indeed, I feel in all the
Tokugawa splendor something not very old, something which reminds me
that this was but the day of my own great-grandfather; a time of rest
after turmoil, of established sovereigns on various scales, of
full-bottomed wigs, of great courtliness, of great expenses in big and
little Versailles. I miss the sense of antiquity, except as all true art
connects with the past, as the Greek has explained when he said that the
Parthenon looked old the moment it was done.
* * * * *
The temple of Iyémitsŭ is, indeed, charming and of feminine beauty,
complete, fitted into the shape of the mountain like jewels in a
setting. From near the red pagoda of Iyéyasŭ's grounds a wide avenue
leads, all in shade, to an opening, narrowed up at its end to a wall and
gate, which merely seem a natural entrance between the hills. There are
great walls to the avenue, which are embankments of the mountains. From
them at intervals fountains splash into the torrents at each side, and
overhead are the great trees and their thin vault of blue shade. The
first gate is the usual roofed one, red, with gilded rafters and heavy
black bronze tiles, and with two red muscular giants in the niches of
the sides. Its relative simplicity accentuates the loveliness of the
first long court, which we enter on its narrowest side. Its borders seem
all natural, made of nothing but the steep mountain sides, filled with
varieties of leafage and the columns of the great cedars. These
indeterminate edges give it the look of a valley shut at each end by the
gate we have passed, and by another far off disguised by trees. This
dell is paved in part, and with hidden care laid out with smaller trees.
Down the steep hillside, a cascade trembles through emerald grass, part
lost, part found again, from some place where, indistinct among the
trees, the jaws of a great bronze dragon discharge its first waters. A
simple trough collects one rill and sends it into the large stone cube
of a tank, which it brims over and then disappears.
The little pavilion over this well is the only building in the
inclosure. It is more elegant than that of Iyéyasŭ, with its twelve
columns, three at each corner, sloping in more decidedly, their white
stone shafts socketed in metal below and filleted with metal above,
melting into the carved white architrave. In the same way the carvings
and the blue and green and red and violet of the entablature melt in the
reflections under the shadow of the heavy black-and-gold roof with four
gables. From under the ceiling, and hanging below the lintels, flutter
many colored and patterned squares of cloth, memorials of recent
pilgrims.
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON THE WATER-TANK, OR SACRED FONT,
FROM THE SECOND GATE.]
As we turn to the highest side of the court on the left and ascend
slowly steep, high steps to a gorgeous red gate above our heads whose
base we cannot see, the great cedars of the opposite side are the real
monuments, and the little water-tank, upon which we now look down, seems
nothing but a little altar at the foot of the mountain forest. The gate,
when we look back, is only a frame, and its upper step only a balcony
from which to look at the high picture of trees in shadow and sunlight
across the narrow dell which we can only just feel beneath us.
The great red gate has two giant guardians of red and green, and
innumerable bracketings for a cornice, all outlined, and confused all
the more by stripes of red and green and white and blue.
[Illustration: A PRIEST OF IYÉMITSŬ]