JAPANESE TOUCH
WITH the Japanese art is an inspiration. They are incapable of bad taste
in art. If their work is not always great, it is always fine. It
sometimes lacks depth, it never lacks grace.
Lightness of touch, exactness of touch, characterise all Japanese work;
but it would be grossly untrue to say that all Japanese work lacks
strength, depth, and force. Much that the Japanese do, they do “from the
shoulder.” Their cloisonné is rich, their carvings are masterly, and on
the stages of their theatres I have seen handling of group-masses that
was powerful in the extreme.
But finish and delicacy are the most general characteristics of all
Japanese work. Even when the Japanese are positively bold in design and
execution, it is so well bred a boldness that we are apt to lose sight
of it, and be absorbed in admiration of the details.
Japanese finish is so extreme that it is almost veneer. The Japanese are
as polished as their own lacquers; and all their work is a reflection of
themselves.
Art and Nature are at their loveliest in Japan. Nowhere else is Nature
so artistic. Perhaps because nowhere else does there dwell a people so
intensely sympathetic with Nature. In Japan the scenery is so perfect
that we almost suspect it of being studied. And the Japanese
architecture—of hut or of temple—is so appropriate to its background,
so fits the landscape, that we feel that both have been arranged by the
same master-hand.
No other people can boast an art that breaks into so many lines of
beauty, and that smiles with such sweet wealth of colour-harmony. But
there are parts of the globe where both Art and Nature seize upon us
more quickly and hold us more powerfully.
In the Alps, in the Sierra Nevadas, in Tasmania, in Gippsland, in the
Himalayas, Nature takes you by the shoulders and shakes you—shakes a
soul into you if you never had one before.
In Japan, Nature has vines and blossoms in her hair, and wine on her
lips. She smiles into your face. She stretches out to you her warm,
dimpled arms. She has bewitched you. You may tear yourself away from
her, but you will never forget her. She will haunt you in your London
club; and when you are deer-stalking in Scotland or yachting in the
Norway fiords you will close your eyes sometimes and feel once more upon
your cheeks the perfume of her breath. Her beauty has mastered you. You
love her, with a light love, perhaps, but then, alas, the light loves
are the loves that last. You have escaped to honest English civilisation
and to Regent Street, but to the day of your death you will long to go
back to the gentle, scented embrace of the blithe Nature that laughs and
rollicks and lavishes her myriad beauties on Japan.
I have seen strong men weep in Dresden and in Rome, moved to a new
emotion by some gigantic achievement of Occidental art,—an achievement
that was great, but far from faultless. The great proportion of Japanese
art is faultless, but far from great.
After all, I have no right to decide what constitutes greatness. Is a
forest greater than a maple leaf? I doubt it. Art is so infinite,—all
artists are so finite! The artists of Japan embroider with their
pencils, and paint with their needles. They follow their own art ideal.
Because it appeals to us less, it is not necessarily a smaller ideal
than our own.
The very delicacy of touch and mind that makes the Japanese the most
exquisite of all workmen, makes them the most sensitive of all peoples,
the most petulantly resentful of criticism. I fear that it would be
impossible for a European to write an article about Japan that would be
inoffensive to the Japanese, unless it were an article of unqualified
praise.
We reached Nagasaki in the early daylight. So should one always first
see Japan. To touch the shores of Japan in the dawning, to begin a new
day and a new exquisite experience, to steal with the sun into Nagasaki;
that is something to remember for ever, with gratitude. As we approached
Nagasaki it looked like a collection of cheerful Orientalised Swiss
chalets.
Nagasaki nestles against the hilly side of fair, green Kiu-siu like a
quaint burr clinging to the petal of a huge, lovely flower.
Japan in many parts is not unlike Switzerland—Switzerland grown warm
and comfortable, Switzerland reduced to a minute scale, Switzerland
burst into myriad bloom and softened into a new and gentle beauty. The
sun lit up the island more clearly as we stepped into the clean, little,
canoe-like tug that came to take us ashore.
A long line of ’rickshaws, as impatient as prancing horses, stood at the
low, sandy landing-place. Hundreds of quaintly-clad, bright-eyed people,
brown-skinned and buff, were moving daintily about the delicate scene.
Over a very serious, but a rather lazy-looking wooden building floated
the Stars and Stripes, and the Union-Jack-adorned British Consulate
looked as eminently respectable and as unpicturesque as did the official
residence of the American Consul.
Our family divided into three parties when we were well ashore. I was
the only adult wicked enough to ride behind a “human horse.” My husband
went to call at the Consulates, and to inspect the theatre, at which we
intended to play on our return. And Nurse marched bravely off, leading
the boy bairn, and followed by the wee girl bairn, who looked like a
great human snowball in the arms of black John the Madrassi.
I made a bargain with a sturdy, cheerful-looking jinrickshaw coolie, who
spoke good English and better French, and he started off into the heart
of bright, busy Nagasaki.
That coolie was a genius. And, unlike many genii, he had not mistaken
his avocation. He was a capital cicerone. He rang, or rather ran, the
changes on the Nagasaki sights in the deftest and most admirable way.
From the choicest shops to the queerest temple, from beside the jolliest
little vine-hung stream into the densest coolie quarter, for seven hours
he directed my travels in a masterly manner. And just when the captain
(so he afterwards told me) was almost beginning to use inelegant
English, the clever little native whirled me down to the shore, bowed me
into a tug, clapped his hands, laughed, and cried, “Sayonara.”
I do not know what delighted me most in Nagasaki I never knew what
delighted me most in Japan, it was all so delightful. Nagasaki was the
first bit of Japan I ever saw. I found in it a new charm. China was to
me like the land of the mighty magicians; Japan was fairyland.
The Japanese islands are running over with flowers. The Japanese temples
are a-tinkle with the music of bells. The soft-voiced people walk among
the blossoms, and their fine faces are aglow with the love of beauty,
and they themselves are innocently intoxicated with the delight of
living.
Nagasaki is so sweetly clean that one cannot wonder that tourists who
spend a few hours there rush back to their boats and write to the
journals of Europe and America that the Japanese are the cleanest people
on earth. I thought that the first day I was in Nagasaki. Alas, I
learned better in a dozen other Japanese cities!
It was in Nagasaki that I first felt the full force of Japanese
courtesy. My husband lunched in an elaborate fashion with friends at the
hotel, but I begged off and spent all of my seven hours in investigating
Nagasaki. When my coolie thought I had fasted long enough, he dropped
the shafts of the ’rickshaw and ran into a droll little papier-maché
looking house that was perched on the hilly highway, midway between the
cemetery and the bamboo-bridged streamlet. In a few moments he came back
carrying a tea-tray, and followed by a half-grown girl, who had cakes
and fruit in a lacquer basket. An old woman toddled after, and spread a
paper napkin on my lap. I enjoyed my _al fresco_ lunch very much, as I
sat in the ’rickshaw; the sunshine danced about me, but I was cool under
the shade of an immense plum tree. They brought me a strange copper
bowl, filled with warm water, and when I had paid the reasonable bill,
we went back to the little paradise of shops.
The great works of Western art move us to awe. Upon Europeans the
universal effect of Japanese works of art is a mad, insatiable desire to
possess. Very good people long to buy. I am not very good; my enemies
say that I am not good at all. Certainly, until my money gave out I
longed to buy everything I saw in Japan. But when my money gave out, as
it soon did, my one desire was to steal. I do not remember that I ever
did steal anything in Japan, but I often wanted to do so. And my husband
says that he mysteriously lost a hundred yen in Yokohama.
European art—if it is great art—holds us at a distance. Japanese art
woos us; we long to own it—to stroke it. Japanese art is as
approachable as it is fine. Occidental art keeps us in our place.
I saw Nagasaki again, when we were leaving Japan. Again our ship stopped
there for a few hours. We played _Hamlet_ there; it was an ethereal
experience—a fitting end of our stay in the daintiest, prettiest, most
mannerly country on the globe. We walked through the moonlight to the
theatre. The streets were silent, save for the plaintive whistle of the
blind shampooers. It sounded doubly sad to me as I realised that
possibly I should never hear it again.
I have often wondered what Ophelia would have said could she have seen
half the strange flowers I have worn in her name. Cowboys have brought
me the wild flowers of their wilder West (it was my wild West too).
Maharanees have sent me scented roses from behind purdahed gardens. Gold
kings and silver paupers have sent me soft flannel flowers, and pink
colonial roses from the Australian bush,—in all the quarters of the
globe I have been the recipient of the perfumed tribute paid to me
because I represented, however unworthily, the sweet, meek maiden who
was the genius-born daughter of Shakespeare’s pen.
In Nagasaki we had a paucity of scenery; but I had a wealth of flowers
for the “mad scene,” and as I wreathed the wistaria and the honeysuckle
with the pompom-like chrysanthemums, the Japanese lilies, and the
matchless roses, I almost wept over them my farewell to Japan.
In the late starlight we went back from the theatre to the boat. Japan
was almost hidden by the night. We stole into Japan in the dawning; we
stole out of Japan in the midnight dusk. Fit beginning, fit end of an
experience almost too exquisitely beautiful to be a reality,—an
experience of which I shall always think as of a Heaven-sent dream.
But between the early morning when the beauty of Japan dawned upon us,
and the night in whose deep dusk we lost sight of the incomparably
lovely islands, we had many weeks of rare delight,—weeks spent in
Hondo.
The little voyage up the “Inland Sea” was well-nigh marvellous. The
lakes and the mountains were as intricate as a Chinese puzzle, and as
beautiful as we fancy the Garden of Eden.
Kobe—the Hiogo of yore—broke the sylvan panorama of our sail and
Fusiyama accented it. Fusiyama rose between the green Japanese hills and
the blue Japanese sky like a white point of holy exclamation. It was
dormant, but a dozen lesser volcanoes threw up tongues of flame as we
passed.
In Kobe we found old friends—friends from London, from Boston, and from
Nevada. We found shelter in a cosy, well-cuisined hotel, and its
presiding genius had once been our Boniface in Montano. We were given
great hospitality in Kobe. We made some charming Japanese friends. I
revelled in the Japanese shops. And the fierce, rainy day that we sailed
for Yokohama, I was given such a roll of sumptuous black satin, on which
wonderfully skilled Japanese fingers had embroidered great clusters of
purple _fleur-de-lis_!