On entering the town, at the turn of the principal street, I have the
good luck to meet No. 415, my poor relation. I was just at that moment
in want of a speedy djin, and I at once get into his vehicle; besides,
it will be an alleviation to my feelings, in this hour of departure,
to take my last drive in company with a member of my family.
Unaccustomed as I was to be out of doors during the hours of siesta,
I had never yet seen the streets of the town thus overwhelmed by the
sunshine, thus deserted in the silence and solitary brilliancy
peculiar to all hot countries.
In front of all the shops hang white shades, adorned here and there
with slight designs in black, in the quaintness of which lurks I know
not what,--something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures
The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this
old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald,
notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings.
These little wooden houses, of such marvelous cleanly whiteness
inside, are black outside, time-worn, disjointed and _grimacing_. When
one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the
hideous masks laughing in the shop fronts of the innumerable
curio-shops; in the grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols,
cruel, suspicious mad;--it is even found in the buildings: in the
friezes of the religious porticos, in the roofs of the thousand
pagodas; of which the angles and gable-ends writhe and twist like the
yet dangerous remains of ancient and malignant beasts.
And the disturbing intensity of expression reigning over inanimate
nature, contrasts with the almost absolute blank of the human
countenance, with the smiling foolishness of the simple little folk
who meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in
the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their
heels, carving with their imperceptible tools, the droll or odiously
obscene ivory ornaments, marvelous cabinet curiosities which have made
Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it.
Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of
lacquer or of porcelain traditional designs learnt by heart, or
transmitted to their brains by a process of heredity through thousands
of years; automatic painters, whose storks are similar to those of M.
Sucre, with the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies
eternally the same. The least of these illuminators, with his
insignificant eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum
of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous,
which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative
decadence, and which has become the great resource of our
manufacturers of cheap "_objects of art_."
Is it because I am about to leave this country, because I have no
longer any link to bind me to it, any resting-place on its soil, and
that my spirit is already on the wing? I know not, but it seems to me
I have never as clearly seen and comprehended it as to-day. And more
even than ever, do I find it little, aged, with worn-out blood and
worn-out sap; I feel more fully its antediluvian antiquity, its
centuries of mummification, which will soon degenerate into hopeless
and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes into contact with Western
novelties.
It is getting late; little by little, the siestas are everywhere
coming to an end; the queer little streets brighten up and begin to
swarm in the sunshine with many-colored parasols. Now begins the
procession of uglinesses of the most impossible description,--a
procession of long-robed, grotesque figures capped with pot-hats or
sailors' head-gear. Business transactions begin again, and the
struggle for existence, close and bitter here as in one of our own
artisan quarters, but meaner and smaller.
At the moment of my departure, I can only find within myself a smile
of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Liliputian
curtseying people,--laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted
with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and
incurable monkeyishness.
Poor cousin 415, how right I was to have held him in good esteem; he
is by far the best and most disinterested of my Japanese family. When
all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle under a
tree, and much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting me on
board the _Triomphante_, to watch over my final purchases in the
sampan which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself safely
into my cabin.
His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling,
without a suppressed smile, on quitting this Japan.
No doubt, in this country as in many others, there is more honest
friendship and less ugliness among the simple beings devoted to purely
physical work.
At five o'clock in the afternoon we set sail.
Along the line of the shore are two or three sampans; in them the
mousmés, shut up in the narrow cabins, peep at us through the tiny
windows, half hiding their faces on account of the sailors; these are
our wives, who have wished, out of politeness, to look upon us once
more.
There are other sampans as well, in which other Japanese women are
also watching our departure. These stand upright, under great parasols
decorated with big black letters and daubed over with clouds of varied
and startling colors.