THE IDEA OF A GAP
Bold is the donkey driver, O Khedive, and bold is the Khedive who
dares to say what he will believe, not knowing in any wise the mind of
Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart.
The "Japanese Carlyle" is getting grey. It seemed well to seek out
some young Japanese thinker and take his view of that "heathenism"
concerning which Uchimura had delivered himself so unsparingly. Let me
speak of my first visit to my friend Yanagi.
As a youth Yanagi was a lonely student. He took his own way to
knowledge and religion. The famed General Nogi had been given by the
Emperor the direction of the Peers' School, but even under such
distinguished tutelage the stripling made his stand. His reading led
him to write for the school magazine an anti-militarist article. The
veteran, as I once learned from a friend of Yanagi, promptly paraded
the school, boys and masters. He spoke of disloyal, immoral,
subversive ideas, and bade the youthful disturber of the peace attend
him at his own house. When Yanagi stood before Nogi and was asked what
he had to say, he replied with the question, "Don't you feel pain
because of sending so many men to death before Port Arthur[107]?"
Again I found my prophet in a cottage. It was a cottage overlooking
rice fields and a lagoon. From the Japanese scene outdoors I passed
indoors to a new Japan. Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Van
Gogh, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake--Yanagi has written
a big book on Blake which is in a second edition--hung within sight
of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music[108].
Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places
in the dwelling not occupied by Western pictures and the Western
library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history of
Eastern and Western mysticism. An armful of books about Blake and
Boehme, all Swedenborg, all Carlyle, all Emerson, all Whitman, all
Shelley, all Maeterlinck, all Francis Thompson, and all Tagore, and
plenty of other complete editions; early Christian mystics; much of
William Law, Bergson, Eucken, Caird, James, Haldane, Bertrand Russell,
Jefferies, Havelock Ellis, Carpenter, Strindberg, "Æ," Yeats, Synge
and Shaw; not a little poetry of the fashion of Vaughan, Traherne and
Crashaw; a well-thumbed Emily Brontë; all the great Russian novelists;
numbers of books on art and artists--it was an arresting collection to
come on in a Japanese hamlet, and odd to sit down beside it in order
to talk of "heathen."
"Yes," said Yanagi--he speaks an English which reflects his wide
reading--"our young maid, on being shown the full moon the other
night, bowed her head. I find this natural instinct of some value. Our
people have much natural feeling towards Nature. If modern Japanese
art has degenerated it is because it does not sufficiently find out
life in things. The sough of the wind in the trees may have only a
slight influence on character, but it is a vital influence. I do not
like, of course, the word 'heathendom' of which Uchimura seems so
fond. I dearly admire Christ, but most of the Christianity of to-day
is not Christ. It is largely Paul. It is a mixture. It is not the
clear, pure, original thing. Christians must reform their Christianity
before it can satisfy us. In the East we now see clearly enough to
seek only the best that the West can offer."
Yanagi said that the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions
ought to be recognised. "You will find Christians admiring Walt
Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the
prophet of naturalness." He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect
of Buddhists. Many of the Zen devotees were "noble and had a profound
idea." He was unable to see "any difference at all" between the best
part of Buddhism and the best part of Christianity. He said that his
own mysticism was based on science, art, religion and philosophy. "My
sincerest wish," he declared, "is to produce a beautiful
reconciliation of these four. As it is, too often scientists and
philosophers have no deep knowledge of religion or art, artists have
no deep knowledge of religion or science, and the religious have no
idea of art. Surely the deepest religious idea is the deepest artistic
and philosophic idea. Perhaps our scientists are in the poorest state
just now with no understanding of art or religion. Our scientists are
immersed in the problem of matter, our religious people in the problem
of spirit, and our artists forget that in dealing with nature they are
dealing with spirit as well as body."
Faced by force and science when Commander Perry came, Japan, in order
to save herself from foreign colonisation, had had to concentrate all
her attention on force and science. She had concentrated her attention
with signal success. But naturally she had had, in the process, to
slacken her hold somewhat on the spiritual life.
"Always remember how difficult the Japanese find it to know which way
to take. Their whole basis has been shaken and on the surface all has
become chaotic. Ten years hence it will be possible to take a just
view. There is much reason for high hopes. For one thing, the burden
of old thought does not rest so heavily on us as might be supposed. We
are very free in many ways. In the matter of religion Japan is the
most free nation in the world. If England were to become Buddhist it
would sound strange or exotic, but Japan is free to become what she
may."
"There may be a great difference between one of our temples and
shrines and an English church," Yanagi proceeded, "but I cannot
believe in the gap which some people seem to see yawning between East
and West. It is deplorable that the world should think that there is
such a complete difference between East and West. It is usually said
that self-denial, asceticism, sacrifice, negation are opposed to
self-affirmation, individualism, self-realisation; but I do not
believe in such a gap. I wish to destroy the idea of a gap. It is an
idea which was obtained analytically. The meeting of East and West
will not be upon a bridge over a gap, but upon the destruction of the
idea of a gap.
"In future, religion cannot be limited by this or that sect or idea.
Religion cannot be limited to Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism or
Mahomedanism. Uchimura says that it is the essence of Christianity
which has the power to rescue Japan from its chaotic state. But the
essence of Buddhism can also contribute some important element to the
future of Japan. The notion that the essence of Christianity and the
essence of Buddhism are far apart is artificial and prejudiced."
One day some weeks later I walked with Yanagi on the hills. He said:
"The weakest point in the Japanese character is the lack of the power
of questioning. We are repressed by our educational system. And so
many things come here at one time that it makes confusion. What is so
often taken for a lack of originality in us is a state resulting from
an immense importation of foreign ideas. They have been overpowering.
Many of us have no clear ideas on life, society, sex and so on, and
you will find it difficult to get satisfactory answers to many
questions which you will want to ask."
As to morality, it was dangerous to say "this or that is immoral."
Morality was often merely custom. Ordinary morality had scant
authority. Critics of Japanese morality should not forget that, in the
opinion of Japanese, Western people were more erotic than they were.
Western dancing--not to speak of Western women's evening costumes--was
undoubtedly more erotic than Japanese dancing. Again, the sexual
curiosity of foreigners seemed stronger than that manifested by
Japanese. It was a well-known fact that the girls at many hotels and
restaurants had not a little to complain of from foreign men who
misjudged their naïve ways. It must be remembered that Japanese were
franker in sexual matters than Europeans and Americans. Sexual
ill-doing was not so much concealed as in Europe. A wrong impression
of Japanese morality was taken away by tourists whose guides showed
them, as in Paris, what they expected to see.
"I wonder," he said, "that Western visitors to Tokyo who talk of our
immorality are not struck by the fact that in an Eastern capital a
foreign lady may walk home at night and be practically safe from being
spoken to. The Japanese are undoubtedly a very kind people. They may
be unmoral, but they are not immoral."
"Most of our people do not understand liberty in the mental sexual
relations. Love is not free. In a very large proportion of cases,
indeed, parents would oppose a match because a son or daughter had
fallen in love. And if it is difficult to marry for love it is not
easy to fall in love.[109] Society in which young men and young women
meet is restricted; there are few opportunities of conversation.
Without liberty towards women there can be no perfect sense of
responsibility towards them."
What had been taught to women as the supreme virtue was the virtue of
sacrifice for father, husband, children. It was most important to let
women know the significance of individualism. They were always
offering themselves for others before they became themselves. But the
idea of individuality was very little clearer to the Japanese man than
to the Japanese woman. People were too prone to wish to give 100 yen
before they had 100 yen. The Japanese were the most devotional people
in the world, but they hardly knew yet the things to be devoted to.
Yanagi is a leading member of a small association of literary men,
artists and students who graduated together from the Peers' School.
They call themselves for no obvious reason the Shirakaba or Silver
Birch Society. The intelligent and consistent efforts of these young
men to introduce vital Western work in literature, philosophy,
painting, sculpture, draughtsmanship and music, and the large measure
of success they have attained is of some significance. Several members
of the group belong to the old Kuge families, that is the ancient
nobility which surrounded the Emperor at Kyoto before the
Restoration. Cut off for centuries from military and administrative
activities by the dominance of the Shogunate Government, the Kuge
devoted themselves to the arts and the refinements of life. For the
exclusiveness of the past some of their descendants substitute
artistic integrity. The Shirakaba has had for several years a
remarkable magazine. Its editor and its publisher, its size, its price
and its date of publication are continually changed; it never makes
any bid for popularity; it expresses its sentiments in a downright way
and it has always been anti-official: yet it survives and pays its
way. Beyond the magazine, the Society has had every year at least one
exhibition of what its members conceive to be significant modern
European work. The members have also supported a few Japanese artists
of outstanding sincerity. Through the Shirakaba the influence of
Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Blake, Delacroix, Matisse, Augustus John,
Beardsley, Courbet, Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet,
particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked. The
Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of
Rembrandt, Dürer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael Angelo,
Tintoretto, Giotto and Mantegna[110].
While an ardent Young Japan has formed and dissolved many societies,
movements and fashions, this Shirakaba group has held fast and has
gained friends by its sincerity, its vision and its audacity[111].
Rodin encouraged the Shirakaba efforts to reproduce the best Western
art by presenting it with three pieces of sculpture.
"The intellectual man does no fighting," Froude has written. Why do
not Yanagi and his friends make a stand on public questions?
"Because," he said, "at the present stage of our development it is
almost impossible to take up a strong attitude, and because, important
though political and social questions are, they are not, in our
opinion, of the first importance. To artists, philosophers, students
of religion, such problems are secondary. More important problems are:
What is the meaning of this world? What is God? What is the essence of
religion? How can we best nourish ourselves so as to realise our own
personalities? Political and social problems are secondary for us at
present; they are not related emotionally to our present
conditions[112].
For the East the Root,
For the West the Fruit.
"If we faced such problems directly we should probably make them
primary problems, as you do in Great Britain. Our present attitude
does not prove, however, that we are cold to political and social
problems. In fact, when we think of these terrible political and
social questions they make us boil. But you will understand that in
order to have something to give to others, we must have that
something. We are seeking after that something."
Yanagi, continuing, spoke of the direct contribution which the new
artistic movement in Japan, under the influence of modern Western art,
was making to the solution of political and social questions[113]. The
interest of the younger generation in Post Impressionism was "quite
disharmonious with the ordinary attitude towards militarism."
European art broke down barriers in the Japanese mind. When the
younger generation, nourished on higher ideals, grew up, it would be
the State, and there would be a more hopeful condition of affairs.
People generally supposed that social questions were the most
practical; but religious, artistic, philosophic questions were, in the
truest sense of the word, the most practical.
Yanagi went on to tell of his devotion to Blake. He could not
understand "why Englishmen are so cool to him." He asked me how it was
that there was no word about Blake in Andrew Lang's work on English
literature. "I cannot imagine," he said, "why such an intelligent man
could not appreciate Blake." Yanagi regarded Blake as "the artist of
immense will, of immense desire, and a man in whom can be seen that
affirmative attitude towards life, exhibited later by Whitman." Yanagi
spoke also of "Anglo-Saxon nobility, liberty, depth of character and
healthiness," and of "a deep and noble character" in English
literature which he did not find elsewhere. Whitman, Emerson, Poe and
William James were "the crown of America."
As I close this chapter I recall Yanagi's library, in the service of
which, bettering Mark Pattison's example, two-thirds of its owner's
income was for some time expended. I remember the thatched dwelling
overlooking the quiet reed-bound lagoon with its frosty sunrises, red
moonrises and apparitions of Fuji above the clouds seventy miles away.
No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that
room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets
West in harmony. I have made note of his Western books but not of the
classics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in
piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown. I have not
mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful
brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism
to Japan; severe little gilt-bronze figures of deities from China, a
little older; pottery figures of exquisite beauty from the tombs of
Tang, a little later; Sung pottery, a dynasty farther on; Korai
celadons from Korean tombs of the same epoch; and whites and blue and
whites of Ming and Korean Richo. On the wall a black and yellow tiger
is "burning bright" on a strip of blood-red silk tapestry woven on a
Chinese loom for a Taoist priest 500 years ago. Cimabue's portrait of
St. Francis breathes over Yanagi's writing desk from one side, while
from the other Blake's amazing life mask looks down "with its Egyptian
power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism." These
are Yanagi's silent friends. His less quiet friends of the flesh have
felt that this room was a sanctuary and Yanagi a priest of eternal
things, but a priest without priestcraft, a priest living joyously in
the world. Above his desk is inscribed the line of Blake:
Thou also, dwellest in eternity
and Kepler's aspiration, "My wish is that I may perceive God whom I
find everywhere in the external world in like manner within and
without me."
FOOTNOTES:
[107] One of the reasons assigned for the suicide of the General was
thoughts of his responsibility for the terrible slaughter in the
assaults on Port Arthur.
[108] Mrs. Yanagi is one of the best contraltos heard at the now
numerous Japanese concerts of Western music.
[109] _Shinjū_, or suicide for love, the girl often being a geisha, is
common.
[110] "I am inclined to think," wrote Yanagi in 1921, in a paper on
Korean art, "that we have paid if anything rather too much attention
to European works while making little effort to pay attention to what
lies much nearer to us."
[111] POLICE STANDARDS.--The sale of one issue of the magazine was
prohibited by the police, who found a nude "antagonistic to the
ordinary standard of public morals." The editors' answer next
month--the police standard being, "No front views"--was to publish
half a dozen more nudes with their backs to the reader.
[112] It will be remembered that this conversation took place in the
summer of 1915 at the outset of my investigation. Since then, as noted
throughout this book, economic questions have increasingly pressed
themselves forward. I may mention that in 1919 Yanagi wrote a
vigorous and moving protest against misgovernment in Korea. In a
recent letter to me he says: "You know that I am going to establish a
Korean Folk Art Society in Seoul. This is a big work, but I want to do
it with all my power for love of Korea. I approach the solution of the
Korean question by the way of Art. Politics can never solve the
question. I want to use the gallery as a meeting-place of Koreans and
Japanese. People cannot quarrel in beauty. This is my simple yet
definite belief." Yanagi's manifesto on his project made one think of
the age when the great culture of China and India glowed across the
straits of Tsushima in the wake of early Buddhism.
[113] A well-known member of the Shirakaba group started two years ago
an "ideal village" among the mountains. It is an effort towards social
freedom in which the police manifest a continuous interest.
ACROSS JAPAN (TOKYO TO NIIGATA AND
BACK)