favorite walks mostly lead to waterfalls. I spent a soaking day making
a sketch of one of them--Kirifuri; the path to it crossed a wide, stony
river, and went over grassy hills where there were abundant wild
flowers, purple iris, white and mauve funkias, yellow orchids, clusters
of white roses, pink spiræas, hydrangeas, St.-John’s-wort, meadow-rue,
and bocconia appearing here and there, half hidden among the rank
herbage. The big buds of auratum lilies showed how fine they would be in
a few days’ time. Just in front of the waterfall a little tea-house gave
me shelter enough to work in; but the path, up which I had walked
dry-shod, by the time I got back had been turned to a raging torrent,
and I only just crossed the stony river in time, for the light bamboo
bridge was washed down during the night.
[Illustration: THE MOOR NEAR YUMOTO]
Chūzenji is a little hamlet, some hours’ walk from Nikko up a mountain
road, consisting of a group of tea-houses which overlook a charming
lake, a very sacred temple with a large bronze torii, and long rows of
sheds to accommodate the pilgrims who come in early August to make the
[Illustration: A WET DAY AT CHŪZENJI]
ascent of Nantai-zan, the mountain which rises close behind the village.
During five long days of incessant rain I painted everything that was
visible from my room in one of the tea-houses, the water of the lake
rising each day so much higher that on the last two I was able to take a
morning header from my balcony, and I hardly got a chance to explore the
country round. At last a bright morning tempted me to
[Illustration: THE FOOT OF NANTAI-ZAN]
walk on to Yumoto, and see the sulphur springs and the wide moorland,
Senjō-ga-hara, which lies surrounded by mountain-peaks at a height of
nearly five thousand feet above the sea. On the moor the grasses do not
grow high enough to conceal the flowers, and I found it gay with purple
iris and white meadow-rue. The baths in Yumoto are open to the public;
they are large wooden tanks under sheds by the road-side, and as you
walk along the street you see the patients, men, women, and children,
all sitting together, in a state of nature, up to their necks in the
steaming malodorous soup. The clouds were gathering round the
mountain-tops as I started to walk back to Chūzenji, and before I had
finished a rapid sketch on the moor the rain began again in torrents;
the road was a series of small ponds, and my coolie insisted on carrying
me, as well as my sketching materials, through them; but he
unfortunately stumbled under my weight, and dropped me in the deepest of
them, and what with the wet above and below I was well soaked by the
time I reached my tea-house. The hibachi seems a very inadequate means
of warmth on such occasions; a hot bath and whiskey and dry clothes are
more effective, and after dinner a bottle of tamago-sake, a hot compound
of whipped egg and sake, soon produces a pleasing drowsiness. Since
leaving Chūzenji I have recognized the place in many drawings on screens
and fans; the artist always gives its main features--the lake, the
cryptomerias, the huge bronze torii, and the steep wooded slope of
Nantai-zan--but he combines them in one view as you never can see them
in reality. The rain had played havoc with the road back to Nikko;
several bridges were down, but temporary ones built of fagots made it
possible to cross the streams. All the higher woods near the lake are
hung with gray moss, and the flowering shrubs which grow among them are
endless--azaleas, climbing and bushy hydrangeas, weigelia, seringa, and
wild vine; on the ground I found orange Turk’s-cap lilies, columbines,
the big _Lilium cordifolium_, and ferns of many kinds.
Notwithstanding the advantage of cooler nights, I was glad to leave the
green mountains, with their constant rain and mists, and the shut-in
valleys, where it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards
away, and get down
[Illustration: THE MOAT OF BENTEN-SHIBA]
again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. On the
journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the
railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the
little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.
The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my
lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early
morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon
the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so
large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them
as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of
wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms.
Besides this their glaucous surface, like that of a cabbage leaf,
reflects every passing phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in
color as clouds pass over.
Japanese drawings of flowers--and they usually draw them
beautifully--are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man
who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what
appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the
exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following
artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became
exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes
and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are
most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less
popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there
is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely
on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on
the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are
spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a marked
feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But
some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now
they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will
be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other
people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps,
without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a
renaissance in Japanese art.
The Japanese treatment of landscape is not more conventional than that
of Claude or David Cox, or than the shorthand of our pencil-sketches,
but it records its facts in a different way. The everlasting question in
art is the imitation of nature; it has never been carried further in
certain directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, or
in others than by Manet, Monet, and the modern French, but no one can
put in everything; look at a simple bunch of leaves in sunlight against
a wall, and think how long it would take to really imitate all their
complexities of form, color, and light and shade; some facts can only be
given by ignoring others, and the question what is the important thing
which must be insisted on is the personal affair of each individual
artist in every country where art is unfettered and alive. But in
Japanese, as in Byzantine and other Eastern arts, this question is still
decided by the practice of past generations, and it will take all the
vitality of a strong man to infuse new life into it without destroying
its many exquisite qualities. Perhaps when Japanese artists absorb its
spirit instead of merely trying to imitate its methods, Western art may
help in the direction of freedom; at present I fear that its influence
has done more harm than good.
The people are so quick to recognize the meaning of a few lines, and to
understand the poetic idea which they suggest, that it is a wonder the
artists ever learned to draw at all; they might have been content with
symbols, for a few lines like those below are enough to convey all the
poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the well-known art
motives.
[Illustration]
The little island of Benten is a frequented spot, and my easel was
surrounded from morning till night with a crowd of spectators; they
dispersed at the command of the policeman on his hourly round, but after
he had gazed his fill and left me, a new lot instantly assembled. They
were mostly children; and a crowd of Japanese children is twice as many
as any other crowd of its size, for every child has another smaller one
tied to its back. I suppose they are not born in pairs this way, but
they contract the habit of carrying a little one at a very early age,
and often tie on a doll when a sufficiently small human being cannot be
found. The spectators are almost always polite, and take care not to put
themselves between you and your subject; but they squeeze up very close
to your elbow, and trample on your nerves, if not on your materials.
They usually remarked that my work was a photograph; some more educated
ones said that it was an oil-painting, that being the medium which is
associated with foreign art; and one man said that it was enamel, which
I took as a compliment to the brilliancy of my color. The keeper of a
little tea-shed hard by, where I took my lunch, noticed that I was
worried by the people standing so close to me, and when I arrived next
morning I found that he had put up a fence round the place where I
worked; it was only a few slender bamboo sticks, with a thin string
twisted from one to another, but not a soul attempted to come inside it.
They are such an
[Illustration: SPECTATORS]
obedient and docile race that a little string stretched across a road is
quite enough to close the thoroughfare. It is difficult to reconcile the
character of this peaceable and pleasure-loving race which the modern
traveller sees with that which is ascribed to their forefathers--those
heroes of the desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages
of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries of Tokugawa
rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed qualities of unreasoning
obedience, and perhaps all the struggles of the past were merely
dynastic, or affairs between the warriors of different clans; perhaps
the people themselves have always been as gentle as they are now,
cultivating their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little
affected by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all times
and countries, they were called on to supply the sinews of war.
[Illustration: THE LAST TEA LEAVES--COTTAGE NEAR YOKOHAMA]
The lotus is intimately connected with Buddhism; most personifications
of the Buddha are represented as seated or standing on its flower, or
holding an unexpanded bud in their hands; it is largely used in temple
decorations, and vases with imitations in metal of the flowers, leaves,
buds, and seed-pods, often very exquisite in workmanship, stand on all
the altars. It is typical to the Buddhist mind of the qualities of the
ideal man: as it grows in the mud, yet produces a lovely flower, it is a
symbol of purity in a naughty world; as its odor sweetens the air
around, so his good deeds influence those about him; it opens in the
morning sunshine, and his mind is expanded by the light of knowledge;
its branchless stalks, rising without a break to the leaf or flower, are
a type of his single-mindedness and directness of purpose; and its
edible root shows that the basis of his life must be usefulness to
others. To this I may add that, like the very good, the flower always
dies young. It is lovely enough in itself without all this halo of
virtue. Hardy says of Tess, “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay
not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”; this is unavoidable
with most of us, and the suggestion of feelings and memories of our own
does not necessarily obscure our visual sense; but a fixed and
recognized suggestion is the result of mental laziness, and may lead to
the ignoring of intrinsic beauty; as our lovely primrose is to some eyes
a political badge, admired only because of its association with a name
and a faction, or rejected for the same cause. To quote Mr. Punch,
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A party emblem was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
But the lotus has not sunk so low as this; though it has been adopted by
the Buddhists, it excites no animosity in Shinto breasts; and where
temples under the present _régime_ have been handed over from the one
religion to the other, though the pagoda and other distinctively
Buddhist
[Illustration: LOTUS-PONDS AT KAMAKURA]
structures are pulled down, the lotus-ponds are left in their beauty.
The largest I saw were those connected with the great Hachiman temple at
Kamakura, which has been turned over to the state religion; they cover
several acres, and the flowers in them are of three colors--either
white, bright rose, or a delicate shell-like pink. All three varieties
seem to grow equally freely, and one is as lovely as the other. The
white one has been specially adopted by
[Illustration: LOTUS-PATCH AMONG THE RICE-FIELDS, KAWASAKI, TŌKYŌ]
the followers of Nichiren, a noisy sect which beats a drum during the
long hours of prayer, and it is this variety, too, which is usually
grown in patches here and there among the rice-fields for the sake of
its roots. They have not much flavor, except that of the sugar with
which they are boiled, but they are crisp in texture and pleasant to
munch. The children are very fond of the nutlike seeds which are
embedded in the fleshy seed-pod; it looks very like the rose of a
watering-pot. In the tea-booths round the temple of Benten they use a
dried slice of this pod for a mat on which to stand the cup or bowl.
[Illustration: A TEA-HOUSE AT KAMAKURA]
Kamakura was for a long time the capital of Japan; in the twelfth
century it was selected for his headquarters by Yoritomo, the great
warrior whose victories enabled him to take the reins into his own
hands, and to establish that system of military government which only
ended with the deposition of the last Shogun in 1868. But when a rival
family defeated his successors they removed the seat of government, and
Kamakura rapidly declined from a great city of more than a million
inhabitants to the insignificant fishing-village which it now is, with
nothing to show of its former greatness but this temple of Hachiman, and
the Daibutsu, an enormous bronze Buddha, not only remarkable for its
size, but also for being the finest and most dignified production which
the art of Japan can show. The temple buildings which once sheltered it
were destroyed ages ago, and the image is now in the open air, in one of
the little valleys which branch out from the plain and run back among
the pine-clad hills. Centuries of exposure to rain and sun have given
varied colors to the great bronze god. He is seated cross-legged on a
lotus-flower, his hands folded in his lap; the head is bent slightly
forward, and his face gazes down with an expression of calm superiority
which can only come from perfected wisdom and subjugated passions. A new
shrine to Yoritomo’s memory, all of black and gold, stands near one of
the lotus-ponds; in front of it are some splendid old willow-trees,
which he is said to have planted, and under which he sat and composed
poetry when he was not engaged more actively in fighting. It is hardly
possible that these willows can have lived to such a great age; they are
probably descendants of the original trees. Behind the shrine is a large
modern barrack, and I saw bands of white-clad recruits, with side-arms
and repeating rifles, trousers,
[Illustration: YORITOMO’S WILLOWS AND HIS SHRINE]
tunics, and forage-caps, quite European in everything but face and
stature, constantly passing to and fro over the ground where the old
warrior must have seen his quaint soldiers in lacquered armor and bronze
helmets carrying their long-bows and queer-shaped halberds. One day when
I was painting the willows my boy Matsuba, who had plenty of spare time
for investigating the neighborhood while waiting to carry home my
umbrella and things, came and told me that there was a wrestling-match
at a small temple about a mile away. I packed up at once and we walked
over there, for I was very anxious to see what kind of a sport it was.
This was a tournament, and all the professional wrestlers of the
neighborhood, and many youths anxious to distinguish themselves, had
collected to take part in it. They were divided into three classes. The
masters of the art were all past their first youth; not enormously
stout, as they are often represented in drawings and carvings, but fine,
athletic men, taller than the average of Japanese. They wore their hair
in the ancient style, shaved away from the centre of the head, and the
locks from the back and side made into a queue, turned up and knotted
with a string on the top of the poll; they had no clothes except a
loin-cloth and an embroidered apron. In the second class were men who
had won but few prizes; they were not all in the professional get-up,
and some of them were evidently laboring-men with a taste for sport. The
third class was composed of youths, none of them more than nineteen or
twenty years old. The contests took place in the temple court-yard on a
circular bed of sand, under a roof supported by wooden pillars, but not
enclosed at the sides; round the edge of this raised circle there was
laid a straw rope, and the man won who could either fairly throw his
opponent or force him across the rope without being dragged over
himself. The proceedings were conducted by a Shinto priest in full
dress, wide trousers, and a coat sticking out from the shoulders like
that of a modern young lady, who with a peculiar-shaped fan gave the
signal to begin and to stop. For the highest class this umpire was a
venerable old gentleman; for the others the place was taken by young
priests who needed to learn this part of their business. The wrestlers
came on in pairs as their names were called, and after a great deal of
marching round, stamping, rubbing their limbs, making gestures of
defiance, and so on, they squatted opposite each other. When the
[Illustration: JAPANESE WRESTLERS]
signal was given to begin they rested their fingers on the ground
between their knees, and leaned towards each other till their foreheads
touched, sometimes waiting several minutes before attempting to make any
grip. If the grip seemed unfair or unsatisfactory to one of the
opponents, he immediately put down his hands, the priest stopped the
bout, and all the preliminary business had to be gone through again; but
if it seemed all right the struggle began, and sometimes lasted for five
minutes, each man straining every muscle in a splendid way, and using
all the science and cunning he knew. If it lasted too long without
either man gaining any advantage, the priest signalled to them to stop,
and they had to wait till their turn came round again. The preceding
rough sketch, made while jammed in the crowd of spectators, will give
some idea of the attitude of the men waiting for the fan to be lowered.
Everything was conducted in the most ceremonious and orderly manner, and
there was no drunkenness or rowdyism, although the multitudes who had
assembled were entirely of the poorest class. The most fashionable
wrestling-matches are held in Tōkyō in spring and autumn, and the
champion is as much a popular favorite as a famous torero in Spain, or a
well-known prize-fighter in England and America.
Those who read these notes will have gathered that the heat and the rain
make summer life in Japan not wholly enjoyable; let me also say some
words of warning to the thin-skinned against the mosquitoes, and even
more against a horrible little insect which lives in the grass or sand
and bites your legs and feet. It is so small that I never succeeded in
finding it, but its bite brings up a blister which breaks and leaves
troublesome sores. There were few nights from June till October when I
was not obliged to get up once or twice and bathe them in cold water to
allay the intolerable itching. The sea, too, has its terrors. I went
down to the shore near Kamakura one hot night, hoping that a swim would
soothe my troubled skin, but no sooner had I plunged into the
approaching wave than my neck and arms were embraced by jelly-fish, and
I scrambled out feeling and looking as if I had taken my bath in a bed
of nettles. The Japanese, although they grumble and fan themselves a
good deal, do not really mind the heat; their draughty houses are
admirably adapted for fine summer weather, and their clothing is
sensible and scanty. But the foreigners suffer, and as September comes,
and the lotus flowers fade, they hail with relief the approach of the
cooler and dryer weather of autumn.
[Illustration: LESPEDEZA “MAGI”]
[Illustration: THE HEART-LEAVED LILY]
FUJISAN
[Illustration: CAMPANULAS ON FUJI]
FUJISAN
[Illustration]
The great mountain of Japan is well known to us all; its form appears on
countless screens and fans, and its foreign name, Fusiyama, is as
familiar as Mont Blanc or Pike’s Peak. By the Japanese it is called
Fuji, or Fujisan, or sometimes Fuji-noyama when speaking poetically: it
is difficult to understand how an _s_ came to be substituted for the _j_
by foreigners, but under any name there is a peculiar fascination about
the mountain, and the first sight of it, from the hundred steps in
Yokohama, from Ueno in Tōkyō through a haze of telephone wires, or
across the waves of Suruga Bay from the deck of a steamer, is an event
which will be fixed in the traveller’s memory.
I can never see a high place without wishing to be on the top of it,
and Fuji looks obtrusively high. The long sweep with which it heaves its
twelve thousand feet above the shore, the absence of any competitive
mountains, and the exaggerated perspective of its broad base and narrow
summit, all add to this impression, and the ambitious soul longs to be
on such a superior eminence. And there is no better way of taking a
holiday than to climb a mountain. To go down a river leads to laziness;
things glide by which look as if they ought to be sketched, but to do so
would involve stopping the boat, and interfering with the forces of
nature which are gently furthering the traveller’s ends, and thus the
mind is tossed to and fro between the delight of seeing things and the
unpleasant feeling that it is a duty to work. Thinking is the one thing
to be especially avoided on a holiday, and there is too much time for
thinking on an ordinary river. The same objection holds against walking
on easy roads; in fact, the farther you walk the more you think; but in
climbing a really big hill all thought is killed for hours by the simple
physical exertion, and you become a mere machine, with a laboriously
pumping heart and very heavy legs. And what a sense of superiority comes
when the highest point is at last reached, when the world is all below
you, half cloud and half solid earth, lovely, mysterious, and absolutely
unpaintable. Even this sense fades from me in a few minutes, and I
become a nonentity, with only a vague feeling of the hugeness of the
universe and the infinitesimal smallness of the individual, and the
opening verse of Adam’s morning hymn always comes into my mind, as it
did years ago on the top of a Somersetshire hill overlooking the
Glastonbury flats, just after my first reading of “Paradise Lost.”
An artist often hears the remark, “You must find painting a great
resource,” as if it were an amusement like golf or trout-fishing; and no
doubt to many people a landscape-painter’s life seems like one long
holiday; but the struggle with ever-changing skies and fast-fading
flowers has its fatigues, and the mind gets wearied of constantly
thinking how this and that ought to be painted, so when a friend in
Yokohama suggested that we should go up Fuji together, I accepted his
proposal with alacrity, and we chose the first week in August for our
excursion, that being the time when there is the best chance of good
weather, and when most pilgrims are to be seen on the mountain. One of
the most boring things in life is to walk through new and interesting
country with a man who has no eyes for anything but his watch, and who
insists on telling you how many minutes the last mile has taken; but my
friend’s figure was a sufficient guarantee against any attempt at
“record-cutting,”
[Illustration: GOING UP IN THE MIST]
and I felt sure that his pace would give me plenty of time for looking
about.