Kabanata Kabanata 4 · FROM A TRAVELING DIARY

. FROM A TRAVELING DIARY

OSAKA-KYOTO RAILWAY.

April 15, 1895.

Feeling drowsy in a public conveyance, and not being able to lie

down, a Japanese woman will lift her long sleeve before her face

ere she begins to nod. In this second-class railway-carriage

there are now three women asleep in a row, all with faces

screened by the left sleeve, and all swaying together with the

rocking of the train, like lotos-flowers in a soft current. (This

use of the left sleeve is either fortuitous or instinctive;

probably instinctive, as the right hand serves best to cling to

strap or seat in case of shock.) The spectacle is at once pretty

and funny, but especially pretty, as exemplifying that grace with

which a refined Japanese woman does everything,--always in the

daintiest and least selfish way possible. It is pathetic, too,

for the attitude is also that of sorrow, and sometimes of weary

prayer. All because of the trained sense of duty to show only

one's happiest face to the world.

Which fact reminds me of an experience.

A male servant long in my house seemed to me the happiest of

mortals. He laughed invariably when spoken to, looked always

delighted while at work, appeared to know nothing of the small

troubles of life. But one day I peeped at him when he thought

himself quite alone, and his relaxed face startled me. It was not

the face I had known. Hard lines of pain and anger appeared in

it, making it seem twenty years older. I coughed gently to

announce my presence. At once the face smoothed, softened,

lighted up as by a miracle of rejuvenation. Miracle, indeed, of

perpetual unselfish self-control.

Kyoto, April 16.

The wooden shutters before my little room in the hotel are pushed

away; and the morning sun immediately paints upon my shoji,

across squares of gold light, the perfect sharp shadow of a

little peach-tree. No mortal artist--not even a Japanese--could

surpass that silhouette! Limned in dark blue against the yellow

glow, the marvelous image even shows stronger or fainter tones

according to the varying distance of the unseen branches outside.

it sets me thinking about the possible influence on Japanese art

of the use of paper for house-lighting purposes.

By night a Japanese house with only its shoji closed looks like a

great paper-sided lantern,--a magic-lantern making moving shadows

within, instead of without itself. By day the shadows on the

shoji are from outside only; but they may be very wonderful at

the first rising of the sun, if his beams are leveled, as in this

instance, across a space of quaint garden.

There is certainly nothing absurd in that old Greek story which

finds the origin of art in the first untaught attempt to trace

upon some wall the outline of a lover's shadow. Very possibly all

sense of art, as well as all sense of the supernatural, had its

simple beginnings in the study of shadows. But shadows on shoji

are so remarkable as to suggest explanation of certain Japanese

faculties of drawing by no means primitive, but developed beyond

all parallel, and otherwise difficult to account for. Of course,

the quality of Japanese paper, which takes shadows better than

any frosted glass, must be considered, and also the character of

the shadows themselves. Western vegetation, for example, could

scarcely furnish silhouettes so gracious as those of Japanese

garden-trees, all trained by centuries of caressing care to look

as lovely as Nature allows.

I wish the paper of my shoji could have been, like a photographic

plate, sensitive to that first delicious impression cast by a

level sun. I am already regretting distortions: the beautiful

silhouette has begun to lengthen.

III

Kyoto, April 16.

Of all peculiarly beautiful things in Japan, the most beautiful

are the approaches to high places of worship or of rest,--the

Ways that go to Nowhere and the Steps that lead to Nothing.

Certainly, their special charm is the charm of the adventitious,

--the effect of man's handiwork in union with Nature's finest

moods of light and form and color,--a charm which vanishes on

rainy days; but it is none the less wonderful because fitful.

Perhaps the ascent begins with a sloping paved avenue, half a

mile long, lined with giant trees. Stone monsters guard the way

at regular intervals. Then you come to some great flight of steps

ascending through green gloom to a terrace umbraged by older and

vaster trees; and other steps from thence lead to other terraces,

all in shadow. And you climb and climb and climb, till at last,

beyond a gray torii, the goal appears: a small, void, colorless

wooden shrine,--a Shinto miya. The shock of emptiness thus

received, in the high silence and the shadows, after all the

sublimity of the long approach, is very ghostliness itself.

Of similar Buddhist experiences whole multitudes wait for those

who care to seek them. I might suggest, for example, a visit to

the grounds of Higashi Otani, which are in the city of Kyoto. A

grand avenue leads to the court of a temple, and from the court a

flight of steps fully fifty feet wide--massy, mossed, and

magnificently balustraded--leads to a walled terrace. The scene

makes one think of the approach to some Italian pleasure-garden

of Decameron days. But, reaching the terrace, you find only a

gate, opening--into a cemetery! Did the Buddhist

landscape-gardener wish to tell us that all pomp and power and

beauty lead only to such silence at last?

KYOTO, April 10-20.

I have passed the greater part of three days in the national

Exhibition,--time barely sufficient to discern the general

character and significance of the display. It is essentially

industrial, but nearly all delightful, notwithstanding, because

of the wondrous application of art to all varieties of

production. Foreign merchants and keener observers than I find in

it other and sinister meaning,--the most formidable menace to

Occidental trade and industry ever made by the Orient. "Compared

with England," wrote a correspondent of the London Times, "it is

farthings for pennies throughout.... The story of the Japanese

invasion of Lancashire is older than that of the invasion of

Korea and China. It has been a conquest of peace,--a painless

process of depletion which is virtually achieved.... The Kyoto

display is proof of a further immense development of industrial

enterprise.... A country where laborers' hire is three shillings

a week, with all other domestic charges in proportion,

must--other things being equal--kill competitors whose expenses

are quadruple the Japanese scale." Certainly the industrial

jiujutsu promises unexpected results.

The price of admission to the Exhibition is a significant matter

also. Only five sen! Yet even at this figure an immense sum is

likely to be realized,--so great is the swarm of visitors.

Multitudes of peasants are pouring daily into the

city,--pedestrians mostly, just as for a pilgrimage. And a

pilgrimage for myriads the journey really is, because of the

inauguration festival of the greatest of Shinshu temples.

The art department proper I thought much inferior to that of the

Tokyo Exhibition of 1890. Fine things there were, but few.

Evidence, perhaps, of the eagerness with which the nation is

turning all its energies and talents in directions where money is

to be made; for in those larger departments where art is combined

with industry,--such as ceramics, enamels, inlaid work,

embroideries,--no finer and costlier work could ever have been

shown. Indeed, the high value of certain articles on display

suggested a reply to a Japanese friend who observed,

thoughtfully, "If China adopts Western industrial methods, she

will be able to underbid us in all the markets of the world."

"Perhaps in cheap production," I made answer. "But there is no

reason why Japan should depend wholly upon cheapness of

production. I think she may rely more securely upon her

superiority in art and good taste. The art-genius of a people may

have a special value against which all competition by cheap labor

is vain. Among Western nations, France offers an example. Her

wealth is not due to her ability to underbid her neighbors. Her

goods are the dearest in the world: she deals in things of luxury

and beauty. But they sell in all civilized countries because they

are the best of their kind. Why should not Japan become the

France of the Further East?"

The weakest part of the art display is that devoted to

oil-painting,--oil-painting in the European manner. No reason

exists why the Japanese should not be able to paint wonderfully

in oil by following their own particular methods of artistic

expression. But their attempts to follow Western methods have

even risen to mediocrity only in studies requiring very realistic

treatment. Ideal work in oil, according to Western canons of art,

is still out of their reach. Perhaps they may yet discover for

themselves a new gateway to the beautiful, even through

oil-painting, by adaptation of the method to the particular needs

of the race-genius; but there is yet no sign of such a tendency.

A canvas representing a perfectly naked woman looking at herself

in a very large mirror created a disagreeable impression. The

Japanese press had been requesting the removal of the piece, and

uttering comments not flattering to Western art ideas.

Nevertheless the canvas was by a Japanese painter. It was a daub;

but it had been boldly priced at three thousand dollars.

I stood near the painting for a while to observe its effect upon

the people,--peasants by a huge majority. They would stare at it,

laugh scornfully, utter some contemptuous phrase, and turn away

to examine the kakemono, which were really far more worthy of

notice though offered at prices ranging only from ten to fifty

yen. The comments were chiefly leveled at "foreign" ideas of good

taste (the figure having been painted with a European head). None

seemed to consider the thing as a Japanese work. Had it

represented a Japanese woman, I doubt whether the crowd would

have even tolerated its existence.

Now all this scorn for the picture itself was just. There was

nothing ideal in the work. It was simply the representation of a

naked woman doing what no woman could like to be seen doing. And

a picture of a mere naked woman, however well executed, is never

art if art means idealism. The realism of the thing was its

offensiveness. Ideal nakedness may be divine,--the most godly of

all human dreams of the superhuman. But a naked person is not

divine at all. Ideal nudity needs no girdle, because the charm is

of lines too beautiful to be veiled or broken. The living real

human body has no such divine geometry. Question: Is an artist

justified in creating nakedness for its own sake, unless he can

divest that nakedness of every trace of the real and personal?

There is a Buddhist text which truly declares that he alone is

wise who can see things without their individuality. And it is

this Buddhist way of seeing which makes the greatness of the true

Japanese art.

These thoughts came:--

That nudity which is divine, which is the abstract of beauty

absolute, gives to the beholder a shock of astonishment and

delight,--not unmixed with melancholy. Very few works of art give

this, because very few approach perfection. But there are marbles

and gems which give it, and certain fine studies of them, such as

the engravings published by the Society of Dilettanti. The longer

one looks, the more the wonder grows, since there appears no

line, or part of a line, whose beauty does not surpass all

remembrance. So the secret of such art was long thought

supernatural; and, in very truth, the sense of beauty it

communicates is more than human,--is superhuman, in the meaning

of that which is outside of existing life,--is therefore

supernatural as any sensation known to man can be.

What is the shock?

It resembles strangely, and is certainly akin to, that psychical

shock which comes with the first experience of love. Plato

explained the shock of beauty as being the Soul's sudden

half-remembrance of the World of Divine Ideas. "They who see here

any image or resemblance of the things which are there receive a

shock like a thunderbolt, and are, after a manner, taken out of

themselves." Schopenhauer explained, the shock of first love as

the Willpower of the Soul of the Race. The positive psychology of

Spencer declares in our own day that the most powerful of human

passions, when it makes its first appearance, is absolutely

antecedent to all individual experience. Thus do ancient thought

and modern--metaphysics and science--accord in recognizing that

the first deep sensation of human beauty known to the individual

is not individual at all.

Must not the same truth hold of that shock which supreme art

gives? The human ideal expressed in such art appeals surely to

the experience of all that Past enshrined in the emotional life

of the beholder,--to something inherited from innumerable

ancestors.

Innumerable indeed!

Allowing three generations to a century, and presupposing no

consanguineous marriages, a French mathematician estimates that

each existing individual of his nation would have in his veins

the blood of twenty millions of contemporaries of the year 1000.

Or calculating from the first year of our own era, the ancestry

of a man of to-day would represent a total of eighteen

quintillions. Yet what are twenty centuries to the time of the

life of man!

Well, the emotion of beauty, like all of our emotions, is

certainly the inherited product of unimaginably countless

experiences in an immeasurable past. In every aesthetic sensation

is the stirring of trillions of trillions of ghostly memories

buried in the magical soil of the brain. And each man carries

within him an ideal of beauty which is but an infinite composite

of dead perceptions of form, color, grace, once dear to look

upon. It is dormant, this ideal,--potential in essence,--cannot

be evoked at will before the imagination; but it may light up

electrically at any perception by the living outer senses of some

vague affinity. Then is felt that weird, sad, delicious thrill,

which accompanies the sudden backward-flowing of the tides of

life and time; then are the sensations of a million years and of

myriad generations summed into the emotional feeling of a moment.

Now, the artists of one civilization only--the Greeks--were able

to perform the miracle of disengaging the Race-Ideal of beauty

from their own souls, and fixing its wavering out-line in jewel

and stone. Nudity, they made divine; and they still compel us to

feel its divinity almost as they felt it themselves. Perhaps they

could do this because, as Emerson suggested, they possessed

all-perfect senses. Certainly it was not because they were as

beautiful as their own statues. No man and no woman could be

that. This only is sure,--that they discerned and clearly fixed

their ideal,--composite of countless million remembrances of dead

grace in eyes and eyelids, throat and cheek, mouth and chin, body

and limbs.

The Greek marble itself gives proof that there is no absolute

individuality,--that the mind is as much a composite of souls as

the body is of cells.

Kyoto, April 21.

The noblest examples of religious architecture in the whole

empire have just been completed; and the great City of Temples is

now enriched by two constructions probably never surpassed in all

the ten centuries of its existence. One is the gift of the

Imperial Government; the other, the gift of the common people.

The government's gift is the Dai-Kioku-Den,--erected to

commemorate the great festival of Kwammu Tenno, fifty-first

emperor of Japan, and founder of the Sacred City. To the Spirit

of this Emperor the Dai-Kioku-Den is dedicated: it is thus a

Shinto temple, and the most superb of all Shinto temples.

Nevertheless, it is not Shinto architecture, but a facsimile of

the original palace of Kwammu Tenno upon the original scale. The

effect upon national sentiment of this magnificent deviation from

conventional forms, and the profound poetry of the reverential

feeling which suggested it, can be fully comprehended only by

those who know that Japan is still practically ruled by the dead.

Much more than beautiful are the edifices of the Dai-Kioku-Den.

Even in this most archaic of Japan cities they startle; they tell

to the sky in every tilted line of their horned roofs the tale of

another and more fantastic age. The most eccentrically striking

parts of the whole are the two-storied and five-towered

gates,--veritable Chinese dreams, one would say. In color the

construction is not less oddly attractive than in form,--and this

especially because of the fine use made of antique green tiles in

the polychromatic roofing. Surely the august Spirit of Kwammu

Tenno might well rejoice in this charming evocation of the past

by architectural necromancy!

But the gift of the people to Kyoto is still grander. It is

represented by the glorious Higashi Hongwanji,--or eastern

Hongwan temple (Shinshu). Western readers may form some idea of

its character from the simple statement that it cost eight

millions of dollars and required seventeen years to build. In

mere dimension it is largely exceeded by other Japanese buildings

of cheaper construction; but anybody familiar with the Buddhist

temple architecture of Japan can readily perceive the difficulty

of building a temple one hundred and, twenty-seven feet high, one

hundred and ninety-two feet deep, and more than two hundred feet

long. Because of its peculiar form, and especially because of the

vast sweeping lines of its roof, the Hongwanji looks even far

larger than it is,--looks mountainous. But in any country it

would be deemed a wonderful structure. There are beams forty-two

feet long and four feet thick; and there are pillars nine feet in

circumference. One may guess the character of the interior

decoration from the statement that the mere painting of the

lotos-flowers on the screens behind the main altar cost ten

thousand dollars. Nearly all this wonderful work was done with

the money contributed in coppers by hard-working peasants. And

yet there are people who think that Buddhism is dying!

More than one hundred thousand peasants came to see the grand

inauguration. They seated themselves by myriads on matting laid

down by the acre in the great court. I saw them waiting thus at

three in the afternoon. The court was a living sea. Yet all that

host was to wait till seven o'clock for the beginning of the

ceremony, without refreshment, in the hot sun. I saw at one

corner of the court a band of about twenty young girls,--all in

white, and wearing peculiar white caps,--and I asked who they

were. A bystander replied: "As all these people must wait here

many hours, it is to be feared that some may become ill.

Therefore professional nurses have been stationed here to take

care of any who may be sick. There are likewise stretchers in

waiting, and carriers. And there are many physicians."

I admired the patience and the faith. But those peasants might

well love the magnificent temple,--their own creation in very

truth, both directly and indirectly. For no small part of the

actual labor of building was done for love only; and the mighty

beams for the roof had been hauled to Kyoto from far-away

mountain-slopes, with cables made of the hair of Buddhist wives

and daughters. One such cable, preserved in the temple, is more

than three hundred and sixty feet long, and nearly three inches

in diameter.

To me the lesson of those two magnificent monuments of national

religious sentiment suggested the certain future increase in

ethical power and value of that sentiment, concomitantly with the

increase of national prosperity. Temporary poverty is the real

explanation of the apparent temporary decline of Buddhism. But an

era of great wealth is beginning. Some outward forms of Buddhism

must perish; some superstitions of Shinto must die. The vital

truths and recognitions will expand, strengthen, take only deeper

root in the heart of the race, and potently prepare it for the

trials of that larger and harsher life upon which it has to

enter.

VII

Kobe, April 23.

I have been visiting the exhibition of fishes and of fisheries

which is at Hyogo, in a garden by the sea. Waraku-en is its name,

which signifies, "The Garden of the Pleasure of Peace." It is

laid out like a landscape garden of old time, and deserves its

name. Over its verge you behold the great bay, and fishermen in

boats, and the white far-gliding of sails splendid with light,

and beyond all, shutting out the horizon, a lofty beautiful

massing of peaks mauve-colored by distance.

I saw ponds of curious shapes, filled with clear sea-water, in

which fish of beautiful colors were swimming. I went to the

aquarium where stranger kinds of fishes swam behind glass--fishes

shaped like toy-kites, and fishes shaped like sword-blades, and

fishes that seemed to turn themselves inside out, and funny,

pretty fishes of butterfly-colors, that move like dancing-girls,

waving sleeve-shaped fins.

I saw models of all manner of boats and nets and hooks and

fish-traps and torch-baskets for night-fishing. I saw pictures of

every kind of fishing, and both models and pictures of men

killing whales. One picture was terrible,--the death agony of a

whale caught in a giant net, and the leaping of boats in a

turmoil of red foam, and one naked man on the monstrous back--a

single figure against the sky--striking with a great steel, and

the fountain-gush of blood responding to the stroke.... Beside me

I heard a Japanese father and mother explain the picture to their

little boy; and the mother said:--

"When the whale is going to die, it speaks; it cries to the Lord

Buddha for help,--_Namu Amida Butsu!_"

I went to another part of the garden where there were tame deer,

and a "golden bear" in a cage, and peafowl in an aviary, and an

ape. The people fed the deer and the bear with cakes, and tried

to coax the peacock to open its tail, and grievously tormented

the ape. I sat down to rest on the veranda of a pleasure-house

near the aviary, and the Japanese folk who had been looking at

the picture of whale-fishing found their way to the same veranda;

and presently I heard the little boy say:--

"Father, there is an old, old fisherman in his boat. Why does he

not go to the Palace of the Dragon-King of the Sea, like

Urashima?"

The father answered: "Urashima caught a turtle which was not

really a turtle, but the Daughter of the Dragon-King. So he was

rewarded for his kindness. But that old fisherman has not caught

any turtle, and even if he had caught one, he is much too old to

marry. Therefore he will not go to the Palace."

Then the boy looked at the flowers, and the fountains, and the

sunned sea with its white sails, and the mauve-colored mountains

beyond all, and exclaimed:--

"Father, do you think there is any place more beautiful than this

in the whole world?"

The father smiled deliciously, and seemed about to answer, but

before he could speak the child cried out, and leaped, and

clapped his little hands for delight, because the peacock had

suddenly outspread the splendor of its tail. And all hastened to

the aviary. So I never heard the reply to that pretty question.

But afterwards I thought that it might have been answered thus:--

"My boy, very beautiful this is. But the world is full of beauty;

and there may be gardens more beautiful than this.

"But the fairest of gardens is not in our world. It is the Garden

of Amida, in the Paradise of the West.

"And whosoever does no wrong what time he lives may after death

dwell in that Garden.

"There the divine Kujaku, bird of heaven, sings of the Seven

Steps and the Five Powers, spreading its tail as a sun.

"There lakes of jewel-water are, and in them lotos-flowers of a

loveliness for which there is not any name. And from those

flowers proceed continually rays of rainbow-light, and spirits of

Buddhas newly-born.

"And the water, murmuring among the lotos-buds, speaks to the

souls in them of Infinite Memory and Infinite Vision, and of the

Four Infinite Feelings.

"And in that place there is no difference between gods and men,

save that under the splendor of Amida even the gods must bend;

and all sing the hymn of praise beginning, '_O Thou of

Immeasurable Light!_'

"But the Voice of the River Celestial chants forever, like the

chanting of thousands in unison: '_Even this is not high; there

is still a Higher! This is not real; this is not Peace!_'"